/sci/ - Science & Math

[Anonymous No.6317427]

Today is the 28th anniversary of the Challenger disaster. On January 28, 1986 a booster engine failed on the Space Shuttle Challenger causing it to break apart 73 seconds after lift-off and killing all seven crew members on board.

[Anonymous No.6317430]

From left to right in front they are Michael Smith, Commander Dick Scobee, and Ron McNair; from left to right in the back they are Ellison Onizuka, Christa McAuliffe, Gregory Jarvis, and Judy Resnik.

[Anonymous No.6317437]

A NASA report indicated that the astronauts may have survived the initial explosion. This pic shows the crew cabin falling intact, and forensic investigation found that some spring-loaded switches had been activated after the explosion. Tests confirmed that neither the force of the explosion nor the ground impact could have activated the switches.
It is believed that at least some of the crew members survived the explosion but were killed by the impact with the water.

[Anonymous No.6317438]

>>6317437
THIS pic

[Anonymous No.6317443]

>>6317437
>>6317438
>no parachutes
good going, NASA

[Anonymous No.6317447]

>>6317443
The crew cabin doesn't have parachutes because it wasn't intended to ever separate from the rest of the shuttle.

[Anonymous No.6317450]

>>6317447
>The crew cabin doesn't have parachutes because the shuttle was an insane project that was obviously counterproductive for its intended purpose (lowering launch costs) years before it first flew.

[Anonymous No.6317455]

>>6317450
>its intended purpose (lowering launch costs) years before it first flew.
uh...no. Intended purpose was to have a reusable vehicle.

[Anonymous No.6317465]

>>6317450
The Shuttle's intended purpose was to put people, satellites, and equipment into space, and in this regard it was a resounding success.

The reusable design was experimental, the first of its kind. No one knew if it would lower costs or not. I strongly believe that the reusable design of the Space Shuttle represents the future of space travel.

[Anonymous No.6317491]

>>6317427
was watching that... one of the most chilling moments of my life. I was working as a bench technician repairing Satellite TVRO equipment. We had NASA select chanels up on a couple of systems on the test bench. When the fork appeared and all the audio chanels went silent for about 15 seconds and then "this is downrange tracking... I think we have a major malfunction" and the frantic effort to contact the crew while one of the camera chanels tracked the debris raining downwards that we all knew surely contained whatever was left of the crew helplessly falling to be killed by the impact if they weren't already dead.

[Anonymous No.6317492]

>>6317455
The entire motivation for a reusable vehicle was to reduce launch costs. This was the only reason they were doing it. There was an Air Force study that concluded the next generation should be semi-reusable to cut costs, followed by fully reusable launch vehicles that would be even cheaper (but would take too much time and money to develop for that generation).

If they had started out saying that the space shuttle was going to cost more, it would never have been funded. There would have been no reason for it to exist.

[Anonymous No.6317507]

>>6317492
No, it's a common myth that the Shuttle's only motivation was launch costs, it wasn't. It was intended to fly large experiments multiple times, test military surveillance tech, it was intended to be able to recover satellites for repair or espionage. There were lots of ideas for what it could do and many of them shaped the shuttle.

The shuttle was lower cost compared to the Apollo Moon missions in that it could sustain a higher flight rate with a lower program budget.

[Anonymous No.6317512]

>>6317492
>If they had started out saying that the space shuttle was going to cost more, it would never have been funded. There would have been no reason for it to exist.
Except that traditional methods would not have been able to send the kind of payloads necessary to build the ISS, perform extended experiments, and deliver multiple satellites at the same time. While the average launch per vehicle is greater than the cost of rockets such as the Titan II which launched the Gemini and Mercury missions, the shuttle proved to be invaluably cheaper as far as delivering objects to their destination, since larger and more numerous objects could be delivered.

[Anonymous No.6317510]

>>6317507
>There were lots of ideas for what it could do and many of them shaped the shuttle.

you missed the biggie

ISS some of the parts of the International Space Station were too big to get up there any other way.

[Anonymous No.6317518]

>>6317465
>The Shuttle's intended purpose was to put people, satellites, and equipment into space, and in this regard it was a resounding success.
A "resounding success"? It was a crew killer. It was a finicky and unreliable launch vehicle, which suffered from frequent launch delays and was grounded for years. It was insanely expensive.

If they had simply continued the Saturn system, assuming no improvements in decades of operation, they could have bought one Saturn 1B launch (capable of carrying nearly a shuttle payload, and perfectly suitable for sending a crew up) AND one Saturn V launch (carrying nearly five times the shuttle payload) for each space shuttle flight. That's how expensive and inferior the space shuttle was.

The Saturn system could have put up an ISS-equivalent station in one year for one tenth the cost.

>The reusable design was experimental, the first of its kind. No one knew if it would lower costs or not.
The justification for the program was that it would lower costs. Years before the first launch, it became obvious that it would not lower costs. When it turned out to be several times more expensive than any other option, it was continued for decades.

This is sheer insanity.

>I strongly believe that the reusable design of the Space Shuttle represents the future of space travel.
Surely, reusability does, but the Space Shuttle was fake reusability. They practically rebuilt the thing between flights.

You have to consider the shuttle as one launch option, not as if the payloads and crews it took up would not have gotten to space any other way.

[Anonymous No.6317527]

>>6317507
>It was intended to fly large experiments multiple times, test military surveillance tech, it was intended to be able to recover satellites for repair or espionage. There were lots of ideas for what it could do and many of them shaped the shuttle.
This is what's called "spitballing". You just throw ideas out there, without caring whether they're good ideas or bad ideas, and see what sticks.

