This is a difficult time.
And I don't recall that they were astronauts; the gunman worked there but wasn't a pilot. I think he was an electrician?

As for the incident with the badly-ended love triangle, well, stuff happens like that from time to time with anyone.

And do you think that NASA and Iraq are not connected? Well, technically they are not directly connected, but financially they are. The USA has a whole lot less money now, due to Iraq and the fact that it turned out that war is a rather expensive endeavour.

NASA primary relies on politicians for money, and had the luck of getting a president that is very hated. And as mature politicians are, when Bush gives a couple million to NASA from the trillion the USA gets yearly, another politician will do the exact opposite of what Bush did, and take away money from NASA.

And I think that the CEV may not technically hold as promised: I've read that it has fulfilled none of its promises, and it looks like it will become more expensive then planned. This may send some bad repercussions throughout the agency.

Freeman Dyson's review on NASA is interesting: http://www.npl.washington.edu/AV/altvw30.html

As a curious note, Bristol Spaceplanes is working on Skylon, a space-shuttle like vehicle that can deliver payload into space without pilots.
http://www.reactionengines.co.uk/skylon_overview.html

And yes, allot of testing is the right idea.

It's also curious how NASA seems to suddenly take such an humongous interest in safety, although how safe the Shuttle is interesting.
The first accident was due to heat shield damage. I'm not sure the whether it happened on the ground or in the air, but heat shield damage can happen to any spacecraft. The second, I'm not quite clear. Something about NASA using a cheap (93 cent) o-ring that caused a chain of events when it failed. Something that should have not happened, but can and thus will.
Beyond that, I recall that the Shuttle itself worked as it should have. The extra expenses were due to miscalculations on NASA's part (they overestimated the need for satellites).

Here is an interesting article about CEV: http://www.astronautix.com/craftfam/cev.htm

Personally, I think that NASA has been slapped around enough to understand that it needs a base vehicle, something that is simple, universal and can fall back when its experiments, such as space-plane ideas, fail.

What I hope, that once the program is succesful and in full-swing, NASA gets enough political support to try out more promising ides, such as the use of ion engines and perhaps nuclear-powered spacecrafts.

I think the CEV is a giant step backwards.  Basically we could have done all of this back in the 70s with Apollo and Saturn.  The Shuttle was largely a ruse to keep manned space alive when it wasn't all that popular.   We created a system that required manned space to put satellites up.  The Challenger accident occurred but by that time the Reagan adminstration was committed to SDI and need access to space of the type the Shuttle could provide so it was save while we rebuild our unmanned launchers for satellites. 

I would certainly prefer to continue with shuttle-like vehicle. The problem is that the money just isn't there.  It seems to me that even through its not such a good idea the CEV is the only way to keep manned space alive under the current conditions and so I'm reluctantly for it.  Basically its either CEV or nothing.  We can only hope that at sometime in the future we may have a more forward thinking political leadership than we've had for the past 35 years.  This will probably be possible after the passing of the babyboom generation from the social security system. 

John, the key is not to look for government programs.
Private industries are looking towards shuttle-like system, like Bristol Spaceplanes I linked a few posts earlier.

My hopes go for fusion. Very high performances can be done, although with nothing less then a second generation (D-D created He3) fusion reactors.

But there are already companies that aim for space! Virgin Galactic and Scaled Composites demonstrated that you can make a spaceplane with good design and less then a billion dollars!

There is another solution: screw chemical rockets. Leave them, and let them be remembered as afterburners, or boosters, as that's what they are best for.

For starting space flight, sure they are adequate. But if we seriously aim for the stars and setting up moon bases, we need something more powerful.

I think anybody on this board knows that nuclear-powered rocket motors are superior, even the relatively simple (compared to other designs) solid-NTR, that has twice the Isp that chemical rockets can archive yet still gain enough thrust to brake atmosphere, while no less echo-friendly then a chemical rocket.

Using chemical rockets primary for space, are like trying to make an aeroplane with an steam engine. It's just not economical or practical in the long run.


And yes, comparing rockets to jet planes are like comparing a watermelon to an orange. Jet planes have to take off, fly a bit, then land. Rockets have to push trough Earth's gravity well, deliver its cargo, and must assure that the cargo survives atmospheric re-entry.

Googlenaut wrote about the catastrophic failures which killed the Shuttles.
It's almost as if the individual causes for those specific failures aren't as important as the "culture" of NASA.
They were all killed by the same thing which killed the Apollo 1, as well as the Dehaviland Comet and some of the first Zeppelins as well as Evel Knevil's Snake River rocket craft: I heard Gene Krantz call it "Go Fever". In whatever form, in whatever environment, it's pervasive and dangerous.
Treating something new as a finished design, and instead of the engineers and crews taking full cognizance of conditions and deciding if it's ready, letting the money handlers and politicians have the final say whether to go now or not. This brings the cliche` of the "NASA Culture of Failure" into focus, and again (and again & again...) points to the final flaw in the governmental space program.
And it is also the Shuttle itself, and the way it's been treated and described as the most modern reiliable and ready to go "space truck", instead of a new design philosophy which needed to be treated as an X-plane for as long as it needed to be.
It was not the time for crew and cargo and EVA handling to go in the same ship. It's more like 3 generations of operational craft ahead of its time.

