Space Shuttle memories

[caucasoididiot]

I was thinking there had already been a shuttle thread going but didn't see it. Sorry if I glossed right over it.

Edit: Just spotted plissken's, but it hasn't been updated since April. /Edit

Any thoughts on the Space Transportation System as the final mission flies? I heard the program director on NPR a little while ago saying that it had accomplished everything it set out to do. Not to argue, but I thought the rest of that report did a good job of showing just how far of the mark the program actually came, with a frequency of flight less than 10% of what was advertised and a cost to orbit comparably over expectations. I was hunting for an entry in Encyclopedia Astronautica site manager Mark Wade's old blog in which he estimated the tonnage of hardware that could have been lofted by having taken the money spent on STS and using it instead to have kept the Saturn V assembly line open, but unfortunately the page was unavailable (he hasn't updated it in years and it may just be gone). It never came close to making access to space as cheap as promised, while advances in solid state electronics made disposable satellites too cheap to realize much from the on-site servicing capability.

But the program's heart was certainly in the right place, trying to put in place a step-by-step infrastructure to open the space environment in an economical way. In practice, though, it tried to push that technology too quickly (or underfunded it, a case can be made for that), much as the family of single-stage-to-orbit replacement proposals of the '90s almost certanly would have done had they been pursued. I find a lot of merit to the argument that the program was a net loss for NASA, sacrificing many potential programs (Apollos 18~20 right off the bat) to build a vehicle with nowhere to go that couldn't already be reached with proven systems, the upshot of which was to build a station for it to go to (despite its being overly large and complex for a lot of the desired experimentation) which now must be serviced by Soyuz.

Hmm . . . I sound very negative, don't I? Hate to about a system so downright cool. If Shuttle has been a success, it must be on the basis of intangibles: the prestige factor of the most advanced system ever flown belonging to the United States, the "Wow!" in the eyes of every child who ever saw a launch. But how does this weigh against the negatives of having killed two full crews? The program did succeed in making spaceflight seem pedestrian enough that spectacular come-aparts like those got most of the publicity, so very different from the Apollo coverage that went far to spark my own dissatisfaction with the Terrestrial surface. No real "Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed," memories, but "We have a report from the Flight Dynamics Officer that the vehicle has exploded."

Well, that's my daily ration of being a nattering nabob of negativity. Anyone have brighter memories?

[Mr. Atari]

I'm sad that I never got to see a launch in person.

I remember the first launch of the Columbia in '81. I remember Sally Ride in '83. I remember the explosion in '86. It was 2 days after Super Bowl XX, when the Bears clobbered the Patriots. I was home from school because I had gotten sick at a Super Bowl party. I was watching The Price is Right, and they interrupted the show with footage of the launch. When it blew up, my mom gasped/screamed and ran out of the room. I don't remember feeling anything about the astronauts, but the memory of my mom's reaction has always stuck with me. I was in 5th grade at the time, and what I really remember were the schoolyard jokes about it all. (Need Another Seven Astronauts, etc.)

After that, I lost interest. I'm sure the jokes & the tragedy somehow implanted in my subconscious that the shuttle program was dumb (at least) or doomed (at worst).

In the late '90s, one of my best friends from high school got a job in Houston with NASA and the shuttle program. This prompted me to take up space pursuit as a major hobby. When Columbia blew up in '03, it was far more personal to me because it directly affected someone I knew. The same goes for this week's final mission.

All that to say, my memories are a mixed bag. I'm sure the shuttle program did more to bring about our technophile society than a couple more missions to the moon would have. Everything from satellites to wireless to my beloved iPhone wouldn't have happened without NASA. And just the thought of a vehicle that can go into space, orbit for a while, land safely, and do it all again later is pretty mind-blowing. However, the adventurer side of me says, "Screw the pragmatic and obvious cultural advances of orbital travel, and get to Mars already!" Where's my escalator to the moon, dammit?!

[BJ]

Normally when I hear a cost/benefit analysis damning the shuttle program (or NASA in general), I'll go on the defensive, but I just don't have the energy. The only fact I'll give is that without the shuttle, there's no Hubble, and that's given us more scientific data than I could have ever imagined.

The weather was terrible for launch viewing yesterday, and there were way too many people on the roads, so I didn't see it in person. While watching on tv, as soon as the orbiter was safely in space, I began to feel depressed. With this program ending, the rejection of the new telescope, and my country basically in its own slow fall from orbit, I feel like our civilization peaked and we're in a decline.

The economy's toast, there are wars everywhere, religions are increasingly intolerant of one another, people in the US absolutely hate one another, our government is as impotent and transparently corrupt as possible... It's like getting the chance to see the collapse of the Roman empire first hand. I guess it's time to move to Australia, buy a black Ford XB Falcon, and wait for the apocalypse.