Launch cost reduction was the purpose of the system. Once they decided to build it for the sake of reducing launch costs, and particularly after it started becoming obvious that the system they were building wasn't going to reduce launch costs, people started trying to think of what else their vehicle might be good for.

None of these were meaningful applications. Nobody was doing anything like proposing a non-reusable vehicle for these applications, and even when the capability was available, nobody wanted it.

These are rationalizations, not reasons.

[Anonymous No.6317529]

>>6317518
>It was a crew killer.
135 Launches
2 failures.
The Saturn system could have put up an ISS-equivalent station in one year for one tenth the cost.
1/10th the cost?? Do you even know how payloads work on the Saturn rocket? You're suggesting we could have launched several bullets into space and somehow they would join together.
>Years before the first launch, it became obvious that it would not lower costs. When it turned out to be several times more expensive than any other option, it was continued for decades.
Once again, launch costs increased, but the cost of getting a single satellite into orbit decreased dramatically since multiple satellites could be launched at once.
>They practically rebuilt the thing between flights.
This is very untrue. The shuttle underwent maintenance between each flight that involved removing, checking, and replacing (among other things) the engines and heat shields, but the shuttle itself remained intact and (unlike parts from traditional rockets) were designed to be removed and replaced if necessary.

[Anonymous No.6317534]

>>6317510
That's not accurate. Tee ISS wasn't proposed until many years after the Shuttle was in service so the US orbital segment was designed with the Shuttle in mind. Even so none of the segments were too big to be launched conventionally, in fact the largest single modules of the ISS are Russian segments launched by conventional Proton rocket.

The Shuttle was a motivator for the way the ISS was designed not the other way round.

[Anonymous No.6317536]

>>6317427
It was shot down by UFOs for trying to bring nukes into space.

[Anonymous No.6317535]

>>6317518
>If they had simply continued the Saturn system, assuming no improvements in decades of operation, they could have bought one Saturn 1B launch (capable of carrying nearly a shuttle payload, and perfectly suitable for sending a crew up) AND one Saturn V launch (carrying nearly five times the shuttle payload) for each space shuttle flight.

Where are you getting your numbers from?

[Anonymous No.6317541]

>>6317527
>This is what's called "spitballing".

No. Extensive modifications were made to the original design to accommodate the military, on that point alone your idea that cost was the sole motivator is debunked.

[Anonymous No.6317554]

>>6317529
>1/10th the cost?? Do you even know how payloads work on the Saturn rocket? You're suggesting we could have launched several bullets into space and somehow they would join together.
I apparently have a much better understanding than you do. The Saturn V was perfectly capable of putting a payload in a precisely targetted orbit. A much larger variety of orbits than the shuttle was capable of reaching, for that matter.

As for docking the modules, propulsion and guidance systems are common satellite features, and the ISS needs propulsion for stationkeeping in any case (though one constructed using the Saturn V could have needed less propulsion, since it could have been put in a higher orbit with lower drag and reduced rate of orbital decay -- the ISS is in a shitty orbit because of the limitations of the shuttle).

>Once again, launch costs increased, but the cost of getting a single satellite into orbit decreased dramatically since multiple satellites could be launched at once.
Where do you get this misinformation? You don't need the space shuttle to launch multiple satellites, and it certainly didn't reduce the cost of launching any kind of satellite.

>The shuttle underwent maintenance between each flight that involved removing, checking, and replacing (among other things) the engines and heat shields, but the shuttle itself remained intact and (unlike parts from traditional rockets) were designed to be removed and replaced if necessary.
The shuttle underwent maintenance between flights that involved basically taking it apart and rebuilding it. That's aside from the expendable fuel tank and the solid rocket boosters that needed to be taken apart and recast (the SRBs were just about the dumbest part of the whole system).

It wasn't designed for easy access to the engines for maintenance (it was originally expected to fly several flights between significant engine maintenance efforts), so the back half of it had to be disassembled.

[Anonymous No.6317564]

>>6317541
>No. Extensive modifications were made to the original design to accommodate the military
Yes, when they started talking about the shuttle being America's ONLY launch system, the military demanded that it be able to carry all of their payloads, including large spy satellites in polar orbits.

They were trying to make the point that the space shuttle plan was unworkable. The space shuttle people instead insisted that they could meet these requirements, and made the design even more unreasonable.

And no, even after the modifications, the space shuttle still didn't meet the military's requirements.

[Anonymous No.6317571]

>>6317554
>I apparently have a much better understanding than you do.
yet you're missing one very important piece of the puzzle, namely pic related. To build something like the ISS with a Saturn V (why the hell would you use such a large rocket for this task anyway?!) you would mostly rely on ballistics with slight adjustments from guidance systems. With the Shuttle component parts could be pieced together in orbit with high precision. THIS is the real advantage of the space shuttle, aside from its reusability.

[Anonymous No.6317573]

>>6317571
dammit, pic related.

[Anonymous No.6317577]

>>6317535
>Where are you getting your numbers from?
The Saturn program was active when the space shuttle was proposed. The R&D for Saturn 1B and Saturn V was already spent, the factories and launch facilities were built, the personnel were trained, the testing was all done. These were sunk costs, and no longer relevant to the decision-making process once they were spent.

