STS-135 Live: The Last Shuttle Mission

http://www.nasa.gov/externalflash/135_splash/index.html

by ColinWright • 15 years ago

28 19 15 years ago

nasa.gov

ColinWright3• 15 years ago

15 minutes to go as I type this.

ColinWright3• 15 years ago

1 minute to touchdown

ColinWright3• 15 years ago

Down.

That's all folks.

ck2• 15 years ago

Total lifetime cost of shuttle program under NASA $200 Billion (a bargain).

Total cost of Iraq War (2nd one) $750 Billion (published, unofficially twice that)

Cost of care and benefits for injured/killed troops through 2050 $1 Trillion.

We could have had a dozen James Wright telescopes and a round-trip or two to Mars.

drgath3• 15 years ago

The Iraq War could balloon to even 3 times that, $2.4 trillion according to a congressional report. All the money we're spending for war? It's all borrowed, which means interest.

pvsnp• 15 years ago

You mean $2.4 Trillion?

marshray• 15 years ago

Saw it as a bright dot and heard the sonic boom as it flew over.

InclinedPlane3• 15 years ago

It bears repeating that the Shuttle was not a good system, it should have been ended long ago. Yes it's inspiring, I've certainly been inspired by it, and yes it's better than nothing, but it's worse than almost all of the reasonable alternatives, by a lot. It did not live up to any of the promises that were made to get it built, in most cases it missed them by a factor of 10 or more. For the few unique capabilities the Shuttle did have (large cross-range flight on landing, return of payloads from orbit, satellite repair) it paid a heavy price in the cost, complexity, and safety of every single launch and yet those capabilities were very rarely used, if at all. Worse yet, the Shuttle was in many ways less flexible and more limited than previous vehicles.

On the whole the decision to build the Shuttle resulted in about 3 lost decades for manned spaceflight in the US. Decades and billions of dollars spent doing busy work and treading water in low Earth orbit. And slowly but surely the organization which put men on the Moon morphed into a typical bureaucratic mire with the most important goal to merely funnel high-paying government aerospace contracts to key congressional districts. When people look back at this era of manned spaceflight they will be occasionally awed by the accomplishments of the Shuttle but more they will wonder how we managed to waste so much time and effort on such a limited and flawed program.

The Shuttle system has had its fair share of victories, but it's past time for it to rest in peace.

drgath3• 15 years ago

I almost entirely agree with you. The only point of contention I have is we couldn't realistically end a low-earth orbit program without something else in place. The private sector had been interested in it for years, but never did anything about it, until recently. I'm not sure why it finally happened. Computer technology? Advancements in aerospace engineering? The web exploding and creating billionaires who now view space as their next personal challenge (see: Musk, Bezos)? A combination of all 3 is most likely.

Now that the private sector is taking over the mundane LEO missions (in comparison to what is possible), it's time for NASA to get back to doing what it was originally created for, adventure.

hartror• 15 years ago

The stuff I have read points to the X-Prize as the catalyst, though you are likely right in that there was a combination of factors that allowed these enterprises off the ground.

Certainly a load of geeks flushed with cash didn't hurt at all.

InclinedPlane3• 15 years ago

If you weren't following the development of "new space" then SpaceX's achievements would seem to come out of nowhere for seemingly no reason, but that's not the case, there was a lot of buildup.

The main reason for "why now" is the end of the Cold War. During the Cold War there were geopolitical military implications to building launch vehicles, and there was a huge brain drain (or brain sink if you like) of aerospace talent into military projects.

In the 1990s there was a very substantial boom in "new space" companies (orbital launch startups). A lot of that growth was fueled by the growing venture capital from the dot-com boom, however in many ways this was a very flawed boom that did more to hurt new space than help it. For one, much of it was based on a then emerging launch market for low-orbit comsat constellations such as Iridium, Globalstar, and Teledesic (which, of course, were in turn vastly fueled by the tech boom).

More importantly though the heavy influence of VC firms in providing investment funding for many new space companies twisted the industry in weird ways. The way VC works in tech based startups is often to seek out highly disruptive companies that are both high risk but that have a high chance of an enormous return if they succeed. This doesn't work as well with companies founded on physical engineering and it didn't help much for launch vehicle development. A lot of the early new space companies were founded on highly innovative and unconventional launch vehicle designs (hybrid jet/rocket planes, rocket helicopters, RLV SSTOs, etc.) which were at best several generations ahead of the current state of the art (and at worst highly impractical or unworkable). When the dot-com bubble burst the comsat constellation companies did as well, bringing down many new space startups with them.

