Next shuttle launch
 

They are supposed to launch tomorrow afternoon for the ISS.

They said that they will watch the launch, and if any foam falls off and breaks the shuttle, the astronauts will be able to just wait at the ISS for another shuttle to come up and get them.

But wait a minute. What if foam falls off of that one? Then they have another set of astronauts at the ISS.

And then they have to send up a third one! And what if the foam falls off of that one?

That's why I strongly feel that, along with the crew, they should send up enough raw materials to build additional wings onto the ISS.

Or at least, materials to attach the new arriving shuttles, and turn them into various private residences. They'll have to park somewhere anyway.

Poor NASA. I used to have so much respect for them. Now they are the butt of jokes.

My brother used to work for them. Helped design the ISS. When he quit in disgust after working there a year and a half, I thought he was nuts. NASA had always been his dream job, and he went to school for a long time so he could work there. But he couldn't deal with the bureaucracy.

Now he teaches science to high school kids and gets them really excited about it.

Anything we lift, that can be used up there, should be used up there if we're not riding it home. Fortunately, NASA is using tax dollars so they don't have to consider resources.

If they get stranded on the ISS, NASA can just pick them up on the way back from Mars. ;)

Maybe they can ride a kite tube down...

has been postponed, due to weather. safe than sorry, 'suppose.

Lightning strikes the cape yesterday. :eek6:

The central weather issue was the fact that there were thunderstorm cells too close to the landing strip at KSC...which would be used in the case of a return-to-launch-site (RTLS) or abort-once-around (AOA) launch abort.

I've seen IMAX video of what a shuttle pilot sees on final to the KSC runway. No way I'd want to try that in a thunderstorm.

In other STS news, we're currently go for a July 4 launch, having decided that the foam crack discovered during/after yesterday's safing wasn't big enough to be a worry.

I really have to wonder would we be having all these ET foam problem if they hadn't stopped painting the ET to save weight. A nice thick coat of latex...

Holy shit, when they say foam I didnt realize they meant, like, styrofoam

Polyurthane foam, sprayed on. Just like a picnic cooler, and for the very same reason: the ET is filled with liquid H2 and liquid O2, and the slower it boils off the less they have to top it prelaunch. There is some additional insulation that is pre-molded.

But yes...the piece of foam that killed Columbia was essentially styrofoam. That's why it was hard at first to get anybody to beleve it could put a hole in the leading edge of the wing. But then they tested the theory...

Lemme see...

I'm re-entering the atmosphere at 18,000 MPH.
The craft is pretty much on fire.
The styrofoam (STYROFOAM?!?) is cracked.
And it is burning off.
If your scientist ass is so certain that it's safe, then suit up Skippy! You is going on a trip.
To quote the great Richard Pryor -
"I don't want to be no motherfucking accident!"

Styrofuckingfoam? It can't hold coffee without deforming, and this is what we coat our space vehicles with?
Coat them with the plastic you cover CDs & DVDs with. Nothing gets thru that shit.

No, no, no...

The TPS (thermal protection system) on the *Orbiter* is ceramic tiles over most of the surface. The places where tiles won't work--like the leading edge of the wings-- are made from reinforced carbon-carbon composite. Fairly strong, if somewhat brittle. Both the tiles and the RCC are insanely heat-resistant.

The external tank (which doesn't fly to orbit and is not reused; it's a one-shot per flight) is coated with foam insulation just to keep the cryogenic liquid fuels from boiling away too fast. The issue is that the chuncks of foam sometimes crack off from being very cold, or having liquid hydrogen or liquid oxy boil off into gas between the foam and the tank.

This didn't used to be viewed as a big deal...after all, it's approximately the density of a Nerf ball.

But imagine getting hit by a Nerf ball moving at 500 mph.

Columbia was lost because a couple-pound chunk of foam came off the ET at the worst possible time during ascent...while still in the atmosphere moving supersonically. By the time the foam reached the leading edge it had been slowed by air friction (relative to the Orbiter) to a speed 500 mph less than the Orbiter. It smacked into the RCC leading edge of the wing and made a substantial (maybe 20 inches across) hole.

During reentry, hot air at the leading edge, instead of flowing over the wing, flowed into the hole and was trapped *inside* the Orbiter left wing...which is made mostly of aluminum.

It melted.

Got the picture now?

Crap -- too cloudy here, today, to see it from this side. HDNet is carrying live coverage and it looks like a 'go' so far, though.

I won't brave the crowds, anymore, to rush across just to see a scrub. The number of people headed into the Titusville area was so heavy on the previous weekend attempts that they actually put the East-West toll roads into contraflow and people still ended up sitting in slow rolling traffic for hours. (Having the race at Daytona on Saturday around the same time didn't help matters, either.)

I wish I could be there -- shuttle launches are beautiful and powerful enough to rank as emotional events. The evening/early morning/night launches are really missed! It was like an artificial sunrise over the coast.

http://static.flickr.com/17/22209475_a88afcdcc3.jpg

I shot this image of Columbia's second to last mission from Spaceview Park. This is about as close as you can get, anymore, thanks to heavy security measures.

Not as impressive a sight from Tampa, but there's Discovery lifting off just minutes ago. What a way to kick off the 4th!

http://static.flickr.com/45/181768048_1123004d79.jpg

Bye bye. :mg:

Ok, I'm with ya so far...

Oww. OwwOwwFuckingOww.