So comparing the option of developing and using the Space Shuttle to the option of continuing to use the developed Saturn vehicles, it's fair to simply divide the total Space Shuttle program cost by the number of flights that actually happened, and compare that to the incremental cost of adding another Saturn flight.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_program#Budget
>With 134 missions, and the total cost of US$192 billion (in 2010 dollars), this gives approximately $1.5 billion per launch over the life of the program.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_V#Cost
>In 1969, the cost of a Saturn V including launch was US $ 185 million (inflation adjusted US$ 1.18 billion in 2014).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_IB#Cost
>In 1972, the cost of a Saturn IB including launch was US$55,000,000 ($307,000,000 in 2014).

[Anonymous No.6317580]

The shuttle ran over countless missions, saved the Hubble, inspired the nation, tested a yet untested design, and was highly instrumental in building the ISS.

>but we could have done it for .001% of the national budget instead of .0015% if we only knew what we knew now!
Thanks, captain hindsight! Could we have saved a few pennies discovering the New World with fiberglass ships? Sure. But does that mean the Nina and the Santa Maria were not resounding successes? Absolutely not.

[Anonymous No.6317582]

OP here, can't we just have a memorial thread without people turning into a cluster fuck of old technology vs. new technology?
You guys are pathetic.

[Anonymous No.6317587]

>>6317564
>when they started talking about the shuttle being America's ONLY launch system
So even you admit launch costs were not the sole goal.

[Anonymous No.6317598]

>>6317573
I saw Atlantis up close in Florida.
It was intense.

[Anonymous No.6317601]

>>6317577
You're comparing apples and bananas there as I suspected. You include the full cost of the space shuttle program but do not induce the full cost of the Saturn V program. This is not a valid comparison, the 1.5 billion figure is nowhere near the marginal cost of a shuttle flight which varies in estimate but is always estimated at less that a billion (i.e less than a Saturn V).

You claimed you could have a Shuttle flight for less than a Saturn V fight, this is nonsense. If you said it would have been cheaper to continue the Apollo program you may be correct, but that's a completely different statement and you would have to use industry specific inflation rather than base.

[Anonymous No.6317604]

>>6317427
>a booster engine failed

it was an O ring that failed, or more specifically, a junction from a fuel tank to a booster engine which used O rings which were not designed to operate in sub-zero temperatures.

NASA management should have gone to prison for this fiasco.

[Anonymous No.6317602]

>>6317571
>To build something like the ISS with a Saturn V (why the hell would you use such a large rocket for this task anyway?!)
Why the hell would you use something smaller? Why would you want to make many flights over several years, instead of a few flights in one year?

The Saturn V was big enough to put a useful space station up in one flight. And they did that. It was called "Skylab".

>you're missing one very important piece of the puzzle, namely pic related.
All they needed to do was put the arm on the first module. You don't need two of them.

>To build something like the ISS with a Saturn V (why the hell would you use such a large rocket for this task anyway?!) you would mostly rely on ballistics with slight adjustments from guidance systems.
You really don't understand how the shuttle worked, do you?

Shuttle flights also "mostly relied on ballistics with slight adjustements from guidance systems". You had to go to the right orbit, then you could adjust it a bit with the OMS/RCS. And you had to reserve a good amount of your storable delta-v to de-orbit.

The space-storable propulsion systems used on the Apollo missions were more capable than the shuttle's. Remember, they had to land on the moon, and then come back from it. This is not some special capability only the shuttle had.

[Anonymous No.6317609]

>>6317587
>>when they started talking about the shuttle being America's ONLY launch system
>So even you admit launch costs were not the sole goal.
Are you functionally illiterate?

[Anonymous No.6317615]

Wow what a cluster fuck this thread turned into. There are advantages and disadvantages to every launch system. One system is useful for some projects, other systems are useful for other objects. Stop comparing apples to oranges and just stfu.

[Anonymous No.6317617]

>>6317609
I'd say unifying US launch was a goal. Your claim doesn't hold water.

[Anonymous No.6317649]

>>6317601
>You claimed you could have a Shuttle flight for less than a Saturn V fight, this is nonsense.
Yes, this is nonsense. Why are you typing nonsense?

Aside from you getting it completely backward, I said if the Saturn program was continued, instead of starting the shuttle program, the same funding for launches would have bought one Saturn V launch plus one Saturn 1B launch for every shuttle launch. And this is 100% true.

>You're comparing apples and bananas there as I suspected. You include the full cost of the space shuttle program but do not induce the full cost of the Saturn V program.
I explained why. Before the space shuttle program was initiated, the Saturn V and 1B were already fully developed. That money was already spent and gone.

Anyway, the experience and research of the Apollo program was used to develop the shuttle. There's no relevant scenario where you have to choose between developing the Saturn V and developing the Shuttle without the Saturn V. Having developed the Saturn V, and spent all of that money, you then choose to develop the Shuttle or not.

[Anonymous No.6317652]

Astronauts are the dorkiest bad-asses the world has even known.

[Anonymous No.6317657]

>>6317617
>I'd say unifying US launch was a goal.
Well no. There was nobody saying, "Hey, it would be really great if we had only one launch vehicle, so if something went wrong with it, we just wouldn't be able to launch anything."

What people were saying was, "Hey, it would be really great if launch costs were a lot lower, and we can do this with a reusable system, but we need a high launch rate to be able to amortize the costs of setting up the system, so in order to give our reusable launch a high launch rate, we'll require that all payloads go up on it."

And then it turned out that the shuttle was incapable of a high launch rate.

Unifying US launch was a sacrifice for the goal of lowering launch costs.