Anyway, seeing night turn to day in seconds at 3am is just one of the many breathtaking memories I have of the shuttle. There may be some bad memories mixed in there, but that's the nature of striving for greatness.

[caucasoididiot]

Jul 9, 2011 16:21:59 GMT -5 Mr. Atari said:

Everything from satellites to wireless to my beloved iPhone wouldn't have happened without NASA. And just the thought of a vehicle that can go into space, orbit for a while, land safely, and do it all again later is pretty mind-blowing.

No argument what-so-ever on that, Mr. A, except that while those satellite applications did burgeon during the Shuttle era they predate it, and mostly get lofted by simpler, unmanned boosters like Delta, Ariane or Proton. Even had Shuttle managed the turnaround times initially forecast, the fundamental difference between manned and unmanned systems is that if the latter blows up you call your insurance carrier, the former you call a mortuary. That makes the safety requirements for manned systems much more stringent, and that necessitates tolerances and redundancies that drive the cost per pound way up.

Initially Shuttle was going to be NASA's only launch vehicle. My recollection is that the Air Force was always dubious of that and so kept Titan in production, while the Challenger disaster headed off NASA's closing down the Delta assembly lines. It's hard to think of a really good day-to-day analogy--maybe think of deep sea operations, the difference in risk and cost between sending down a little teleoperated dingus on a line as opposed to a fully manned submarine. I'm a big fan of putting astronauts up, but for most operations its uneconomical.

Even in the manned realm Shuttle probably was a classic case of trying to do too much too quickly. It's really unfortunate (to my mind) that MacNamara cancelled the Air Force's X-20 spaceplane in '64. With such a smaller project, one that didn't represent the whole ballgame and thus able to proceed more carefully, a body of spaceplane experience might have been built up that could have made Shuttle more successful.

It's not so much that I dislike Shuttle, just that I think a good case can be made for its having cost NASA more than it benefited. Even if true, though, many of the problems are only really clear in hindsight, and furthermore NASA always had problems with shifting governmental requirements and funding once the "Space Race" was over.

Edit:
Oops! Plisken, you posted while I was composing. Yes, Hubble is one program that required Shuttle in the space environment as it stood, but my argument would be that a better system could have been in place. I mean, think of Skylab. Saturn V's could loft immense loads, and a less exotic, more evolutionary manned system could have serviced them. I suspect our differences are down in the details of how to do space exploration, rather than with the deeper why.

[Weirdo Writer]

I never got to see a launch live and in person, but I do vividly remember the first launch after the Challenger disaster- they had all the kids at my school gather to watch it live on TV, which they didn't do for more "normal" shuttle launches.

[BJ]

Jul 9, 2011 20:27:55 GMT -5 @caucasoididiot said:

I suspect our differences are down in the details of how to do space exploration, rather than with the deeper why.

Yea, I guess that was another reason why I didn't go into further detail earlier. It was obvious from other threads that this sort of thing interests you, and your post wasn't the typical "NASA wastes money" rant, which the NY Times seems to run every month or so.

While I agree that the Saturn V's were amazing, they weren't that cheap either and nothing that powerful is ever safe. Combine that with almost no public interest in space exploration, and NASA had to try something new. The dream of a ship that could take off, land, and take off again repeatedly must have been tough to resist in the early 70's. Even though it didn't quite work out as hoped, we've learned so much from that experience that I have to think of the program as a success.

If it were up to me, I would have had as many moon launches as possible since 1969, skylab would have never come down, and the X-20 program would have grown, not ended. But reality got in the way. Soyuz and public interest killed the moon. Funds killed the X-20, and a shift in focus killed Skylab. While the orbiter's early champions obviously oversold the craft, I think NASA did a good job in a post JFK world with no clear goals other than scientific pursuit. There was so much time spent in space with so many people. We built a space station with the help of a former enemy and many other nations. We learned to operate on the most delicate equipment in outer space. Some people spent so much time out on EVA's, it seemed like a normal day at the office for them. All that information is priceless if we ever hope to reach another planet.

I'm rambling, so here's some more. Do I feel like we've been treading water a bit with the shuttle program? Absolutely. We landed on the moon 50 years ago, and now we're stuck a couple hundred miles in the sky with a 30 year old spacecraft. But on the other hand, we're incredibly spoiled. For millennia, humans looked to the sky and dreamed of soaring there. They looked at the moon and wondered what it was. It wasn't until around 100 years ago that we were in the air, and only 66 after that, two men were on the moon. If it takes another few decades of farting around before we make the next big step, I can't really complain. As long as we don't give up, and keep learning more about space flight, we're going in the right direction.