However, out of those ashes a new generation of launch startups grew. These new startups didn't have the luxury of fantastical potential revenue streams from a comsat boom, they had to build their businesses on hard-nosed accounting and either more proven or more likely revenue sources such as traditional launch business (still a very big market) or space tourism. This spurred companies to be more practical in their engineering choices, to use iterative development practices, and to spend more of their efforts in competing with traditional launch providers. In combination with the X-Prize (which had been created in 1996, in the midst of the first generation of the new space boom) this helped create the current crop of space startups we know and love today. Companies like SpaceX who built a very traditional expendable rocket but did so using a competitive spirit in terms of expense and complexity not seen with most of the launch vehicles built via multi-billion dollar cost-plus government contracts. Companies like XCOR and Virgin Galactic/Scaled who are paving the way in sub-orbital space tourism with very elegant and simplified reusable rocket ships designed for simplicity and robustness of operations. Companies like Blue Origin who took up an enormously promising reusable launch vehicle design that the government abandoned (Delta Clipper), or Bigelow who took up an enormously promising space station design also abandoned by the government (TransHab). Companies like Masten and Armadillo showing that you don't have to be a billion dollar aerospace megacorp to do good work or blaze new trails in rocketry.

Despite a late and rocky start, the startup/barnstormer phase of manned and unmanned rocketry has finally begun in earnest. This phase propelled the design of the airplane from experimental and impractical craft like the Wright flyer to advance within 2 decades to the industrial, commercial, and military workhorses made of metal, able to carry a dozen passengers, and fly across or between continents that were built by the dozens or hundreds in the 1910s and '20s. And then a decade after that to craft like the DC-3 and the Spitfire. Launch vehicle development may not advance at quite that pace but it is nevertheless an enormously exciting time filled with a great deal of promise for anyone interested in spaceflight.

e03179• 15 years ago

Hrmm. Sounds like the misguided Shuttle program is like a lot of popular web technologies and protocols (better alternatives out there, people doing busy work for years on end, concern of security, etc.).

InclinedPlane3• 15 years ago

The Shuttle is a fairly classic example of "2nd system syndrome". It was designed to replace every single launch vehicle currently in existence and to become the backbone of manned spaceflight, cargo launches, and military spaceflight. Large payloads were to be assembled in orbit in pieces (a la ISS). Comsats and suchlike were to be launched in the cargo bay far cheaper than any expendable rocket could manage. Military missions were to be conducted with very little prep-time from Vandenberg AFB with polar missions that would fly over Western Russia (Moscow, Leningrad, etc.) and then return in one orbit back to the launch site. Since the Earth would have rotated under the Shuttle's orbit this would require an immense cross-range flight capability (about a thousand miles), this requirement forced the orbiters to have exceptionally large wings and thus a stronger airframe to support them and a more extensive re-entry shielding, both of which significantly increased the dry weight of the vehicle as well as the total area of extremely vulnerable thermal protection systems (such as the much larger wing leading edge carbon-carbon shielding, which led to the disintegration of Columbia on re-entry when it was damaged by iced foam during takeoff). That cross-range flight capability was never used in practice as polar military missions from Vandenberg never came about, though the requirement imposed a heavy burden on the Shuttle's capabilities and costs.

The Shuttle was also designed to haul an airlock, rendezvous equipment, and a robotic arm, even though such capabilities are not necessary for every mission, though again the requirements affect the capabilities and cost of every mission. On paper each orbiter was to have flow dozens of times a year, this was a key element of lowering launch costs. In practice the orbiters were not truly reusable and were more refurbishable, the main engines were replaced on each flight, all of the consumables were flushed, the cargo bay liner was removed and replaced, the tile-based thermal shield had to be extensively inspected, etc. in a months long process that steeply limited the flight rate of the orbiters and vastly increased launch costs (ultimately making the Shuttle one of the most expensive launch vehicles of all time).

Overall the Shuttles tried to satisfy too many mission requirements and ultimately did not achieve any of them well. And in the process a hugely compromised system which was vastly more expensive and vastly less capable than previous systems was built.

purephase• 15 years ago

Any reason why they let it sit on the runway unattended for so long? I would imagine a flurry of vehicles descended on them immediately upon touchdown.

It seems lonely just sitting out there like that.

ErrantX2• 15 years ago

The crew are doing final checks and making it "safe" - and the ground grew do remote external checks for leaks etc. (there are a few toxic bits and pieces they don't want to walk into if they are leaking :)).

lutorm2• 15 years ago

I imagine it's also quite hot...

STS-135 Live: The Last Shuttle Mission

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