I don't know if we can ever get past treating a space craft as a high-risk venture. With the energies and stresses involved, can it ever be routine? We can certainly get closer to it, just by using sane (non-politicized) design and operating practises -and that means the NASA is and always has been in serious trouble.

It's got to be something like the CEV/Dream Chaser/HL-20/Kliper for now and the next few generations, if we want to be able to send people, without having them get their final life situations in order before they sign the waiver of responsibility in case of "unforeseen catastrophic difficulties".
Truax said that for crew, you lavish attention and design care into a small ship, whose only mission is to get people there & back again. The only frills it has are specializations which serve this primary function. Things like landing gear and jet engines on a plane, which also has steerable parafoils and airbags for water or off-runway emergency ditchings.
He said the design criteria for crew and cargo are worlds apart, and it's as true now. You don't want to spend as much lifting a cargo as you do people. A passenger liner needs more amenities & lifeboats than a cargo ship.

One thing which irritates me about this, is that a booster which could lift a basic no-frills crew capsule (which is highly evolved for its purpose) needs to lift about ~25 tons (the HL-42 was ~23 tons in LEO, ~30 tons at launch). That's entirely possible, if one of these were built up to be man-rated (high time that was done).
This also neatly replaces the Space Shuttle's cargo capacity, so one booster could do everything we do now, cheaper and safer. Granted, the manned version has a lot more redundancies and telemetry than the cargo booster, but still there could be a lot of commonality. The cargo launchers could be thrown together and launched 30 or 40 times a year, as the market needs it (for drastically less than what we spend on cargo now), and crew could fly up to meet them as needed.
Given what Homer Hickham called the "NASA Shuttle Cult", is it any wonder why these sorts of manned boosters have never been done, and the HL-20 and all other crew vehicles died?

I have a bad feeling that it's headed for a melt-down. The ESAS architecture makes not much sense, and is just there to look like they're doing something, while keeping all the funding going to the same places.

-- Edited by john fraz at 09:27, 2007-05-01

This has gotten far away from NASA's troubles. Can we link to a thread about NTR gound-orbit shuttles, and other launcher proposals? NASA's next few years and the coming decade is deserving of one.

I don't see NASA building such a big transpsort system. What they could do (besides the ESAS supposedly Moon-Mars pork-fest), is man-rate a booster for either a bare-bones crew capsule or ~20+ tons cargo. It should have been the primary thrust of the post-Columbia (Hell, post-Challenger, post Apollo) space agency.
Maybe I'll familiarize myself with the nasaspaceflight.com site, or peruse other sites for discussion about these.

They should definitely be forced out of the spacecraft daily operations business. "Governments build roads, not operate trucking companies" says it all. They need to investigate things which might be beyond private industry, and offer incremental development prizes to spur development of key technologis for all these things. If the political structure didn't live for graft & pork, the big change to NASA following the Columbia accident investigation would have been just this sort of mandate. Signed into law, forcing them to give over operations ASAP.
Good grief! If they had ops stripped from them when the Shuttle finally dies and ISS is "finished", they'd have so much funding to devote to R&D for all these things as well as the science programs whioch are being short-changed to pay for the Shuttle/ISS.
Air-breathing NTR should be investigated, as well as laser-thermal and such.

Oh, and don't forget the Hypersonic Skyhook for spaceplanes to be lifted from the stratosphere to orbit. And the rotavator isn't as far fetched as the typical Beanstalk everyone thinks of when space tethers and any sort of space elevator is mentioned. It's only capable of tiny loads, so it's not much help for manned travel. Rotavators would give us cheap traffic to the Moon, and boost small loads outward.

Yes, I saw Hawking's zero-grav experience.  Perhaps he wanted to finally have direct experience with a local inertial reference frame!

On the other hand I think that we can be a little two negative on NASA and the Shuttle.  For of all space as I've said before is far from safe.  If someone got killed climbing a mountain we would be surprised and the same goes for space.  I think that all of the astronauts know the risks and if they weren't up for it they could get other safer jobs that would probably pay them a lot more.  That large organization screw up is true both for government and large corporations.  I was certainly sad about each loss but we just lost good navy pilot the other day just entertaining a crowd with stunt flying.  I think the conquest of space is a far more worthy cause for which to put one life on the line.

The other point is that the U.S. had a very fortunate string of luck through the end of Apollo.  Six Mercury, 10 Gemini, and 15 Apollo missions with no losses in space (although one on the ground).  The Shuttle has had two losses out of  115 flights.  Given just how close Apollo 13 was I don't think that says that the Shuttle is all that much more dangerous.  Soyuz has had two losses in flight.  We may have found the two big over looked Shuttle risks and we might be about to fly 100 times with a loss for all we know.  We can point to escape systems but even fighter aircraft have only about a 50% survival rate with their ejection seats include the many occasions that they can't be used for one reason or another.

The big problem is just lack of money.  I agee that we pushed the shuttle too fast.  We should have at least had a decade of prototyping first.  However, it seems we are going to take a step at least sideway (if not back) inorder be able to return to the moon within a limited budget low technical risk program.

Yup...like drop the war in Iraq. Isn't the cost of the war at about 6.5 billion/month?