Now I understood the physics of the disaster, but at least now it's a lot clearer. Thanks.

that or I can go over to the Johnson Space Center and borrow a space suit and then go to the airport and hook up a nitrous oxide bottle up to a cessna 172 and pick'em up! :D

Well, at least you can see it at all and take a pic. I had to settle for the TV.

Congrats to NASA and especially the shuttle crew for having the cajones to get humans back into space.

They had no choice. Appreciate how close the entire shuttle and ISS is to total collapse and disintegration. Appreciate how many other nations would have spent $bilions that would never get used. Every shuttle launch from here on out is a crap shoot where snake eyes is the complete and utter disaster for both ISS and America's only manned program. Appreciate how close to the edge NASA has come, in part, because almost all their eggs are in only one basket.

Kitsune, thanks for the magnificent picture. Majestic, awesome.

So, are you suggesting we abandon it, should never have started it, or should have had an alternate vehicle by now?

The ISS and NASA are now paying the price for successive administrations who were wishy-washy about the space program in general. Unmanned exploration is delivering great dividends, but shortsightedness has kept our manned program from moving forward.

In retrospect, the money spent on ISS might have been better targeted at more specific goals, but a permanent manned presence in space is, in itself, nothing to be sneezed at. It is sort of hard for us to know how what we learn now might be applied in the future. Failure to think of the future is one of the greatest shortcomings of Mankind, IMHO.

These were posted on Wunderground by a guy in Florida but he said they were taken by Gene Blevins/LA Daily news? :)

And a big un. :D

I am a child of the Sixties. Most of my hopes and dreams involved the space program. These kinds of pictures still excite me.

Yeah. I'm that easy.

Me too Wolf, and I'm not a 60s child. I am however a big Trekkie (in a conversation, me and a friend agreed my trekkieness was the size of the Q-Barrier, aka infinite...) and truly believe every launch of a satellite or a shuttle or a whatever is a step into the future.

Every time I see a picture like this, I get all giddy inside.

Appreciate the major difference between management that saved three lives in Apollo 13 verses management that all but tried to kill shuttle astronauts. My first experience was standing on a runway in California when a P-3 airplane landed on that same runway and came to a stop. All I could see was the top of its tail; it stopped that far away. And there was at least one more mile of runway behind me.

So I went back to the blockhouse to ask engineers (who had nothing to do with shuttles) why that runway was so long. The brakes on the Space Shuttle did not work. The MBA solution was to make 10+ mile long runways throughout the world rather than fix the brakes. These engineers who had nothing to do with the Shuttle then proceded to tell me tens of problem with the Shuttle.

I specifically remember sitting on that airplane reviewing what I had been told and saying, "It could not be that bad". Then Challenger exploded. No, it was worse.

The problem with Shuttle are mostly traceable to management that does not understand how the work gets done AND uses the 'communist' principles taught in Harvard Business School. Communist? Yes. Engineers did not make decisions. In non-communist organisations, when the little guy finds a problem, he is then empowered to fix it. In communism, you don't have a problem until the top man says so (the difference between socialism and communism).

Challenger was directly traceable to a management that created not just those tens of problems I was told. The problems cited by the Roger's Commission were thousands - directly traceable to bean counter or communist type management (they are same).

Why was that runway so long? Why could engineers not fix brakes on the shuttle until they were listed in the 200 most critical problems to be fixed before shuttle could fly again? Why did those engineers who had nothing to do with the shuttle know of these problems? And most important, why did top management not know of or deny these problems? That is why Shuttle has had a marginal history. 85% of all problems are directly traceable to top management. That is why Shuttle has problem, is so expensive, and has failed to do what it was intended.

So why do we put all - every - egg in that basket? Same reason why a president thinks a man on Mars is called science.

Meanwhile, we don't need new shuttles. First we need strategic objectives that are not based in the greater glory of a political agenda. We need an agenda that is instead based upon the advancement of mankind and the promotion of science. Until we have that, then, well, why do you think the world leaders in space science launching and satellite launches are the French? Again, look at who(foolishly) defines America's strategic objectives in space exploration. Not science educated people.

A simple, one-line answer would have sufficed, tw.

Ah, yeah right. I forgot who I was talking to here.

The French are in it for the money. Let's review the list of French pure research accomplishments and *then* decide if we're comparing apples to apples.

Boeing is launching lots of satellites......with russian rockets.:blush:

Cool. So what will the financing be based on, then...voluntary contributions? Because that agenda won't get you any tax money.

Seems to me we're transitioning very slowly to privatized space untiliation. The next ten years will prove very interesting.

My kind of girl. :-) Wanna see my Earth Station?

Note changes made to NASA's objectives as defined by Congress. Study of earth science has been completely removed. The exploration of space has been replaced with 'colonization of space'. As a result, those wildly successful unmanned space programs (that consumed less than 10% of NASA's budget and did most of the science) are being trimmed back for things like the ISS, a moon base, and sending a man to Mars. All sound good politically - and currently have near zero science benefit.

Even the Martian Rovers that were so successful as to require refunding almost got eliminated.

Inasmuch as space colonization is the thing that will actually make money up there -- and money up there can fund all kinds of space science -- I'd say this time they have it right.

People doing hardhat stuff, people making rocket fuel, people mining iron asteroids for high-grade, and no environmental protection problems (others instead, like the cosmic-ray environment) because there's no biosphere up there, shortorder cooks learning how you flip a burger in zero G -- this is what actually puts people in space. Any science fiction fan could tell you that; guess it fell to this one this time.

Sure there are...you need lots of protection from the environment.

Yep. Eskimos do too. And similar protection goes for the Dakotas in January.