[Anonymous No.6317656]

>>6317649
>the same funding for launches would have bought one Saturn V launch plus one Saturn 1B launch for every shuttle launch
No this is the problem I noted. Your claims are only true if you induce full cost, you use the term "funding for launches" you explicitly ignore development costs in which case we are discussing marginal cost. The marginal cost of the Shuttle is less than that of the Saturn V so the above statement is wrong.

[Anonymous No.6317674]

one of the o-rings failed due to the abnormally cold weather, causing the left?-rocket to explode. it is also believed that 5 out of the 7 astronauts were still alive but unconscious until the cockpit hit the water

also,
>lol, cockpit..

[Anonymous No.6317675]

>>6317656
>induce
Look this word up, for fuck's sake.

>you use the term "funding for launches" you explicitly ignore development costs in which case we are discussing marginal cost.
Stop trying to tell me what I "actually" mean. I've never met someone who communicates this poorly outside of an assisted living facility.

Regardless of how you try to twist my words, the fact of the matter is that if NASA took all of the money which it spent on the space shuttle, and instead simply spent it on Saturn launches, they could have got at least 135 shuttle-class Saturn 1B flights and 135 superheavy Saturn V flights, instead of a mere 135 wimpy shuttle flights.

They could have built an ISS-class station in the 1970s, a moon base in the 1980s, and put a man on Mars in the 1990s, without spending any more money than they did.

The space program turned into a jobs program because of the shuttle.

[Anonymous No.6317690]

>>6317675
>Stop trying to tell me what I "actually" mean.
I'm not telling you what you mean I'm telling you what you said. I'm not twisting shit, that statement is false.

> they could have got at least 135 shuttle-class Saturn 1B flights and 135 superheavy Saturn V flights, instead of a mere 135 wimpy shuttle flights.
>If I ignore the need to update vehicles as parts become unavailable and the fact that inflation in the aerospace industry is higher than the base rate.


>without spending any more money than they did.
[massive citation needed]

[Anonymous No.6317733]

>>6317690
Building a lot of something doesn't make it more expensive.

There would almost certainly have been cost reductions and performance improvements as they kept cranking them out.

The shuttle didn't stay the same over decades. They improved the components, and found ways of reducing costs and improving reliability, but they were stuck working in this framework of a really impractical design.

One of the really big disadvantages of a reusable vehicle is that when you get an idea for a better one, you have to either work it in as a modification, or wait for a vehicle to need replacement. The biggest improvements in the shuttle were in the expendable fuel tanks, the semi-expendable SRBs, and the engines (which needed occasional replacement).

There would have been much bigger incremental improvements in an expendable vehicle. I wouldn't be surprised at all if the 2010 version of the Saturn V cost half as much and lifted twice as much.

[Anonymous No.6317748]

Are we seriously fucking arguing about this today?

[Anonymous No.6317777]

>>6317582
>>6317748
28 years later, do you really expect us on a science and math forum to have a "memorial" thread over the death of a mere 7 people, rather than discuss the bad policy choices which led to the deaths and the larger consequences of this policy which span decades and continue to this day.

NASA's annual budget is around $20 billion. 7 lives are valued by the US government at around $60 million, give or take $20 million (the amount of money that the government considers worth spending to prevent 7 accidental deaths). 7 is roughly the number of Americans who die in traffic accidents every hour.

[Ellison Oniszuka's Scrambled B(...) No.6317798]

>>6317777
Heavenly Quads for the 7 who died.

[Anonymous No.6317818]

>>6317777
I certainly expected something more civil with a better understanding of the workings of different launch systems. From the very first non-OP post (parachutes) this thread has been totally moronic.

[Anonymous No.6317821]

>>6317777

It wasn't the shuttle that was unsafe. It was NASA's operating procedures.

The O-Ring problem was known well in advanced, and the day of the launch, several engineers said they should abort it, because the cold conditions could cause the O-Rings to malfunction.

The foam that destroyed the heat shield was a known problem, it happened several times before, but NASA saw no problems so they said "Eh, whatever" when it happened again. They didn't check the heat shields (Which should happen every fucking mission where someone goes EVA), and all in all, it was a freak accident. That foam could hit the shuttle a hundred times and not damage the heatshield.

[Anonymous No.6317856]

>>6317818
Are you kidding? The shuttle was an absolutely terrible launch system, whether you're talking about crew or cargo. It had no redeeming features. It was never the right way to do anything.

Launch abort systems are standard on every other crew launch system. It's nice to fantasize about the day when orbital launch will be mature enough that they're not necessary, but leaving it off of the shuttle was pure irresponsibility and reality denial.

The cabin should have been an ejectable capsule with a separate conventional ablative heat shield and its own parachute. Motor explosions and heat shield damage were predictable failure modes, which should have been survivable for the crew in most cases.

This isn't "hindsight is 20/20", people were pointing this out before the first shuttle launch. It was a deathtrap. Of course there should have been a parachute.

[Anonymous No.6317867]

>>6317856
The space shuttle DID have an abort system. In fact there were FOUR DIFFERENT abort procedures. This is the kind of moronic statement I was talking about.

[Anonymous No.6317883]

>>6317856

>Why don't airplanes have a second set of wheels in case the first ones break mid flight?

This is why they don't let stupid people become engineers on things that are important.

[Anonymous No.6317890]

>>6317867
These "abort modes", which all require nearly the entire orbiter to be in good working condition, were obviously no substitute for a proper launch abort system of the kind featured by other crew launch systems, and did not cover the most probable failure modes.

