STS-135: The last Space Shuttle mission.

[Shell B]

But it seems to have a monopoly on pulling off interplanetary stunts the military can only dream about for the price of a song.

Which qualifies for mastermind to me.

Haha, yeah, which is why I am pissed. Making weapons isn't important to me. Going into outer space is the present and future of our species, if we want to do anything worthwhile while we are here. I want the shuttle program back.

[Minimalist]

The Shuttle is 1970's technology, though. It would have been nice to have a replacement in place before scrapping it but it is a political and budgetary football.

[Shell B]

The Shuttle is 1970's technology, though. It would have been nice to have a replacement in place before scrapping it but it is a political and budgetary football.

Our budget is shit, anyway. It's like telling a kid he can't have a tv because his parents are broke, while his parents are hoarders who can't stop buying cheese graters and light bulbs because they can't find the ones they already have in the mess they have made.

[The Grand Nudger]

1:50 in, gorgeous

[Minimalist]

There is a plan for a replacement.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multi-Purpose_Crew_Vehicle


Whether it will ever get built or not depends on a lot of things. Right now, I have to agree with Lewis Black. "We are a country that can't do anything, anymore."

[Autumnlicious]

The Shuttle is 1970's technology, though. It would have been nice to have a replacement in place before scrapping it but it is a political and budgetary football.

The shuttle was an prototype design that was never refined once too many Americans and politicians said "Works well enough. Mission accomplished!"

It suffers from instabilities inherent in the glider configuration, hydrazine storage tanks being in front and in back with no method of sharing fuel (causing a shift in the center of mass, which is dangerous for a flying craft, let alone a space craft), the tiles required glue and the safety factors have always been called into question.

Challenger and Colombia suffered the same critical fault -- the executive branch routinely clearing out and replacing qualified managers with their immediate cronies, leading NASA to be headed by people who couldn't tell the difference between Hydrazine and Hydrogen (One is a caustic, deadly fuel, the other is part of water).

NASA will always be subpar as long as it remains the puppet that it is. That doesn't mean they don't do good science, it just means that every large scale decision will be filled with plenty of idiocies to rival this:



Finally, the "know how" for interplanetary travel, technology is rapidly dying off, with no one to replace them due to the incredible vanishing NASA magic trick, which certainly causes prospective students to either aim for SpaceX (relatively small and hyper competitive) or give up and try Aerospace Engineering at Lockheed or something.

Once again, limited opportunities, generational die-offs will be the death of any competitive US space program.

The best we can hope for, reasonably, is that SpaceX presents a cheap enough and powerful vehicle that they become wildly successful.

But we all know that banking on the "market" to fix things is just as fallible as relying on God fix things.

[Minimalist]

Wasn't there one astronaut who cracked: "I'm sitting on top of 5 million pounds of explosive fuel and every part was built by the lowest bidder?"

[Anomalocaris]

The problem with the shuttle isn't it was too expensive or not safe enough for certain purpose. The problem was it didn't do what it actually did better than cheaper alternatives, plus the additional things it was forced to be designed to do it never really has opportunity to actually do, finally there are things it had to promised to do for political reasons which it simply could not do.

It is an amazing piece of engineering to fulfill all those conflicting requirements. The problem is most of the requirement is shit.

Were it not for the military requirement that the shuttle be capable of being used as a once around orbital bomber to take out Moscow from a lunch in Vendenberg air force base in California, the whole orbiter would have had a totally different shape, without those exposed wings and their vulnerable leading edge tiles,and far lighter and mote efficient. As it is, the shuttle was designed to have a cross range gliding capability that allows it to land 1000 miles to one side of it's orbital track, which is what it would need to do if it were to take off from vendenberg AFB, go over the north pole toMoscow, drop a bomb, then loop back over the south pole and land back at vendenberg. As it happened, the Russians deduced this from the shuttle's shape, and raised a huge stink, and the us never dared to actually launch a shuttle from vendenberg for any purpose. So the whole orbiter design was governed by a requirement that never actual materialized, but did make the shuttle much heavier, thus less efficient, and more vulnerable to lunch mishaps.

[Autumnlicious]

One does not rush off the first prototype into manufacturing. Yet the shuttles were.

Another example of bad design -- there is a massive lead ballast in the nose of the shuttle because there was a miscalculation in which the Shuttle-ET-SRB pairing would be off balance with regards to entering hypersonic velocities. This was discovered prior to the first launch, so they added a giant weight to compensate.

That same "hack" is on every external tank, to compensate for a screw up in the shuttle design.

And when one considers the loss of Challenger and Colombia, one really must ask, was redeveloping the technology to newer standards and models really that expensive compared to the loss of multiple, hyper expensive vehicles?

The shuttle was a great idea and only that. The execution was flawed and never seriously was re-evaluated and updated due to politics.

It is akin to Microsoft only releasing Windows 3.1 and never doing anything new past that. Thankfully, though, such an action would seal the fate of the offending entity.

Shame we can't do that to facets of government that treat ultra-high tech developments as their own personal pork projects.

The Shuttle had great potential, far more flexibility than the Soyuz-type of spacecraft. Shame it never was nurtured.

[Anomalocaris]

Actually, it probably would be, if the replacement were also to be a shuttle like, wholly (or almost wholly) recoverable vehicle with substantial atmospheric maneuverability, and ability to make a soft landing with a large delicate payload.

The issue is, of course, there turned to be no real reason to actually use the shuttle's expensive atmospheric maneuverability, or the ability to protect a delicate large payload with an airliner like landing.

The problem is the shuttle has a lot of fancy but unused ability whose influence on the shuttle design captured the public's imagination. Any more pragmatic and efficient replacement for the shuttle must dispense with these costly luxuries, and be seen by the public as much less than the shuttle it replaced.