[caucasoididiot]

Well put. Yeah, just to be clear, given the choice of Shuttle or nothing I'd take shuttle. Heh heh . . . I'm so into this stuff that in the interval since my last post I marked the day by watching "This is X-20 Dyna-Soar" and "Dyna-Soar Progress Report, June 1962." I'm such a wonk I love watching the Honeywell guys test the resolver error.

Perhaps I'm too cynical, but were Ambrose Bierce writing The Devil's Dictionary today I suspect one of his definitions of "cynic" would be: a space advocate who watched Apollo as a kid.

I spent the '80s convinced that Proxmire couldn't hold us back long. Just wait'til the '90s, '00s tops! But a good twenty years ago I decided that the US was not serious about space exploration, hadn't been for some time and wasn't likely to be in my lifetime. It isn't NASA's fault, though they aren't free of blame. What organization that big is? But I've seen nothing since that really shook that.

I'm dubious, by the way, of the great private industry boom that will supposedly happen. I think private industry is very good at figuring out when technologies are ripe enough to be profitable. Look how quickly they jumped into commsats and resource sats. I suspect that if manned boosters were ready, they'd already be there.

Let me add that I'd like nothing better than to be proven wrong on all of the foregoing.

I'm afraid that I've been convinced of the sad truth that--once electronics got good enough that you didn't need guys constantly swapping out vacuum tubes--the economic rationale for manned space flight largely dried up. The one exception may be space tourism, but that's going to be for the Trumps of the world for the foreseeable.

But if that's what it takes, so be it, I guess. The point is to go. The point is to see things, to be places that no one has ever been before, to feel it in your bones and not see it over a monitor. To discover the insights that only that particular new reality will bring, one of those intangibles whose price I would bet my bottom dollar is beyond evaluation. The closest I got was stepping onto the Antarctic ice; I can only dream of how much moreprofound it must have felt like to tread lunar dust. Damnit! I watched Apollo 7 as a child. I want to go, or at least damned well know somebody's going!

. . .

Er . . . excuse me.

Anyway, for personal bookends, Apollo 7, the first launch I remember:




Edit:
Forgot to mention that the first words of "This is Dyna-Soar" are: "In the not too distant future . . ."

[caucasoididiot]

I think Mark Wade's blog must be in the bit bucket somewhere, but the STS entry on his Encyclopedia Astronautica site (which is well worth poking around on) covers some of the same ground:

www.astronautix.com/project/sts.htm


His contention is that for various reasons the Shuttle, while remarkable, actually gave NASA much less payback for investment than a more linear development of Apollo would have. He was also worried that comparably poor design decisions were being made for the Ares/Orion replacement systems.

Heh heh, maybe I come not to praise Shuttle but to bury it. I guess my point is that, while celebrating the Shuttle on its retirement, we should also be aware of its severe limitations and the reasons behind them, keeping them in mind should we decide to fund a follow-on.


The second (shortcoming) was that it (Shuttle) failed, by most definitions, to reduce the cost of putting payloads into orbit. The shuttle program inherited from Apollo huge fixed costs - the Manned Spaceflight Center in Houston, the cadres of government and contractor workers at the Kennedy Space Center, and so on. The result was that there is a fixed base cost of around $ 2.8 billion per year, just to keep all those people and facilities in place, even if you don’t conduct any flights at all (as occurred after the shuttle disaster). The marginal cost of each flight added to this base is under $ 100 million per year. Seen this way the shuttle is almost competitive expendable boosters - but doesn’t come anywhere near the reductions NASA promised when development started. But if you divide the usual number of flights per year by the total costs, you come up with a figure of $ 245 million per year, significantly more than a Titan 4 or Proton launch with the same payload.

If the shuttle failed as a space truck, it succeeded in keeping the US in the manned spaceflight business in a period of low public interest and political support. With the excuse of delivering payloads to orbit, NASA got to fly up to seven astronauts and run a host of supplementary experiments and payloads with each flight.

With construction of the international space station beginning, NASA finally looked forward to using the shuttle for its intended purpose. Due to the lower than planned flight rate, NASA’s contractors were confident they can keep the existing shuttles flying through 2030. The real test come when (as was inevitable) another shuttle was lost. NASA then decided to essentially to complete the station only enough to keep its international partners happy, then retire the shuttle by 2010. It was to be replaced by a modernized Apollo capsule, dubbed the Orion. The shuttle turned out to be a fifty-year detour to nowhere. By 2020 NASA hoped to have the sort of lunar base it would have had by 1980 if it had continued with Apollo rather than started the shuttle program.

