The Space Shuttle That Fell to Earth

[fossyant]

Posted in hobbies as I'm a rubbish space person - I follow it a little..., I saw Enterprise fly over my school playground on a 747 etc. etc, and a bit 'flash Gordon'ed' about Space X and the flipping rockets that land themselves - followed the original Mars Rover...etc..

Just watching the BBC documentary, but my word did NASA cock up. No wonder things have changed about sticking people in space.

 

[Slick]

I've always been interested and couldn't resist a visit when I was over there, but not when anything interesting was happening.

As for the documentary, I'm watching it now and its really sad to see the crew so young and proud.

Terrible really

 

[Drago]

And now things are so risk averse they're having difficultly doing things in 2 decades that they managed in 8 years in the 1960s, ie, putting folk on the moon. The knee well and truly jerked to the point where NASA are barely pushing the actual boundaries of anything.

It'll be the likes of private enterprise that push crewed flight beyond low earth orbit now. Indeed, a privately funded Space X flight later this year is going to high low-earth orbit, farther out than anyone since Apollo 17, whike NASA fumble about on the ground with no operational crewed flight capacity of their own whatsoever.

The problem with NASA is they don't build their own craft, never have. They're a giant procurement agency, and we all know how efficient they are (NHS, MoD, etc), so when things do go wrong they don't have proper control. They only way they have of managing risk is to ratchet the caution up so high nothing gets done at all. Meanwhile, Space X have created the most reliable crew rated rocket in history, and now have more successful launches per year than the rest of the world put together, and then some.

It was a very interesting documentary.

 

[Joffey]

What I took from it was what a bunch of super intelligent people but equally as dumb as a box of rocks.

More concerned with chain of command and procedure than the obvious - a glaring big impact to the shuttle. Couldn’t ask the security services for help to avoid embarrassment. WTF.

 

[Ming the Merciless]

Posted in hobbies as I'm a rubbish space person - I follow it a little..., I saw Enterprise fly over my school playground on a 747 etc. etc, and a bit 'flash Gordon'ed' about Space X and the flipping rockets that land themselves - followed the original Mars Rover...etc..

Just watching the BBC documentary, but my word did NASA cock up. No wonder things have changed about sticking people in space.

Yes I saw it fly over our school in South Manchester back in the 80s.

 

[wiggydiggy]

A few years before the disaster the Shuttle Columbia was immortilized in one of the greatest animes of all time, Cowboy Bebop. The sequence even makes mention that the heat resistant tiles have peeled off.

View: https://youtu.be/mo-c2hk_hQg?feature=shared

 

[IanSmithCSE]

Good morning,

....... Meanwhile, Space X have created the most reliable crew rated rocket in history, and now have more successful launches per year than the rest of the world put together, and then some.....

For me Space X is the pre 1980s Boeing of the orbital industry, Boeing brought out the 707 (1957) and 747 (1969) and made jet travel a safe commodity service, okay there were other players. But since the introduction of the 747 improvements have been minor, they abandoned their supersonic jet project although it is hard to know if this was a budget issue or a belief that demand would be too small.

Space X have made a success of taking existing tech, improving it and making a product that the market wants but there are no signs that they are inclined or have the funds to develop a Space Shuttle type of product.

Yes, they do have reusable stages, again a successful implementation of an idea from the past. That idea was at least partly dropped because it was considered a novelty, when I last looked Space X were saying reusing the 1st stage reduced capicitiy to orbit by around 20%-30% and resusing the second stage would up this to around 50%. I expect that now they have experience on 1st stage reuse there are more accurate numbers available, I am confused as to where they are at with 2nd stage reuse.

Getting down from orbit is a huge problem that will never change with time and if Space X don't have the funds where does this big advancement come from, looking at the aviation industry the answer could be that it never will.

This is a slightly depressing link https://www.faa.gov/sites/faa.gov/f...7_Commercial_Human_Spaceflight_Activities.pdf

Currently the US has an informed consent policy governing safety on space flights rather than the much stricter liabilty that covers activites such as flying on a commercial jet. This document is discussing dropping the informed consent model and moving towards something like the passenger jet safety standards.

To me this seems completely out of touch with reality in terms of tech and risk and could easily kill off the million dollar joy rides to orbit market that could be the source of funds for the next stage of hardware development.

Bye

Ian

 

[Drago]

Quality a few insurers won't cover a SpaceX flight unless the booster has already completed a flight, been tried and tested. They're finding the market for launches on virgin boosters is rather limited.

Reusable second stage development by SpaceX is so in your face that most folk don't even see it - Starship. Second stage and spacecraft in one.