So this is a weird one. I get Jonathan's Space Report and The Space Review. These guys generally hate the fuck out of the Space Shuttle, as most people educated into the ways of space exploration tend to. Which reminded me of an article published in 1980 about how much the Space Shuttle sucks... a full year before the Space Shuttle ever flew (it got re-run shortly after the Columbia broke up during re-entry).
I've been searching for this article for going on 10 years now. It has been impossibly hard to find. Yet somehow this morning I managed to hit the right search string. So I'm putting it here, without tags, primarily because I never learned how to use Pinterest, Tumblr or Stumbleupon and browser bookmarks are lame.
Edit from THE FYOOOCHUR: new URL is here.
My God, the prescience. I had to look it up: 4.9 flights per year. ... While Columbia was still in orbit, some engineers suspected damage, but NASA managers limited the investigation, under the rationale that the Columbia crew could not have fixed the problem. And it was this insulation that fell off, broke tiles, and killed Columbia. Thanks for this.What was the basis of Mathematica's cost projections? The analysts assumed that the shuttle fleet would stage at least 50 flights a year. With each vehicle having a 10-year life, that meant at least 500 flights over a 10-to-12-year period. (At one point in 1976, NASA was projecting 75 flights a year. The number has been dropping steadily since, and now stands at "around 40 to 50 flights a year," Lee says.) As with any volume merchandising, the more flights there are, the lower the cost of each individual flight. So it was important to project lots of flights. These are "safe life" numbers.
Some suspect the tile mounting is the least of Columbia's difficulties. "I don't think anybody appreciates the depths of the problems," Kapryan says. The tiles are the most important system NASA has ever designed as "safe life." That means there is no back-up for them. If they fail, the shuttle burns on reentry. If enough fall off, the shuttle may become unstable during landing, and thus un-pilotable. The worry runs deep enough that NASA investigated installing a crane assembly in Columbia so the crew could inspect and repair damaged tiles in space.
The external fuel tank, for instance, is full of oxygen and hydrogen cooled to -400°F. to make the gases flow as liquids. Ice will form on the tank. When Columbia's tiles started popping off in a stiff breeze, it occurred to engineers that ice chunks from the tank would crash into the tiles during the sonic chaos of launch: Goodbye, Columbia. So insulation was added to the tank. But while thermal cladding solves the ice problem, it adds weight.
A similar situation happened with the Challenger as well. There was a couple engineers who were worried about the O rings that failed BEFORE they actually failed and killed the Challenger crew.
Another tidbit I've never been able to find again is attribution for this quote, which Frontline pinned on Al Gore, during NASA budget discussions when he was a senator: "If we sent the Shuttle into space with a payload bay full of feathers and had it return with a payload bay full of gold, the Shuttle would only lose eighty million dollars per flight."I had to look it up: 4.9 flights per year.
thenewgreen has long been trying to sell us on building an archive function, where you can save posts under custom categories, and possibly share these archives with others. Any thoughts?Yet somehow this morning I managed to hit the right search string. So I'm putting it here, without tags, primarily because I never learned how to use Pinterest, Tumblr or Stumbleupon and browser bookmarks are lame.
That's incredible. I have a ton of saved links and comments on reddit, but it's a mess. It's all chronological, and attempting to find anything would be impossible. Being able to file and categorize everything I have would be great. Possibly even have a way to export it to my computer, or a dropbox. I could automatically save things to my profile, articles and photos, and then open them on a device without connection later on, like an offline hubski, so if I'm traveling I can cache the first two or three pages of articles or comment threads, open the folder on my devices and download it, have content anywhere. A more planned out and complete version of what Richard Stallman does with every webpage, but with some network activity. Rambling, my apologies, but maybe something can be done.
That's a great idea. People like to collect, archive and tend their gardens of information. I know it's something I would use.