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Out with the old, in with the new The last shuttle mission has begun… and Richard Branson announced he will be starting commercial flights next year:
Sir Richard Branson said that the reason he established Virgin Galactic was because he ‘got sick sick of waiting for NASA.’ He confirmed that space flights for the public will commence in ’10 to 15 months.’ Another endeavour after this milestone will be to launch ‘a 2 to 3 hour London to Australia flight’ via space.
If you add to this the not very far away cargo flights of the SpaceX Dragon capsule, followed by manned flights of same; the scheduled launch of the Bigelow space station in 2014; and the first flights of the SpaceX Heavy around the same time… not to mention things that XCOR, Masten, Armadillo, Boeing, Reaction Engines, Sierra Nevada and others are up to… we live in a very exciting time.
The last flight of the Space Shuttle signals the beginning of the Space Age.
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Hear…and rejoyce!
Quite.
Just hope Branson’s astronauts dont decide to go on strike!
The Statist shackles are off!
Fly babies, fly!
One group of companies, with battalions of lawyers and lobbyists is supposed to be evil statist , socialist, doubleplusungood oldthinkers; and another group with battalions of lawyers and lobbyists is supposed to be virtuous, free market, unsubsidized heros. This based on the fact that the first group gets “Cost Plus ” contracts and the second group gets “Fixed Price” contracts. Both types of contracts can be modified by the by the aforesaid battalions of lawyers and lobbyists.
Bigger difference is that if the government stops being a customer, one set stops building spaceships. The other just slows down by a couple years and keeps on going. NASA needs SpaceX and the others. The time has passed when those others necessarily *need* NASA.
Anyone know why NASA never flew a shuttle around the moon?
Once it’s up there it’s a cheapish option no?
“The last flight of the Space Shuttle signals the beginning of the Space Age.”
I couldn’t have put it better myself. Dale, is it to you I owe this old joke?
“NASA is still expanding into space, office space”.
Anyway, I know this won’t go down to well here but credit where it is due and all. Thank God Obama finally put the tin lid on Ares etc and the various “shuttle derived” lunch systems NASA were muntering on about.
I know I have a typo there but I’m letting it ride. It is fitting.
Paulm,
The shuttle was only ever LEO capable. A number of satellites it launched had an additional booster to get them to the required orbit.
I still remember vividly the day when we had a TV wheeled into class to watch the first shuttle being launched. Keiron Prenderville was presenting, and I remember him talking about how this was to be the dawn of a new space age, that soon, shuttles would be going up like jumbo jets.
The shuttle should not be inspiring the outpouring of warmth it is receiving. In terms of objective measurements, it was a catastrophe. It belongs down with the Yugo, Windows Me and Heaven’s Gate, although none of those wasted so much time, money or lives.
I loved Heaven’s Gate:-)
“It belongs down with …… Windows Me ….. although none of those wasted so much time, money or lives.”
Jeez. What simile are you reserving Widows Vista for? An asteroid strike?
I would have suggested Microsoft Bob myself.
This seems to be the ideal forum to ask a question that has been bothering me.
The Wikipedia entry on the shuttle implies that it was deliberately designed so that it couldn’t be flown unmanned, even though this was technically possible, as one of its objectives was to generate missions for astronauts.
Is this actually true?
Roue,
Almost certainly. It is though a hell of a thing to land.
Actually, from what I understand, it does have the capability of landing on autopilot. Though as far as I can tell it’s never been done
They need the people to put the landing gear down. The rest is or can be put on auto.
There was a shuttle landing sim in the science museum in Perth Western Australia. I landed it successfully. Impressed the hell out of some kid who was watching.
RlJ wrote:
‘The Wikipedia entry on the shuttle implies that it was deliberately designed so that it couldn’t be flown unmanned, even though this was technically possible, as one of its objectives was to generate missions for astronauts.’
Never mind “flying” the thing – virtually every useful thing ever accomplished using the Shuttle could have just-as-well- been accomplished without the presence of the astronauts on board.
