Space Shuttle Status Report

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http://www.spaceflightnow.com/shuttle/sts114/050218optimistic/

[Astronuc]

Astronauts Look Forward to Hosting Shuttle

By Mikhail Antonov

STAR CITY, Russia (Reuters) - The next astronauts scheduled to blast off into space on a Russian craft said on Tuesday they were excited about hosting the crew of the first U.S. shuttle to launch for more than two years.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=570&ncid=2117&e=3&u=/nm/20050329/sc_nm/space_russia_dc

[Astronuc]

Shuttle Move Shifts NASA's Focus Toward Flight

By Irene Klotz

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (Reuters) - NASA passed a significant milestone in its two-year quest to return the shuttle fleet to flight when shuttle Discovery left its processing hangar early on Tuesday and made a quarter-mile journey to the assembly building.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=570&ncid=2117&e=5&u=/nm/20050329/sc_nm/space_shuttle_dc

Slowly moving forward. 

[Astronuc]

NASA Acknowledges Space Shuttle Risks

By MARCIA DUNN, AP Aerospace Writer

SPACE CENTER, Houston - After a two-year struggle to keep big chunks of foam from coming off the shuttle fuel tank during launch, NASA acknowledged Tuesday even marshmallow-size pieces could doom the spacecraft under the worst circumstances

Shuttle systems engineering manager John Muratore said it is a risk NASA and the nation must accept for flights to resume anytime soon.

It would take years and a total redesign of the fuel tank to completely eliminate foam loss and to ensure the 2003 Columbia tragedy would never be repeated, Muratore and other officials said.

NASA expects pieces of insulating foam no bigger than one or two marshmallows to break off the fuel tank when Discovery blasts off next month. Depending on where and when the pieces hit, they could cause catastrophic damage during re-entry, Muratore said.

By contrast, the size of the foam that shattered Columbia's left wing was the size of a carryon suitcase.

[Orstio]

Discovery's on the pad.

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Now that's a beauty! 
 

[Astronuc]

With the Space Shuttle Discovery now at the launch pad, workers at Kennedy Space Center in Florida successfully completed the next crucial step in the Space Shuttle's Return to Flight -- a tanking test of Discovery's redesigned External Tank.

Beginning Thursday (April 14) morning, ground crews filled Discovery's External Tank with liquid oxygen and liquid hydrogen fuel to evaluate how all the systems perform under "cryo-load" -- the condition when the tank is filled with ultralow-temperature oxygen and hydrogen. Throughout the day, crews readied the orbiter's main propulsion system while the launch team took the opportunity to inspect hardware.

Another milestone in the Shuttle's Return to Flight was reached Thursday with the hatch closure of Raffaello, an Italian-built Multi-Purpose Logistics Module that will carry supplies and experiments to and from the International Space Station.

The Space Shuttle and its External Tank have undergone dozens of modifications in preparation for Return to Flight. The updates to the Shuttle system come in response to the Columbia accident and recommendations from accident investigators.

[Astronuc]

NASA Postpones Shuttle's Return to Flight by a Week (registration at Washington Post required)
By Guy Gugliotta
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, April 21, 2005; Page A11

NASA yesterday postponed the target date for launching the space shuttle by a week, to May 22, to enable engineers to complete the analysis and review of critical changes made to the orbiter in the aftermath of the Columbia disaster.

Space shuttle program manager Bill Parsons said he and senior planners began discussing the delay a week ago, and recommended it at a Kennedy Space Center meeting Tuesday with Administrator Michael Griffin and other top NASA officials.

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NASA Delays Post-Columbia Flight Again

By MARCIA DUNN, AP Aerospace Writer (April 29, 2005) - 1147 EDT
 
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. -     NASA on Friday delayed by another two months the first space shuttle flight since the Columbia disaster, saying it needs more time to ensure that the fuel tank does not shed dangerous pieces of ice at liftoff.

Discovery is now scheduled for launch no earlier than July 13. The flight had been targeted for late May.

A large chunk of foam insulation from the external fuel tank punched a hole in Columbia's wing that led to the shuttle and crew's demise during re-entry in February 2003. Now, the lingering concern involves the possible buildup of ice on the tank once it's filled with super-cold fuel, and the hazard such shards would pose if they came off during the launch and hit the shuttle.

NASA's new administrator, Michael Griffin, announced the delay at a midmorning televised news conference, saying it was the result of recent launch-debris reviews.

The July window extends from July 13 until July 31. If Discovery does not fly in July, the next opportunity would come in September. The 12-day mission will supply much-needed supplies and replacement parts to the space station.

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from NASA's Shuttle Page - April 29, 2005

Shuttle Launch Pushed Back

NASA Administrator Michael Griffin announced the decision to push back the launch date for the Space Shuttle's Return to Flight. Commander Eileen Collins and her STS-114 crewmates are now scheduled to launch no earlier than July 13. Discovery's launch window now extends to July 31.

Shuttle managers want to take a closer look at the External Tank attached to the Space Shuttle. They want to analyze the possibility of ice forming on the tank and take a closer look at the risk of debris falling off and hitting the Shuttle. Managers are considering rolling Discovery back to the Vehicle Assembly Building for further work and more tests.

[Astronuc]

Return to Flight activities continue on schedule for a launch window that extends from July 13 - 31.

Space Shuttle Discovery is now on its launch pad nestled within the Rotating Service Structure. The Space Shuttle will undergo final preparations and prelaunch tests to ensure a safe launch and readiness to fly. Discovery’s seven-member crew will test new hardware and techniques to improve Space Shuttle safety, as well as deliver supplies to the International Space Station.