In aircraft terms, what you're talking about is like having an emergency landing plan, rather than having an ejection seat.

The standard practice in crew launch (which NASA is returning to, now that it has finally recognized that the shuttle was shit), is to have the crew in a small capsule which has powerful rockets capable of quickly pulling it away from any launch vehicle explosion, and which is also capable of independent reentry and landing, no matter what goes wrong with the rest of the spacecraft.

Sending the crew up on an reusable launch vehicle is not an excuse for throwing crew safety out the window.

[Anonymous No.6317895]

>>6317883
>Why do experimental aircraft have ejector seats?
The shuttle wasn't a mature commercial airliner. It was not just an orbital launch vehicle (and those have a tendency to blow up), it was a radical new experiment in orbital launch.

[Anonymous No.6317896]

>>6317890
oh my god I can't deal with your stupidity any more. No kind of abort system ever designed would have worked in the event of a catastrophic failure like what happened to the Challenger, but that doesn't mean there weren't any abort systems.
Oh, and FYI: an ejection seat doesn't work when you have several people sharing what amounts to the same seat. Please just STFU. I'm tired of you.

[Anonymous No.6317904]

>>6317895

>radical new experiment in orbital launch.
The challenger was the 25th space shuttle launch. They had 24 complete successes. The whole "Reusable space craft" idea wasn't exactly radical or novel, either. People have been thinking about that since the first rockets were being fired up.

If the cabin had parachutes, there's still no guarantee they would have survived. They'd have to be deployed, and the G's they sustained from the explosion, along with the fast depressurization knocked them all out unconscious very quickly, and might have even killed them right there.

Also, you're essentially saying you should have two separate vehicles each with their own heat shield? No rocket has ever done that in the history of space flight.

They could have fixed Columbia. A second heat shield vehicle wouldn't have done shit, they still wouldn't know about the problem, and still would have fried.

[Anonymous No.6317949]

>>6317896
>No kind of abort system ever designed would have worked in the event of a catastrophic failure like what happened to the Challenger

>>6317437
>>6317438
>This pic shows the crew cabin falling intact

Compare this launch abort of a Soyuz launch:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UyFF4cpMVag

Are you seriously going to claim that this kind of abort system couldn't have saved the crew of Challenger? They didn't even need the escape rocket. They just needed the parachute.

These abort systems (not "abort modes" which assume the launch vehicle is intact and functioning well) have proven effective in saving crews when rockets misbehave. Soyuz has not lost a crew since 1971, and has never lost a crew during launch, despite needing to abort on two launches.

It's a bad safety choice in the first place to use solid rocket boosters. They have a tendency to blow up abruptly, where liquid-fuelled rockets tend to fail more gracefully. They also made pad handling a lot more difficult and expensive since they couldn't be transported to the pad empty (and light) and fuelled on the pad (compare Energia-Buran).

>an ejection seat doesn't work when you have several people sharing what amounts to the same seat
An "ejection capsule" works fine, and is standard practice for crew launch, established before the space shuttle was even on the drawing board.

[Anonymous No.6317967]

>>6317949

You're ignoring the G's experienced by the explosion and rapid rotation. You're ignoring the depressurization. The cabin was already itself pressurized, even if they were in an ejectable pod, there's no saying that the exact same outcome would have happened.

So the Russians haven't lost anyone since 1971, who gives a shit? When's the last time they were mid launch a mile in the air when they had to use that system?

[Anonymous No.6317968]

>>6317904
>The challenger was the 25th space shuttle launch. They had 24 complete successes.
The shuttle was a radical experiment, not the specific flight that blew up.

>The whole "Reusable space craft" idea wasn't exactly radical or novel, either. People have been thinking about that since the first rockets were being fired up.
"Thinking about" and "doing" are different things. The shuttle was radically different from any launch vehicle that came before.

>you're essentially saying you should have two separate vehicles each with their own heat shield? No rocket has ever done that in the history of space flight.
So? No RLV had ever been done in the history of spaceflight.

A more modular design would have made a lot of sense. A detachable crew capsule, aside from the safety benefits, would have meant the option of significantly more cargo capacity on uncrewed missions.

Compare the SpaceX reusability plan. Conventional crew safety measures, separate reentry of crew capsule and upper stage:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSF81yjVbJE

>A second heat shield vehicle wouldn't have done shit, they still wouldn't know about the problem, and still would have fried.
If they had an ablative-shielded backup crew reentry capsule, they would have also have had a plan to inspect for damage. The reason they weren't inspecting for damage is that the plan for finding damage was to let the crew die anyway.

For that matter, they might have been able to separate during reentry. It would have been a risky maneuver, but it might have worked.

[Anonymous No.6317973]

>>6317968

The space shuttle isn't the only reusable space craft. The soviets, who you're so in love with, used the Buran, which also didn't have an emergency ejection system.

>The reason they weren't inspecting for damage is that the plan for finding damage was to let the crew die anyway.

Source? A small patch could be easily fixed. Look at all the shit they did during Apollo 13.

[Anonymous No.6317985]

>>6317967
>even if they were in an ejectable pod, there's no saying that the exact same outcome would have happened.
True, a launch abort system is no guarantee of survival, but it's a hell of a lot better than nothing.

>When's the last time they were mid launch a mile in the air when they had to use that system?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_18a

Soyuz is safer than the shuttle was for a lot of reasons. Having a real launch abort system is a big one. Another is having the crew in a relatively small capsule far from the engines and with a lot of material in between, rather than a big RLV with important parts close to the nozzles and a huge, delicate, exposed thermal protection system. No solid boosters is also important.

