Beam Me Out of This Death Trap, Scotty (1980)

http://www.iasa-intl.com/folders/shuttle/GoodbyeColumbia.html

by juliusdavies • 3 years ago

83 57 3 years ago

throwanem• 3 years ago

Really remarkable to see the failure modes that caused both the Challenger and Columbia disasters enumerated here, respectively six and twenty-three years ahead of time.

kolinko• 3 years ago

True, on the other hand author seems just negative about everything - he expects just single digit satellite launches a year needed, or expects that a permament space station won’t ever happen

rob743• 3 years ago

Be that as it may, he was basically right about one thing: that the Shuttle was a technological dead end that cost a lot of money, wasted a lot of time and, most importantly, killed 14 people.

kragen3• 3 years ago

to be fair, if https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38485847 is correct, the shuttle did in fact manage only single-digit satellite launches per year

theodorejb• 3 years ago

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.

I didn't realize this was the reason for the thermal insulation. It's ironic how in the end the insulation popped off and crashed into the tiles during launch, causing the very disaster it was intended to prevent.

Dylan16807• 3 years ago

Did it do more damage than the raw ice that would have been there instead?

If not, then "caused" isn't the right word, it's just an incomplete mitigation and not ironic.

rob743• 3 years ago

It did enough damage to cause the heat shield to fail on reentry, so "caused" is warranted. Even if the foam had a purpose, it would have been a reasonable requirement to make sure that it doesn't turn into a risk itself...

resolutebat• 3 years ago

The space station sparked a lot of interest, but it too was overwhelmingly expensive. Its components would be so heavy, NASA's entire budget would be required to pay for the launch rockets--to say nothing, as space proponents are wont to do, of building or servicing it.

Which is is fact pretty much exactly what happened with NASA and the ISS.

There is something noteworthy a rocket can do that the shuttle cannot. A rocket can be permitted to fail. What if a billion dollar spaceship wipes out on a "routine" mission "commuting" to space with some puny little satellite? Cooper fears it might drive a stake through the heart of the manned space program.

Nailed this one too.

But to require six shuttle launches a year, there would have to be 18 satellites. "Barring some extraordinary breakthrough in technology," says an informed communications industry source, "that's inconceivable."

This prediction, though, didn't work out so well. (SpaceX alone has more than 5,500 satellites, and is launching thousands yearly.)

ben_w4• 3 years ago

In fairness, there were extraordinary breakthroughs in technology between when the article was written and when SpaceX started constellation building.

PaulHoule• 3 years ago

... like a reusable rocket that's affordable

TMWNN2• 3 years ago

> But to require six shuttle launches a year, there would have to be 18 satellites. "Barring some extraordinary breakthrough in technology," says an informed communications industry source, "that's inconceivable."
This prediction, though, didn't work out so well. (SpaceX alone has more than 5,500 satellites, and is launching thousands yearly.)

Easterbrook was writing specifically about the shuttle. As he explains in the rest of the article, the financials of the shuttle as designed just didn't work without a very high launch cadence. Had each shuttle been capable of landing on its own back at the launch site and be reused 18 times and counting over three years as SpaceX has done with Falcon 9, Easterbrook's conclusions would have been different.

Overall, the article is flabbergastingly predictive of every single thing that happened to the shuttle program over its 30-year operational history. In addition to what you mentioned, Easterbrook also predicted

* The lack of survivability of the crew if an SRB failed (Challenger)

* The fragility of the heat-shield tiles (Columbia, and STS-27)

* The danger to the entire US space program—military, commercial, scientific—if the shuttle, intended to be the sole national launch system, was grounded

contrarian1234• 3 years ago

Genuinely curious

Other than a bit more insight on the impacts on human healthy from long term spaceflight.. What are the major scientific insights or developments made thanks to the ISS?

With Apollo there are quite a few, but with the ISS I can't think of anything

simongray• 3 years ago

This was recently in the Danish news since it was done by a Danish astronaut on the ISS: https://www.esa.int/Science_Exploration/Human_and_Robotic_Ex...

jvanderbot2• 3 years ago

I understand why people might feel this way. Esp, if you think of the ISS as "a bunch of tired astronauts in a floating lab box"

But the ISS should be considered a manned instrument bus. Consider OCO-3, a gimballed observer on the exterior of the ISS. It has revolutionized our understanding of global carbon cycles, and local carbon sink/sources.

There are numerous such missions that benefit from a common, well supported platform to operate from.

The next one should be robotic though.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orbiting_Carbon_Observatory_...

a2800276• 3 years ago

The only thing more ridiculous than another manned visit to the moon is the colonization of mars (especially one intended to "save" humanity). Yet both are being planned. Idiots are just too horny for human space exploration after decades of Star Trek/War consumption.

southernplaces73• 3 years ago

I'd hardly call these innovators, adventurers, (also in some cases profiteers) and dreamers idiots. They may be making all kinds of mistaken assumptions and "overindulging" in optimism, but they're not stupid. They just dream of bigger things and wider horizons with what's at least feasibly reachable, even if right now, some of us, particularly those with a scarcity of imagination, can't conceive the same without dismissing them as stupid.

