Five Horrifying Facts about the Space Shuttle

So I guess that huge fucking fireball was an illusion then, you fucking dickhead!

You might as well ask the sun to stop shining.

Sometimes I think we would be far better off and far farther out today if JFK had never stood up and given his 'let's go to the moon' speech. There was so much R&D going on before that in so many aerospace venues, then all of a sudden all the eggs got dumped in one basket- and it was a government basket at that. X-plane research went away, NTR propulsion research went away, everything went away when everyone realized that the key to the future was 'getting on board' and firmly attaching yourself (and your company) to that wellspring known as the NASA (read: government) tit.

Apollo was the crowning achievement of this nation. I'm convinced now that we'll never do anything greater, given that 11 years later we still can't build a skyscraper to replace the WTC. But Apollo came at the cost of a steadier, broader progress that probably would have us on Mars right now. It also led directly to the shuttle program, which turns out is a perfect example of a road to hell paved with good intentions.

Now, like the rest of the government, NASA has turned into a gigantic, floundering bureaucracy that can't do much of anything other than suck up money and shoot down ideas. If this wasn't true, we'd STILL be on Mars right now courtesy of Bob Zubrin and Mars Direct.

That's exactly the point. What should have been and what we supposedly are turning over to private industry is the Earth to LEO taxi and freight runs. They can make a profit hauling people, cargo and satellites to orbit.

This is supposed to free up the money to allow NASA to actually conduct deep space exploration. This should have been done 20+ years ago.

The space shuttle is history. However, NASA is about to repeat all mistakes of the past by pouring loads of money into the SLS program that doesn't even have a mission profile. What a pity...

And what motivated the space program was "OMFG, the Russkies are gonna get to the Moon before we do!"

That's not true. Both of them were destroyed in space battles.

True. They were attacked by space submarines piloted by otters of the ass.

Yeah, and when is that going to happen?

I guess the two of you are in that group of know nothings who label every Navy vessel as a "battleship" and every armored vehicle on treads a "tank".

Starting here:

The NASA model was flawed from the beginning, i.e., the reasons for going into space were not sustainable reasons.

Making it possible for civilians to go into space will create excitement, and generate income, for full-scale scientific exploration of the solar system, instead of patchwork, "Hey, let's spend x-millions of dollars to send some brine shrimp up on the next shuttle and see if zero-G makes them breed faster!"

Actually that isn't true. The space shuttle orbiters were each supposed to fly at least 100 missions each.

For someone who claims to be a fan of the space program, the author of the article doesn't know dick about the space program.

So? We lost two crews, I believe the Soviets/Russians have lost one more crew than the US, either way, you're dealing with a sample size of about 8 different types of vehicles (Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Shuttles, the various Soviet/Russian vehicles, and the Chinese vehicles), which is rather small. More people have died in 747s than have in the original Wright Brothers plane, which one do you think is safer? Twice, astronauts/cosmonauts have been subjected to high gee forces and missed landing zones on recent missions from the ISS in Soyuz spacecraft. The Russians have also had a number of delays because of problems with the unmanned Soyuz craft. NASA even refused to put astronauts on Soyuz for a while, until the Russians got the problems sorted out.

As for the Chinese, they've only done a handful of launches, but fatalities are inevitable in their program, as with everything, so bandying them about as some kind of success story isn't much. (They haven't even had as many launches as NASA had at the time of the Apollo 1 fire.)

Finally, the two shuttle disasters were caused because people tried to operate the vehicles outside their original design parameters. When you do something like that, its not too surprising that bad things happen.

Again, so? NASA wasn't building Model-Ts, they were building a cutting edge test vehicle, which was foisted on them, and had its capabilities exaggerated by the Nixon Administration which was more interested in rubbing its dick over anything associated with JFK than it was anything else. Maybe things would have been if different if we'd kept with Apollo and not dumped it for the shuttles, but we'll never know. The shuttles were hugely cutting edge, they just didn't go anywhere sexy, like Apollo did.

So, because lots of people are dumbasses and have no idea of what the shuttle did/could do, is somehow a design flaw??? Should they have built it like the shuttle in[ Airplane II: The Sequel? You know, capable of flying to the sun because of the crazy computer onboard? Yeah, its a terrible that NASA's PR department couldn't figure out how to pimp the various shuttle missions so that they were exciting to people who sit around jerking off to the latest episode of Ow! My Balls!, but that's hardly the shuttle's fault. None of the private space ventures will be able to go farther than the shuttles did for at least a decade after they first send humans up, nor will any of the private venture craft be able to go out and repair things like the Hubble.