System maturity is not to be underestimated. Soyuz had its last fatality a decade before the shuttle flew. That kind of maturity could have been achieved by the Saturn family of rockets, if they had been continued after the tremendous expense of developing them.

[Anonymous No.6317995]

>>6317985
>https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soyuz_18a

The system failed, they were too high for it to be active and they had to rely on their own rockets. Also, this wasn't a catastrophic explosion, this was just a staging malfunction.

[Anonymous No.6318017]

>>6317973
>>No RLV had ever been done in the history of spaceflight.
>The space shuttle isn't the only reusable space craft. The soviets, who you're so in love with, used the Buran
The Buran was a copy of the shuttle, so obviously it didn't exist when the shuttle was designed. It had fewer reusable parts and was never actually reused.

It was done out of paranoia that the shuttle might be really important for something they didn't understand. They developed it because they knew it would take time to develop, and they didn't want to be years behind the Americans when they discovered what the shuttle was for.

>the Buran, which also didn't have an emergency ejection system.
...and which the Soviets also never flew manned.

>>The reason they weren't inspecting for damage is that the plan for finding damage was to let the crew die anyway.
>Source? A small patch could be easily fixed. Look at all the shit they did during Apollo 13.
God damn, read up on the incident. There was nothing about the thermal protection system that could have been "easily fixed". It took about a man-day per tile, when they had the exact tile needed, working under ideal conditons on Earth.

Afterward, there was some forehead-slapping because they could have kept it in orbit for longer, and maybe rushed up an emergency mission to bring the crew down in another shuttle, but there was no serious talk of repairing it.

Just fucking look it up. They weren't inspecting for damage because they "knew" they wouldn't be able to do anything if there was damage. The astronauts understood this, and didn't want to be informed of any possible damage to the heat shield.

[Anonymous No.6318029]

>>6317995
What? That wasn't a launch abort system failure. They're supposed to ditch the escape rocket once they'll no longer need it.

Being able to separate the crew capsule and parachute-land anywhere, at any time during the launch, greatly increases the likelihood of crew survival during a mishap.

[Anonymous No.6318488]

>there will never be another exciting disaster news event like the space shuttle disasters or 9/11 ever again, and history is over

may you live in uninteresting times, he was cursed.

[Anonymous No.6318514]

>>6317465

>No one knew if it would lower costs or not

Read this:

http://www.pmview.com/spaceodysseytwo/spacelvs/sld037.htm

Shuttle critics then were right. Shuttle promoters sold their make work program on dubious and deluded marketing pitches, and never had to answer for being wrong. History repeats itself with SLS.

[Anonymous No.6318517]

>>6318514
no one "knew" if it would lower costs. Some people predicted it would, others predicted it wouldn't.

[Anonymous No.6318521]

>>6318517


People choose what is good policy based upon arguments. Space shuttle was bad policy that was picked based upon unsound arguments.

Technically you don't know whether you'll get hit by a car if you run out into the street but a more sound policy is not to do that.

[Anonymous No.6319052]

rip in peace chelngur

[Anonymous No.6319080]

I vaguely remember the day it happened. I was in kindergarten (before 1st year of elementary/primary schools for you non-Americans), and apparently they were replaying the footage of the explosion over and over. The teacher in my class was explaining the disaster in very delicately.

[Anonymous No.6319089]

>>6319080
I should clarify. The news was replaying the clip. There wasn't TV in the classroom.

[Anonymous No.6319102]

>>6317777
Bro do you realize that you just used 7 exactly 4 times in your post and got 7 quads..... shhhiiieet

[Anonymous No.6319568]

>>6318521
The Space Shuttle ran countless successful missions and was instrumental in the US space platform for over 30 years. It is insane to dispute the fact that the Space Shuttle was highly successful. People complain that it was over budget, but forget that budget issues is typical of government projects. People put on their hindsight glasses and start thinking they are smarter than NASA engineers.

You'll see the exact same hindsight engineers pointing out the flaws of the next flagship rocket, mark my words. I cant wait.

[Anonymous No.6319645]

>>6319568

Challenger was launching a TDRS satellite. Just last week Atlas 5 put up another one. The space shuttle was fucking retarded.

[Anonymous No.6319705]

>>6319568
>It is insane to dispute the fact that the Space Shuttle was highly successful. People complain that it was over budget, but forget that budget issues is typical of government projects.
It is insane to claim that the Space Shuttle was highly successful. The entire justification for the development of the shuttle was to lower launch costs. It was also supposed to provide constant, reliable, short-notice access to space, with flights every week.

It failed in its purpose. That they threw truckloads of money at a cost-saving initiative to make it seem to work, and gradually it became a jobs project with full-time lobbyists opposing any cuts or application of common sense.

>You'll see the exact same hindsight engineers pointing out the flaws of the next flagship rocket, mark my words. I cant wait.
Why wait? It's widely known already that SLS is not only shit, but will probably never fly.

The shuttle lobby has got them using shuttle parts. It's just another jobs program.

[Anonymous No.6319842]

>>6318488
orbital launch is hard. shit will always happen.

There has not been a year since the dawn of the space age without an orbital launch failure.

[Anonymous No.6319841]

>>6319705
>Why wait? It's widely known already that SLS is not only shit, but will probably never fly.
lel, typical cynic. has anyone ever done anything rocketry related right, or should we all just give up now?