What a miserly way to look at the world when you yourself live in it benefiting from centuries of similarly flexible-minded people working towards similarly extreme ideas for their time.

There's nothing innately wrong with the idea of colonizing these worlds. It's just a hard thing to do for the time being, like so much else was that's now not only accepted but so routine as to be a fundamental part of daily civilization.

OfSanguineFire• 3 years ago

There's nothing innately wrong with the idea of colonizing these worlds.

That is a subject of disagreement. Kim Stanley Robinson depicted a coming clash between proponents of Mars colonization and keep-it-untouched environmentalists in his Mars trilogy. (And from his later novel Aurora, one wonders if KSR has actually gone over to the anti-human-expansion side.) Thirty years ago, that might have seemed fanciful, but not today when environmentalism has made wider inroads, especially among younger generations. It is easy to find rhetoric now about the future of humanity where the writer talks about the need for degrowth, humanity as a virus, etc.

TheOtherHobbes2• 3 years ago

It's not just far harder than any previous wave of colonisation. The rewards aren't obvious.

A radio telescope on the far side of the Moon would be nice. But there are no slaves or spices, and no gold or other metals at prices that make the economics even remotely sane.

We'd be going for the sake of going - a good enough reason mythologically, but a very tough sell economically.

IMO we'd be better off clawing back the physics PhDs who work in finance and applying them to a blue sky search for new physics. With current tech there's a serious risk of a(nother) Space Winter when the initial wave either fails or doesn't generate any rewards.

ben_w4• 3 years ago

If Columbus hadn't been a wilful idiot by taking the smallest possible calculation for the diameter of the Earth and the largest available guess for how wide Asia was, he (like everyone else of his era) would have known his galleon couldn't make a trip long enough to sail west to India, and wouldn't have accidentally discovered the Americas in process of making this mistake.

I think Mars is a bad choice for a first attempt at a permanent village in space, let alone colony, because things will go wrong and the distance is so large help from earth can't[0] arrive in less than several months. Moon? Few days. Could fix "our food cargo storage exploded/was infected with deadly mould and now we don't have any" if it's on the moon, everyone dies if that happens on Mars.

Mars does have one advantage for saving the earth, though: even if we never actually go, developing the tech to make a self-sustaining colony on Mars necessary solves the biggest environmental challenges on earth.

[0] with current rockets; in principle faster ones can be made, but nuclear propulsion is frowned on for various reasons depending on exactly which one is under discussion

Kim_Bruning4• 3 years ago

I think Amerigo Vespucci did a better job of it, but somehow he's less famous. (despite -rightly- having two continents named after him)

barrysteve3• 3 years ago

The world is completely surveilled and you're surprised people want to leave?

I can't get off this authoritarian nightmare rock soon enough.

bluescrn• 3 years ago

There’s not likely to be much freedom to be had in space or on Mars, in a situation where life support systems are fragile and need much more protection from careless/reckless individuals.

bravetraveler2• 3 years ago

Whoever establishes another planet (or space) is likely to be rather authoritarian...

Think "company town" but so, so much worse.

The desolate environment, required infrastructure, and costs make me see exploitation in that future... not freedom.

This nightmare rock has abundance and greed. We've struggled with "easy mode"!

Space doesn't exactly improve that; hellish rocks with nothing but our greed. Whoever delivers has the authority!

Even with a more optimistic take, I don't like it.

Posit that we have a nice overlord. They provide and expect nothing back.

Given the environment, they'll determine that surveillance is paramount to safety of The Dome.

We can't have someone spacing everybody.

Kim_Bruning4• 3 years ago

Do you live in the United States of America? Australia? Founded by those idiots who want to explore.

Alternately: UK? Spain? Portugal? Netherlands? Got rich on above said idiots.

Maybe you live in the western USA?

Maybe you have Polynesian Ancestry? Or Scandinavian?

Have you ever taken a trans-atlantic flight? Ordered anything from overseas? Made a long-distance phone call? Used GPS?

You know what, let's have a few idiots who go exploring in every generation.

TheOtherHobbes2• 3 years ago

Don't forget to explain - in detail - how to build a stable, self-sustaining off-world ecosystem with adequate food, air, water, and shelter out of rocks, energy, and expensive and very irregular imports.

You might also want to think about how to keep critical machinery running on the end of a six month - best case - supply chain.

"Take three of everything" might work practically, but will raise some eyebrows economically.