Not true. See my above link. Nixon made NASA over-promise what the shuttles could do, to counter opposition from folks like Walter Mondale.

That's rich, coming from Griffin. The Constellation rocket he proposed to replace the shuttle was better than the shuttles only in the sense that it was newer.

Where have I heard that before? Oh, yeah, that's what they told us when they canceled Apollo and gave us the shuttles. We see how well that worked out. All the private space programs have one thing in common: They require the government teat to keep them going for at least a decade or more. Given the number of muck eaters in Congress, that may not happen. Especially with the way Musk has been shooting his mouth off. He's promising the same low, low, price per pound that the shuttle was supposed to deliver, and he over-promised and under-delivered on the Tesla, so pardon me if I'm more than a bit skeptical about his claims.

Oh, and the part about NASA buying things off of eBay had more to do with saving money (cheaper to go with used hardware with known failure rates, than new stuff, that requires all kinds of R&D), than anything else.

That's the tank exploding.

He's being pedantic, but he's being accurate. The shuttle didn't blow up, the TANK blew up,then the shuttle broke apart from both the explosion and being tumbled at supersoinic speeds. One might say the shuttle "was blown up", but the shuttle didn't "blow up."

A death rate as high as the shuttle's shouldn't be expected. The space shuttle is inherently the most unsafe manned launch system used in the last 45 years or more, due to its lack of any kind of LAS. All other manned launchers flown in the last four and a half decades have had such devices. A catastrophic disintegration such as that which befell Challenger would have been quite survivable for the crews of Apollo, Soyuz etc.

You are a total fucking moron. No spaceship could survive its main fuel tank blowing up you idiot. If the Saturn V had exploded the Apollo capsule would have been confetti.

You don't have otters in your ass, you are the otter in someone's never washed asshole.

Oh, and no ship has or had an LAS for in flight. They were all to escape an accident while it was still on the launch pad.

Fucknut.

He's a fucknut, but the LES of Apollo could be used in flight.

Launch escape systems have actually been used only once in the history of spaceflight.

And that was when a Soyuz, two man crew in the 1980s was "extracted" from their launch vehicle at a whopping SEVENTEEN Gs!

Now, American shuttle astronauts were generally older than Soyuz crews so I'm wondering just how survivable an LES that subjected a crew to that great a stress woiuld actually be.

Remember, that even when it comes to combat aircraft, only a handful of pilots have ever survived ejection into a supersonic airstream.

Cool, didn't know that about Apollo. However, that concept only worked because it was a small capsule on top of the rocket. It would not work in the shuttle set up. With the crew cabin part of the whole ship and it next to the fuel tanks, it's a no go.

More people died from commercial aircraft accidents in the time the shuttle program was in operation. And that's not counting terrorism. :suicidebomber:

Yeah, but we're talking about thousands of flights every single day as opposed to one every other month or whatever the shuttle schedule was.

The shuttle had an average of one catastrophe per 65 flights give or take.

Remember that when the Apollo era astronauts were joining the program they were told they had a one in ten chance of dying on each space mission regardless of the destination.

Ummm, its up to over 80 floors now?

After Challenger it was determined that there was one and ONLY ONE type of escape system that could give the crew a chance of survival from blastoff to touch down.

And that was put the crew inside a large (big enough for 10 people if necessary) heavily insulated and armored capsule inside the shuttle cargo bay during launch and landing operations and conduct those by computer control only.

Such a capsule would've taken up a lot of space and weight of the bay capacity.

But on the other hand it would be useful as an airlock for orbital operations.

^ With that in the shuttle bay there would be no room for cargo. No cargo no need for an airlock.

Actually, in Challenger's case evidence suggests at least some of the crew survived 4 min until impact with the ocean. A parachute or retro rockets on the cockpit module (it was an insert) might well have saved some of them.

LINK

That's the liquid hydrogen igniting after the external tank experienced a structural failure and broke apart.

You know, if they'd released photos like this earlier, the space program might seem a bit cooler to folks.

All the capsules had LESs, from Mercury thru Apollo. They were all designed to launch the capsule clear of the rocket at any time.

The shuttles had 2 catastrophic failures in 135 flights. For an experimental aircraft that's pretty damn good!

I would be very interested in seeing the link to that. I've heard people call Obama a communist, I've heard people complain about him cancelling the shuttle program, and I've heard the claim that "it will be replaced by private enterprise," but I don't think I've ever heard anyone link those three things together in the way you say. Who has done that?