[Anonymous No.6319854]

>>6319841
Well, I am very encouraged by the commercial US launch initiatives: COTS and CRS for ISS cargo, and CCDev and CiCap for ISS crew transport. By being commercial with firm contracts (not cost-plus), lowered costs are a big part of the design goals. This is resulting in several competing systems, all better, cheaper, more focused designs than the Shuttle:

* SpaceX Falcon 9 + Dragon for cargo and crew
* Antares + Cygnus for cargo
* Atlas V + Boeing CST-100 for crew
* Atlas V + Dream Chaser spaceplane for crew

The development for all these systems and contracts for the winners is still going to be significantly less than the Shuttle program, and also less than the SLS.

All the crew systems mentioned will launch on top of the stack, avoiding by design the conditions that killed Shuttle crew.

[Anonymous No.6319878]

>>6317604

Don't be a drama queen. 10 gorillian parts, 10 gorillian things that can go wrong. They can probably be forgiven for not appreciating the dangers of freezing in Florida.

[Anonymous No.6319888]

>>6319841
Yeah, I'm "just a cynic". I'm pointing at one project and it's idiotic sequel as bad, so I must hate all orbital launch efforts.

Nope. The shuttle pretty much takes the cake. Only the SLS has potential to surpass it in sheer cost-ineffectiveness.

Saturn V was expensive as fuck, but it provided amazing new capabilities. Atlas, Delta, Titan, all doing it right -- solid value, each of them. Proton and Soyuz, excellent. Energia -- damn good super heavy launcher, if they only used it for something more sensible than launching a paranoia-motivated shuttle clone. The Ariane rocket family has generally worked out pretty well.

Atlas V and Delta IV from the EELV program have been pretty questionable. Again, the goal was cost-cutting, and again, the goal was not achieved. They might have managed to reduce the cost of big launches compared to the Titan IV (debatable), but at the cost of taking proven smaller rockets off the market (notably Delta II, a favorite for NASA's more productive unmanned scientific program) and replacing them with big rockets that cost several times as much for no added benefit to small payloads.

What I'm excited about is SpaceX. They're doing everything they should be doing. They're keeping costs down and focusing effort on what matters. With their incremental reusability development plan, they've got real potential to finally bring orbital launch into the realm of the routine and affordable.

[Anonymous No.6319887]

>>6317443
This.

Designing a launch vehicle without a comprehensive launch-abort system is downright insane. It's a rocket, not a fucking airliner.

[Anonymous No.6319897]

>>6317657
>There was nobody saying, "Hey, it would be really great if we had only one launch vehicle
As a matter of fact, that's EXACTLY what NASA decision-makers were saying. They even went as far as to ban the USAF from developing their own launch vehicles with the intent of forcing them to use the Shuttle to launch everything.

After the STS program ran into serious delays in the '70s, the ban was lifted and new variants of Titan, Atlas and Delta were funded again.

[Anonymous No.6319910]

>>6319897
Did you even bother to read the whole post before replying?

The motivation for that wasn't the belief that having a single launch system was preferable for its own sake, but that the space shuttle needed a high volume of flights to bring the cost per flight down.

[Anonymous No.6319951]

>>6319910
The Space Shuttle HAD a high volume of flights. More than Atlas V, Delta IV and Titan IV combined.

Expecting to get a significantly higher launch rate simply by trampling the competition was foolish.

[Anonymous No.6319972]

>>6319951
>The Space Shuttle HAD a high volume of flights. More than two new, blatantly uncompetitive rockets and a stopgap to launch planned shuttle payloads when the shuttle proved unreliable combined.
I don't know what point you're trying to make.

The point of the shuttle was to lower launch costs. Their analysis showed that it would be very expensive to develop, but cheap to fly once developed, so they needed a high volume of flights to make it viable. Once they decided to build it, it was decreed from on high that all American payloads would fly on the shuttle, so the high flight rate would be achieved and many savings would be had.

The shuttle never did achieve a high flight *rate*. It was supposed to fly about once a week. What it ended up doing in three decades, it was supposed to have done in three years. Savings were not had.

[Anonymous No.6320237]

What is it doing in orbit?

[Anonymous No.6320249]

this is what it feels like to chew 5 gum

[Anonymous No.6320308]

>>6317573
>>6317571
Whats stopping you from putting a robotic arm on a module that could be launched by the Saturn system?

[Anonymous No.6320317]

>>6319878
The O-Ring issue was well know over a year before the shuttle launch

The night before the launch the lead engineers at Morton Thiokol, the company which made the booster requested a halt to the launch because of the O-ring specifically. Nasa pushed back and basically pressured them into approving the launch.

It was pure negligence all the way through the leadership structure.Disregard for human life

[Anonymous No.6320314]

>>6320308

The arm was supposed to be used to retrieve satellites and bring them back to earth safely.

That's not possible on anything like a Saturn rocket.

[Anonymous No.6320494]

Reminder that the reason NASA pushed so hard for a January 28 launch is because administrators wanted to have the mission mentioned in President Reagan's State of the Union address that was originally scheduled for that night

[Anonymous No.6320543]

>>6320317
>>6320494

>This just in!

>Publicly funded government institutions are dominated by political forces!

Grow the fuck up. Astronauts know they have a chance of dying at work just like a pizza driver does.

[Anonymous No.6320670]

>>6317571

Not quite. In the case of the ISS, it could have been built that way by including the ARM on early pieces launched, with the space station itself acting as its own assembly system.

