Supply Mission to the ISS Lost

Dayton wants them to launch a manned mission to the sun. But since the sun is hot in the daytime, he wants them to go at night.

Yes but they're already up there.

Let's hope they can get down in one piece.

What were the promises? I know they had some issues with the LH2 tanks.

And because of this incident, the ISS may have to be abandoned come November. space.com/12767-astronauts-space-station-evacuation-nasa.html

I can see it now. It's going to end up like skylab. Which was supposed to be a long term station, but it was decaying a bit faster than they anticipated... and they faffed around with getting reboost vehicles online, so the thing re-entered. Parts of it landed in SW Australia, there's some town there that issued a fine to the United States for littering, IIRC it's still outstanding.

While they faff around the ISS will go unboosted, re-enter, and be destroyed. All those billions for nothing. And to cap it off, it will actually pose a danger to populated areas when it comes down. (Controlled spacecraft reentries are aimed at the central pacific, uncontrolled ones like Skylab as mentioned above can happen anywhere, potentially dropping wreckage on towns or cities.)

You do know that ISS can be run from the ground indefinitely, while it is unmanned.

For a while, at least. But remember, it wasn't designed to be run in unmanned mode for any significant length of time (as I understand it). At least the Hubble was.

AFAIK it can be run for a long time unmanned.

Skylab wasn't in that bad of shape. NASA was planning to dock the shuttle to it, reboost it, and possibly resupply and reoccupy it. The shuttle fell behind schedule and didn't make it up in time to do it.

They could have sent up some other rocket to give it a shunt. It wouldn't need to be manned.

But they screwed around like beavis and butthead and the thing came down.

If they're going to evac the ISS they should boost it a few hundred miles to make sure it can last a few years with no attention.

Not according to the folks at NASA that I've talked to. 30 days with no crew onboard is the limit. No doubt it might be possible to go a bit longer, but thst's certainly pushing it and would probably shorten the overall lifespan of the station.

From the other thread:

"We know how to do this," NASA's space station program manager Mike Suffredini told reporters today. "Assuming the systems keep operating, like I've said, we can command the vehicle from the ground and operate it fine, and remain on orbit indefinitely."

Actually, no. The shuttle came in on schedule (Nixon's Administration had fudged the time line) and there was no serious effort made at NASA to use the shuttle to save Skylab. They knew it wouldn't be ready in time.

Of course, can you imagine how obsolete Skylab would be now? Built with hardware designed some 40 years ago and significantly smaller than the ISS. It probably would be a bigger death trap than the Mir was in its final years.

From what I understand, system failures onboard the ISS aren't exactly rare. They don't make the news because they're not unexpected and they have plenty of spares for the smaller stuff on the station (save for big things like the toilet).

With something operating on narrow margins like the ISS does, not having humans onboard means that the opportunity for a minor issue to turn into a serious problem are much greater (remember, it was designed to have someone there to fix things when they went wrong, and not just wait around for the repairman to show up months later). On one of the shuttle flights, a crew member left the lid on the toilet seat up, and NASA freaked out because they couldn't figure out where the power drain was coming from until they traced it back to the toilet. (There's a fan which comes on in the shuttle's toilet when the lid is raised. That's right, folks, they designed the thing so that the shit is supposed to hit the fan! )

Unless Dayton has a source to verify that Glenn actually said anything even remotely resembling that, I call shenanigans.

That sounds so typically NASA. Why wouldn't they design the lid to not be able to stay open without somebody sitting there? I'm not an engineer, but if I can come up with it, why can't they? And this is what you guys want billions of taxpayers dollars to go towards.

How are you going to do it in zero gravity? And remember, NASA engineers are concerned with shaving weight like nobody else. Anything you add to the system is going to reduced the amount of cargo which can be hauled up into space, and at $10K/lb to get to orbit, whatever you're adding to the shuttle had damned well better be important.

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Sworn testimony by the director of the shuttle program during the development phase.

(bolding mine)

So, no, they did not make any serious plans for boosting Skylab with the shuttle, since they knew it'd most likely be '81 when it flew. Nothing you've posted shows that they actually went so far as to build hardware for the project (which would mean they were, you know, serious), and while someone might claim that they could have easily upgraded Skylab, that may not be the case. Remember, on one of the Skylab missions the crew went on strike because NASA had so overloaded them with work that they couldn't hack it and basically got into a shouting match with ground control over the workload.

Even if they had gotten the shuttle to fly in '79, they still probably couldn't have done it. Columbia was a wreck when it landed and they had to repair it (and modify the other shuttles) before they could launch again. That leaves little time to do things like prep the ship for a risky mission like boosting Skylab into a higher orbit.

^ They started construction of the TRS in '78.

It was the solar activity that didn't cooperate.

Apollo 7 also got a little pissed with Mission Control over the workload. None of that crew ever flew again.

It had to be bureaucratic or Congressional meddling that caused them to work on hardware. Even if you had Columbia ready to fly in '79, there was a gap of 7 months between STS-1 and STS-2 as it took them that long to get Columbia flight ready again.

Having only a year (or less, more realistically) to build, test, and fly experimental hardware on an experimental spacecraft is a recipe for disaster.

The Russians say they've found the problem with the rockets.

More at the link.