[BJ]

Good stuff, I'd love to have been alive for the Apollo missions. They were basically science fiction come to life. For me (and I'm stealing from Charles Lindbergh here), Apollo 8 is still the pinnacle of human achievement, breaking earth's bonds for the first time and coming back safely. Every year when everyone around me is celebrating Christmas, all I can think about is those guys seeing an earthrise for the first time.

Also, that last line in the Astronautica quote about the moon base could be a metaphor for all our technological advancement. The Jetsons version of the future promised in the 50's never came to be. As I look around my apartment, with a few exceptions, everything is just a better version of what was available in the 50's. Even the super rich barely have access to futuristic devices. It all comes down to a recurring theme in this thread, it costs too much money and no one can turn a quick profit from it.

[caucasoididiot]

Yes, I love technological prediction from that era. I suspect part of the issue was that the war had opened up a lot of new technologies, ones in which the difficult initial work had been done and where real spurts of development were easy. That led to the view that technical progress was geometric and ever accelerating (I recollect a G. Harry Stine article from around that time that graphed the speed of manned vehicles and predicted breaking the light barrier before 2000 AD). But with a few decades behind us things look a lot more S-curved: that mid-term runup of performance starts to hit fundamental limitations of the technology and advancement again becomes slow and incremental.

By the way, ever seen Disney's presentation of Ernst Stuhliger's '50s nuclear electric Mars mission proposals? Dang, but these are cool! I don't think sci fi ever topped 'em.

[BJ]

Nice artwork. It's easy to forget that Disney used to be the animation studio. I'm not exactly sure what they do now.

[CBG]

My biggest Shuttle memories have to do with Columbia, and, of course, Challenger.

I was fortunate enough to be stationed at Edwards AFB when Columbia touched-down for the first time. I was a Security Police Augmentee (basically a parking attendant) on the dry lake bed. The crowd was AMAZING. No one could know what was gonna happen, and the speculation of "melted astronauts" was rampant. Then we heard the - now familiar - double-sonic-boom. Everyone looked to the skies, we couldn't see anything. Suddenly hands started pointing up in the air. A tiny silver speck was slowly lofting down from on high. Amazing. Once the shuttle was down, my job really started, 'cuz this dry lake bed full o' people, suddenly wanted to leave. Slow stadium-like egress, lotsa cute girls, people high on AMERICA!, and lots of free beer. We partied all night.

I'll never forget where I was when I heard about Challenger...I was working at an animal hospital in the San Fernando Valley. We were prepping a dog for spaying, and the hospital secretary came into the room and asked if we'd heard about Challenger. What are you talking about? Then one of the assistants, who'd apparently had been watching it in back, blurted out "It blew'd up!" Wha?!? You didn't think this relative to relate, Al? We all went running to the x-ray room where a portable TV was kept. Once we got it on, they were just starting to replay the incident. As soon as that thing blew up, it was pretty obvious there were no survivors. It shook me to the core. I was so sad, and yet so angry at the media speculations. They knew NOTHING, yet continued to report false rumors and "theories" as facts.

[Hellcat]

I was a senior in high school when the Challenger disaster happened. We were taking our midterm exams at the time, and on this particular day I didn't have a test, so I had the day off. My mom and I made tentative plans to go shopping. It was a gray kind of day, threatening either rain or snow, and we weren't sure if the weather would interfere with our plans. I turned on the radio to get a forecast, and all of the news was about Challenger. It was just general talk, probably background stuff, with no mention of anything that had happened. But there was a somber kind of tone to their reporting, and I realized that something had happened. I went to the TV, and there was the full story. It was shocking, and heartbreaking.

Strangely enough, years later when the Columbia disaster happened, it was the same kind of day: cold, gray and threatening snow.

[mrsphyllistorgo]

My most vivid memory of the shuttles was when Columbia blew up and someone told me at work. My first reaction was "no, no, that already happened a long time ago." Like since Challenger was destroyed we had "earned" a Get Out Of Tragedy Free Card, or something.

That second explosion really underlined how deeply, deeply dangerous space work is, and how utterly vulnerable and literally out of their element humans are in undertaking space exploration. I can see why investors are leaning far more towards robotics since they are so much cheaper/easier to launch, without all that pesky air/food/medical equipment.

But as much as robotics is a vital part of exploring the universe, there's really nothing like going out there, in person, and seeing what humans can do and achieve. Just about the only time these days that I feel the human race isn't a completely worthless mistake is watching footage of space missions, thinking "Holy God, look what we can figure out and build and make real!" as the Viking and Voyager ships slingshot into the deepest parts of the galaxy, Spirit and Opportunity range about on Mars, and the Hubble scans back to the dawn of time.