In the case of the space shuttle, actually retrieving sats was a dead end task because generally old sats are obsolete, and also the space shuttle was so expensive it was cheaper to send up new ones rather than repair the occasional faulty or old sat. The idea they had in mind didn't pan out/wasn't actually productive work.

A lot of the problem with this topic is thinking that the Shuttle was indispensable when it was only one manner of doing things.

The Shuttle's reusability was lackluster. It's a veneer for a overly complicated work intensive system.

***

>Saturn

Titan > Saturn, when it comes to Shuttle age alternatives to it.

[Anonymous No.6321024]

>>6320670
I heard that Titan IV was also overly expensive, like the Shuttle. Like Ariane V, it had too much capability, so its flight rate was low. It also had SRB reliability problems.

No argument on earlier Titans though. They were the Air Force's workhorse, similar to the Delta II in having 150 launches in its career.

[Anonymous No.6321040]

>>6317455
It ended up with over a half a dozen intended purposes, which is why it sucked so hard.

[Anonymous No.6321069]

>>6319878
Not when the engineers had repeatedly warned them about it and told them not to launch, and they went ahead anyway because they were afraid that canceling the launch would make the program seem unreliable and unsafe in the media.

[Anonymous No.6321068]

>>6321024
Titan IV only existed because of the space shuttle and its failure.

See, one of the big advantages the shuttle was supposed to offer was that its large payload capacity would make cheaper satellites possible.

Now, orbital launch is very expensive, but developing and constructing the satellite often costs more than the launch. Less mass constraints mean you can use cheaper, heavier materials and more off-the-shelf parts. It also means you can make a more durable, reliable, capable satellite.

So when the American government decided that all payloads should go up on the shuttle, of course satellite designers designed for the shuttle's loose payload constraints, and program planners counted on being able to launch them. Then Challenger happened.

All of a sudden, they needed another way to launch these shuttle-sized payloads. Titan IV was cobbled together in a rush (Challenger blew up in '86, Titan IV's first launch was '89), to be used only for payloads that couldn't be kept to a more reasonable size. So of course it was expensive and had reliability problems.

[Anonymous No.6321321]

>>6321024
I've been to the Titan missle silo outside of Tucson. Real cool place

[kitty !kitty/EnNg No.6321323]

who cares they were americans

[Anonymous No.6321337]

>>6321323
/pol/ pls go

[Anonymous No.6321414]

>>6319888
definition of an elephant

>mouse built to gov specs

[Anonymous No.6321423]

>>6320317
>The O-Ring issue was well know over a year before the shuttle launch

any idiot engineer can see it was defective from the start... just look at the joint it's upside down and any condensation running down the side of the booster will fill it. It should have been oriented to drain naturally while on the launch pad as almost all other multi section solid rockets are.

[Anonymous No.6321446]

Regardless of whether it was cheap by design or merely cheap by implementation, the fact was that bureaucrats and politicians called the shots, rather than engineers. Feynman's brutal takedown of NASA's design cycle is particularly telling - they came up with safety figures out of thin air and then ex post invented justifications for why these figures were accurate, rather than building it to a particular safety spec in the first place.

[Anonymous No.6322023]

>>6317580
>inspired the nation

more like taught people to associate space missions with floating about in low earth orbit

[Anonymous No.6322835]

>>6317580

It's stagnation and brutal reality destroying the fabric of expansive hopes about the future of space turned off generations of people from that wonder and allowed them to follow more productive pursuits of the benefit of both themselves and the greater world, except for the bottom of the barrel of naive deluded fanatics who waste their brief time and attention on the backwards dead end subject.

That's the only good thing I'll say about it.

[Anonymous No.6322840]

>>6317580

Its stagnation and brutal reality destroying the fabric of expansive hopes about the future of space turned off generations of people from that wonder and allowed them to follow more productive pursuits to the benefit of both themselves and the greater world, except for the bottom of the barrel of naive deluded fanatics who waste their brief time and attention on the backwards dead end subject.

That's the only good thing I'll say about it.

[Anonymous No.6322845]

When you guys say "The Shuttle" are you talking about the Challenger?

Because Atlantis was pretty successful.

[Anonymous No.6322844]

>>6319102
Read the post again, he used it 8 times. 7, 7, 7, 7, 28

[Anonymous No.6322865]

>>6317580

After the Columbia disaster and the intent to cancel the space shuttle program, NASA had to create a new means to resupply ISS. It did so by competing some dev money to two companies to develop new rockets and cargo ships with the intent to later buy cargo flights from them. This helped the viability of the fledglying upstart SpaceX, and those rockets they developed are the most cost advanced ones ever built, and show promise of opening a holy grail of spaceflight: productive reusability and lowering the cost of access to space.

If Columbia hadn't exploded, and the space shuttle program continued for more decades as they intended, then that serendipitous interchange would never have occurred, and we would have lost a necessary advance in the course of spaceflight. Now I have a feeling you’re the type of person who doesn’t care about SpaceX, but that is a tangible outcome of what the space shuttle program would deny with its existence and what its lack of existence helped to spring forth. It's not a drive for absolute efficiency that those of us who criticise the space shuttle seek, but the substantive effects a different course in policy can have than just meeting a set of objectives that could still be met, and what you, a fan, would seek to deny.

And before you get a little atwiddle over seeing a positive light on the tragic sacrifice of 7 men and women, know that of the two of us, I'm the only one who would have ended the space shuttle program before Columbia.

[Anonymous No.6322889]

>>6317580

Effective stewardship of the discrete budget the space program has to accomplish things is no glib matter.