Complex science is being done on the surface of Mars using ROVs, a task exponentially-more-difficult than doing them in LEO – and using 10-year-old technology. As a general rule, remotely-operated space vehicles have a much better success rate and ROI than the human-occupied ones do. Taking people along makes everything so much more complex, costly and heavy. If you’re going to do things in space, a most-inhospitable environment for the weak vessels that is Us Humans, the smart way to do it is to send the most-efficient systems you have – which is almost-always Not People.
The Shuttle was a vanity program, trying desperately to continue the outdated thinking of the 1960s and 1970s and a century of science-fiction fixated on the idea of Men in Space. It should have been cancelled 25 years ago. Instead, it p*ssed away untold taxpayer dollars and (IIRC) 14 lives, all for a handful of mostly-trivial scientific advances, all of which could have been obtained in other ways.
I’m sorry to see that so much of the ‘private’ space exploration effort seems to be thinking much too much about manned space flight. You’d think they would have learned by watching NASA what not to do.
llater,
llamas
Llamas, why did you put ‘private’ in quotes?
Alisa wrote:
‘Llamas, why did you put ‘private’ in quotes?’
Because it’s my perception that much of the ‘private’ space industry isn’t really a private enterprise at all, in the sesne of an invetor-funded enterprise with the goal of making profits.
For example, SpaceX is a combination of Elon Musk’s money (made doing other things) and NASA contracts and partnerships.
Virgin is Sir Richard Branson’s vanity plaything (note that that does NOT mean that it is not technically effective). As we will see from the snippet that headlines this piece, it’s not in the business of doing space travel for profit – it’s all concerned with publicity nonsense like sub-oribital day-tripping and 3-hour flights from Melbourne to London. This way does not lie a profitable private enterprise.
Maybe I’m too harsh, or my perceptions are unjustified. By all means, school me.
llater,
llamas
Paulm wrote:
Anyone know why NASA never flew a shuttle around the moon?
Orbital mechanics
Roue le Jour wrote:
The Wikipedia entry on the shuttle implies that it was deliberately designed so that it couldn’t be flown unmanned, even though this was technically possible, as one of its objectives was to generate missions for astronauts.
Is this actually true?
The orbiter was designed to require manual deployment of the landing gear and air data probes. Premature deployment of either is fatal, and it was thought manual deployment by trained astronauts is safer than relying on a once-glitchy computer.
A few years back there was a detailed test objective to test automatic deployment of the gear and probes, but rumor has it that it was quietly squashed by the astronaut office. For whatever reason this capability exists but has never been demonstrated.
One likely reason why is that astronauts needed to be on board for reliability reasons. The orbiter is not easy to fly, and astronauts saved the vehicle on at least two or three occasions. For example, on the very first flight an autopilot error nearly doomed the ship, and John Young had to take manual control of the orbiter early in the re-entry to keep the stagnation point on the high-performance TPS. Had he not, an STS-107-style re-entry failure would have befallen Columbia on STS-1.
Mike
Llamas wrote:
Complex science is being done on the surface of Mars using ROVs
No, simple science is being done on the surface of Mars using ROVs. Complex science requires astronauts. Steve Squyres himself, the principal investigator for the Mars Exploration Rovers, has said that the rovers can do in three months what a trained geologist could do on the surface of Mars in ten minutes.
It is true that a life-support system will put a floor on the complexity and cost of a manned mission and that unmanned missions can operate below that floor, but once you’ve met the minimum for a manned mission, science output can go up dramatically.
It’s like cars and bicycles. Cars are much more expensive than bicycles. But few who can afford cars use bicycles as their primary means of transportation.
Llamas again:
Because it’s my perception that much of the ‘private’ space industry isn’t really a private enterprise at all, in the sesne of an invetor-funded enterprise with the goal of making profits.
Then, with all due respect, you haven’t been paying attention.
