Space Station Working Again
…well, sort of. They have by-passed a switch to see if that was the problem, but the computers are working for the moment.
The shuttle crew managed to staple the torn thermal blanket back in place, as they decided against the nails, and couldn’t find the duct tape.
The skeptics get their say in the Associate Press article:
The days-long computer problems fueled skepticism toward the Bush administration’s “Vision for Space Exploration,” which calls for finishing the space station in three years, grounding the space shuttles in 2010 and building next-generation vehicles to go to the moon and Mars.
“This growing chorus of opposition to the current vision … is finding expression in the difficulties of the station,” said Howard McCurdy, a space public policy expert at American University. “We’re learning a great deal from the space station, and one of things we may be learning is we shouldn’t have built this particular one.”
McCrudy probably thinks that a missile defense system ought to actually shoot down missiles and the Federal Emergency Management Agency should be able to manage emergencies. There’s one in every crowd, continually carping about waste, fraud, abuse, and incompetence.
7 comments
so, it’s a waste of time and trees because it was all a fraud and seeing as how i’m too incompetent to find further information on my own, i should just call 1-800-ABUSE-ME?
i’m a taxpayer, and a frugal person by nature, but honestly, i’d be willing to spring for a couple extra laptops [with batteries!], a roll or two of duct tape, and even some visqueen. oh what the heck, throw in something for them to breathe too.
i’ve put in a few years as safety officer in a mildly dangerous line of work, and have seen graphic demonstrations of what happens when you put good safety policies into place and then only pay lip service to them. we used to joke that the only way you get some of the project managers to spend enough money on safety was to trot out the line “do you know how much it costs if we kill somebody?”
nasa’s a big-dollar organization. i guess they figure they can blow up a handful of folks here and there without feeling the pinch.
Well, it’d be nice to have a space station that could stay up in space all by itself without needing Space Shuttles to give it a boost from time to time to keep it in orbit. (Without a boost from time to time, it’d fall out of the sky). The main problem was that it was designed so that the Flying Albatross could reach it, and the Flying Albatross (“Space Shuttle”) can only reach a fairly low Earth orbit. Indeed, the biggest modules got launched by the Russians atop Proton rockets because the Flying Albatross simply could not get anything that big that high up into the sky in the orbit where the Space Station sits. The other problem is that it’s in a weird orbit because it has to be reachable by the Russians, who are a bit further north of the equator than is ideal, which further hinders the ability of the Flying Albatross to reach the thing. All in all, a boondoggle of major proportions. We should have just paid the Russians to build Mir II and build Energia rockets for us (which they’d designed to launch Mir II and their own “Shuttle”, but which got scrapped when the Soviet Union collapsed… indeed, two of its upper stages are now doing duty as modules in the “International” space station). Of course, the fact that the Energia strap-ons are built in the Ukraine and the Ukrainians and Russians barely talk to each other anymore would have made that a bit more difficult than just filling suitcases with money, but …
(Note to hipparchia: your link on the word “incompetent” is to a page forbidden to ordinary mortals… we get a banner, but a 403 Forbidden for the page content.)
yep.
Secrecy for the sake of secrecy, while the people at Los Alamos are sending nuclear secrets in open e-mails.
Energia is a powerful system, but I wouldn’t want to be in the same state if there’s a failure at launch. I think Florida might miss Cape Canaveral.
On your general point, ‘Tux, all of the compromises to get an “International” space station have compromised the basic systems. The Shuttle replacement should have been started a decade ago and there should be more escape capacity on the station itself. The Soviet Buran shuttle was too much like our own, a fault of the bureaucracy not their designers, and had the same weaknesses. We need a “boxcar” to take that stuff up, without all of the people. You could design it to utilize the shuttle external fuel tank and boosters, but automate the flight systems and designed it to be used as part of the station after being emptied.
Build it in low earth orbit then push it out to a more stable position and outside the “junk belt”.
Hell, they could have done the ultimate “This Old House” and rehabbed the Mir and moved it to the area of the ISS as an escape pod, rather than letting it fry. I know, money and priorities. Space lacks both.
Energia was actually slightly less powerful than the Saturn V. Slightly. And thus probably wouldn’t have taken out much of Cape Canaveral if it’d exploded there. Besides, the Soviets learned a lot between the time that their N1 moon rocket blew up and took out their equivalent of Cape Canaveral, and the time of Energia. For example, Energia’s engines were controlled by basically the equivalent of an 8086 microprocessor — much more advanced than the crude analog controls of the N1 that were incapable of syncing its engines or dealing with an engine-out condition.
As for their “space shuttle”, it was more of a re-entry vehicle, and as noted, there was no real reason for its existence. Soyuz works fine as a vehicle to put men in orbit at a much lower cost.
Ironically, the failure of the Soviet moon program can be laid to the fact that, for unprofitable ventures, Communism is more efficient than capitalism. The Communist NASA, granted a government monopoly upon space flight, kicked the free-market Soviets’ ass. The Soviets had no centralized space program. They had competing “bureaus” — think aerospace companies like Lockheed, Boeing, etc. — that refused to cooperate with each other but instead competed. You would think that competition would result in the best design winning. Instead, competition resulted in a dilution of resources so that no one program for sending the Soviets to the Moon had the total resources needed to get there. It took almost 1% of U.S. GDP in 1966 to get the Saturn V built. The creaky Soviet economy did not have the resources for several different equivalents to the Saturn V at once (something which would have stressed even the more robust U.S. economy), and thus the Soviet moon program failed.
The Soviets had the ability to build big and huge, but they lacked precision. There guidance systems were dependent on a ball bearing machine from New Hampshire, and they needed help from Japan and Norway to build a balanced prop for their submarines. Their chip foundries are not beyond the 80286 level of integration.
That said, their stuff is tough. You can repair a MiG-21 in a decent auto shop, and if you have access to the standard maintenance parts, their military trucks should last forever. I had a twin lens reflex camera made at the Leningrad Optical Works that you could drive a tank over and the square-cut focusing gears wouldn’t be out of place in a transmission.
One of the big problems was the Soviet system was based on a troika – the Party, the KGB, and the military. The space program was mainly the military. The KGB had no real interest beyond surveillance satellites, and the Party interest wasn’t constant.
The failure of agriculture, thanks in large part to Khrushchev, caused a strain on hard currency during the project. The KGB wouldn’t vote for it, and then the military split over funding needed for nuclear research. When the price of oil started to drop, a main source of hard currency, something had to go.
The design bureaus definitely hated each other, and some of it was personal by their heads. I’m fairly certain that a lot of information that Janes received on Soviet aerospace was based on damaging leaks from the competing bureaus. What we would consider common equipment like radios and avionics was not shared.
The before and afters on the Kosmodrome they lost are a scary set of pictures, as bad as the nuclear waste disposal site on the east side of the Urals.