Those are the hard problems. Compared to them, getting there is trivially easy.

dash22• 3 years ago

I think of NASA vs SpaceX as the equivalent of East vs West Germany: a clear demonstration that private companies work better than state bureaucracies.

ben_w4• 3 years ago

There are plenty of inept private bureaucracies. Free market doesn't always clear them out, cash cows can support a lot of waste.

The orbiters were built by Rockwell International, the external fuel tanks by Martin Marietta/Lockheed Martin, the SRBs by Thiokol/ATK United Space Boosters Inc./Pratt & Whitney.

pavlov• 3 years ago

Why even look as far as space, you can see this principle producing tremendous value to millions of ordinary people in the brilliant effectiveness of America’s private healthcare industry.

dash22• 3 years ago

Come over and enjoy the delights of the NHS. How's your dentistry? We no longer have any.

Eliezer• 3 years ago

How incredible it seems today that this story could ever have been written by a mainstream reporter. It tells the story of a technology without any attempt at "human color" or "character portraits" to "interest the public". It is written for an adult readership that seems scarcely conceivable today. A lost artifact of lost social technology that could never be reproduced within the modern West.

kragen3• 3 years ago

i was marveling at that too, and at the reporter who understood the subject matter, which is not unrelated. yesterday i had the displeasure of reading an article that confused risc with risc-v

Reason0772• 3 years ago

From the article:

”You've probably heard, for instance, that the space shuttle will retrieve damaged satellites and return them to earth for repair. Not so. It can't. Simply and flatly, can't.”

Interesting article, but the Washington Monthly’s sources were wrong here. The space shuttles could, and did, retrieve satellites from orbit and return them to earth several times during their operating life:

STS-41-C (launch) / STS-32R (retrieve): LDEF

STS-41-B (launch) / STS-51-A (retrieve): Palapa B-2 and Westar 6

STS-46 (launch) / STS-57 (retrieve): EURECA

STS-72 (retrieve): Space Flyer Unit (SFU)

uberuberuber2• 3 years ago

Was this a more economical approach than launching those missions on an expendable rocket, and just building brand new satellites?

The shuttle program launched 135 missions at a cost of $209 billion (2010 dollars).

dirtyhippiefree2• 3 years ago

Vision is only 20/20 in hindsight.

Reason0772• 3 years ago

"Was this a more economical approach than launching those missions on an expendable rocket, and just building brand new satellites?"

Assuming you already have a Space Shuttle, then the answer was apparantely yes. Lloyd's of London, as insurers, paid NASA for the recovery of Westar 6 and Palapa B2. The cost of the recovery was said to be $10m, vs. the $180m insurance value of the satellites (both in 1980s dollars). [1]

I suppose many of today's satellites are relatively cheap and considered more expendable, but back in the 1980s these things were very valuable pieces of kit.

Besides, most of the retrieval missions performed by the Space Shuttles were not "failed" satellites but rather long-life science platforms that were designed to spend time in space and then be returned to earth for analysis. Now days, many of those sorts of missions can be performed on the ISS, but back then the shuttle was the only option.

[1] https://www.lloyds.com/about-lloyds/our-market/what-we-insur...

trimbo• 3 years ago

The part you did not quote is that, at the time the Shuttle was being designed, 2/3 of satellites launched were in geosync orbit. Looking them up now, Palapa B-2 and Westar 6 were both intended to be in GEO but failed, and were retrieved in LEO.

uberuberuber2• 3 years ago

Highly recommend this irreverent podcast by 2 engineers and former NASA contractors. They get out above their skies on some topics but the shuttle content is fun.

Episode 1: Why do Blake and Craig think the Space Shuttle was stupid? https://youtu.be/KRlD8SdFmaE

Episode 18: Challenger https://youtu.be/H98IGl7pSfQ

amacbride• 3 years ago

"Would the public stand to lose a quarter of the fleet in a single day? Would it fork over another billion dollars to build a replacement? Would it stand for spending millions to train astronauts to be truck drivers, only to lose truck and drivers both?"

Amazingly prescient article, but I don't think the author expected the answers to these heartbreaking questions to be "yes."

Twelve-year-old me stayed up all night to watch Columbia launch in '81, and I watched the last flight of Atlantis in 2011; I still can't watch the Challenger footage to this day.

JohnCClarke• 3 years ago

I worry that the business case for StarShip is similarly optimistic.

Launching once per week, a single StarShip will carry 10,000 tons to orbit. Fully 50% of all mass launched to orbit since Sputnik 1. Given the hopes for even more frequent launches with a fleet of StarShips makes me wonder who is going to pay for it all and why?

I do understand it's supposed to be much cheaper. But someone still has to pay. And that person still has to be sure that SpaceX - as a single, critical, supplier - won't eat their business model any time SpaceX chooses.

So I do hope there's a secret cunning plan I'm not aware of.

kragen3• 3 years ago

this seems like the good kind of problem to have? not the kind of problem the shuttle had

Beam Me Out of This Death Trap, Scotty (1980)

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