Commercial space has existed for decades. Just in the United States, Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Space Systems/Loral, and Orbital Sciences all make good money designing and building communications satellites. Their in-house R&D is so far beyond the government’s that most government comsats these days use a commercial satellite bus.
United Launch Alliance, Orbital, and SpaceX have launched dozens of commercial payloads into space using their own launch vehicles. Many launch vehicles were developed using commercial, not government, funding: Pegasus, Athena 1, Athena 2, Falcon 1, Atlas III, Delta III, Delta IV-Medium, and Sea Launch. Still others were developed via a commercial / government partnership: Taurus, Atlas V, & Falcon 9.
The LEO comsat constellations were all developed commercially: OrbComm, Irridium, and GlobalStar; as were the commercial imaging satellites: GeoEye and DigitalGlobe.
SpaceX and Virgin Galactic are just the latest in a long line of commercial space companies that include some of the giants (Boeing and Lockheed Martin). They are merely moving into adjacent markets. This happens in the commercial space industry every five or ten years.
Not every venture makes money for its initial investors — markets are like that — but that doesn’t mean losing money is the intent.
Mike
Michael Kent – thanks for your input. Your points are well-taken.
But, with respect – the science being done on the surface of Mars by ROVs is complex – the fact that it could be probably be done more-quickly by a human is true, and interesting, but that’s not really the issue. The added time taken by the ROV (because it is being operated, incredibly conservatively, from Earth) is absolutely trivial when compared to the simply-amazing cost (in both time and money) involved in developing the necessary systems to put a human in the same place and bring him/her back. The cost to put the human there, I suggest, increases as a very significant power of the distance – not squared, not even cubed, but a hugher power still. And the fact that you have to take a human with you (with all his weaknesses and vast needs for life support) paradoxically means that you can do far less with him when you finally get him there – so much of your payload is consumed just moving him that there’s not much left to move the facilities that he would need to do anything much that’s useful.
I dsiagree that complex science requires astronauts on the ground. Some of the most-complex science we do these days is done entirely-remotely, and with advances in telecom, distance no longer matters. ROV technology has advanced to such an extent that the reduced speed of operation more-than-offsets the vast additional burdens involved in placing a live eyeball at the point of interest. And ROVs can do things no man can do. Slowly, yes – but if speed is not critical, who cares? The human intellect can now be essentially completely-remoted from the hardware.
With some noble exceptions, which I will name if you desire chapter-and-verse, most of what has been done in the ISS and the Shuttle in terms of scientific discovery could have been done just as well by ROVs, and for a lot less of the taxpayer’s money. Maybe slower, no argument there. But if you hadn’t had to haul people along, think how much science you could have packed into a Shuttle-sized orbiter. Most of the Shuttle, and most of its crew activity, is there simply to keep the occupants alive.
Your car vs bicycle analogy is true enough, as far as it goes, but let me posit it in a more-realistic analogy for space flight – if you need to go just a few feet, using a vehicle which will be completely destroyed by the journey, which is a better choice – a $75 bicycle or a $500,000 Bugatti Veyron? The tasks to be done are generally not that complex – why the need to send the most-complex system of all (a man) to do them?
Your point about the existing private space industry is very-well-taken and I should have been more clear. I understand very well the established space industry, parts of which you describe. I was referring specifically to the ‘new’ space industry players discussed in the article, who will, it is alleged, fill the void in manned space flight left by the demise of the Shuttle. Outfits like Virgin (for all that they are doing wonderful engineering, and as an engineer I am fascinated by what they are doing) are not going to be the future of commercial space flight as long as they keep doing what they are doing, which is vanity fluff.
We can note that none of the established players you name are rushing to get into manned space flight – which was kind-of my point. But I should have been more clear, my bad.
llater,
llamas
Putting a man in space, the moon or mars is more public relations than science. Saying “Yeah, we sent a robot to Mars and it moves 1m every month” does not exactly inspire people. There’s a romantic human element to exploration, a footprint in the sand.