[yale]

End Of The Astro-Nots?
June 16, 2005

This story was written by John Derbyshire.
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Like the monster in some ghastly horror movie rising from the dead for the umpteenth time, the space shuttle is back on the launch pad. This grotesque, lethal white elephant -- 14 deaths in 113 flights -- is the grandest, grossest technological folly of our age. If the shuttle has any reason for existing, it is as an exceptionally clear symbol of our corrupt, sentimental, and dysfunctional political system. Its flights accomplish nothing and cost half a billion per. That, at least, is what a flight costs when the vehicle survives. If a shuttle blows up -- which, depending on whether or not you think that 35 human lives (five original launchworthy Shuttles at seven astronauts each) would be too high a price to pay for ridding the nation of an embarrassing and expensive monstrosity, is either too often or not often enough** -- then the cost, what with lost inventory, insurance payouts, and the endless subsequent investigations, is seven or eight times that.

There is no longer much pretense that shuttle flights in particular, or manned space flight in general, has any practical value. You will still occasionally hear people repeating the old NASA lines about the joys of microgravity manufacturing and insights into osteoporesis, but if you repeat these tales to a materials scientist or a physiologist, you will get peals of laughter in return. To seek a cure for osteoporesis by spending $500 million to put seven persons and 2,000 tons of equipment into earth orbit is a bit like… well, it is so extravagantly preposterous that any simile you can come up with falls flat. It is like nothing else in the annals of human folly.

Having no practical justification for squirting so much of the nation's wealth up into the stratosphere, our politicians -- those (let us charitably assume there are some) with no financial or electoral interest in the big contractor corporations who feed off the shuttle -- fall back on romantic appeals to Mankind's Destiny. Thus President Bush, addressing the nation after the Columbia tragedy two years ago:

These men and women assumed great risk in this service to all humanity. In an age when space flight has come to seem almost routine, it is easy to overlook the dangers of travel by rocket and the difficulties of navigating the fierce outer atmosphere of the earth.

These astronauts knew the dangers, and they faced them willingly, knowing they had a high and noble purpose in life. Because of their courage and daring and idealism, we will miss them all the more.

The cause in which they died will continue. Mankind is led into the darkness beyond our world by the inspiration of discovery and the longing to understand. Our journey into space will go on.

Anyone who finds it "easy to overlook the dangers of travel by rocket" just hasn't been following the shuttle program very attentively. One astronaut death per eight flights!

The rest of the president's address on that occasion was, to be blunt about it, insulting to the memories of the astronauts who died, and still more insulting to their grieving spouses, children, parents, and friends. If these astronauts believed that "they had a high and noble purpose in life," they were mistaken, and someone should have set them straight on the point.

Please note that "if." The motivation of shuttle astronauts would, I suspect, make a very interesting study for some skillful psychologist. Here is Ken Bowersox, one of the astronauts who was actually on board the International Space Station (steady now, Derb, husband your wrath) when Columbia blew up. He is writing in the June 2005 issue of Popular Mechanics, putting the "pro" case in a debate on the continuation of the Shuttle program, versus former NASA historian Alex Roland arguing the "con."

Bowersox:

I've wanted to be in space from the time I was listening to the radio and heard about John Glenn circling the earth. Columbia was the klind of blow that could have made me walk away from it. As astronauts, though, we wouldn't have been on the space station if we didn't believe in the program. Even after losing our friends and our ride home, we still believed that exploration was important.

Far be it from me to pull rank on Astronaut Bowersox, but I've wanted to be in space for somewhat longer than that -- since seeing those wonderful pictures by Chesley Bonestell in The Conquest of Space, circa 1952, or possibly after being taken to the movie Destination Moon at around the same time. The imaginative appeal of space travel is irresistible. I don't think I could resist it, anyway. Even with two young kids who need me, and a wife who (I feel fairly sure) would miss me, I would still, if given the opportunity to go into space tomorrow, be on the next flight to Cape Canaveral. As Prof. Roland says in that Popular Mechanics exchange: "The real reason behind sending astronauts to Mars is that it's thrilling and exciting." Absolutely correct. The danger? Heck, we all have to go sometime. As President Bush said, I am sure quite truly: "These astronauts knew the dangers, and they faced them willingly…" It's the president's next clause I have trouble with: "…knowing they had a high and noble purpose in life."


Did they really know that? My experience of pointless make-work, which is much more extensive than I would have wished when starting out in life, is that people engaged in it know they are engaged in it. Whether they mind or not depends on the rewards. For a thousand bucks an hour, I'd do make-work all day long -- aye, and all night too! Astronaut salaries don't rise to anything like that level, of course; but there are rewards other than the merely financial. I hope no one will take it amiss -- I am very sorry for the astronauts who have died in the shuttle program, and for their loved ones -- if I quietly speculate on whether, being engaged in such a supremely thrilling and glamorous style of make-work, one might not easily be able to convince oneself to, as Astronaut Bowersox says, "believe in the program."

None of which is any reason why the rest of us should believe in it, let alone pay for it. There is nothing -- nothing, no thing, not one darned cotton-picking thing you can name -- of either military, or commercial, or scientific, or national importance to be done in space, that could not be done twenty times better and at one thousandth the cost, by machines rather than human beings. Mining the asteroids? Isaac Asimov famously claimed that the isotope Astatine-215 (I think it was) is so rare that if you were to sift through the entire crust of the earth, you would only find a trillion atoms of it. We could extract every one of that trillion, and make a brooch out of them, for one-tenth the cost of mining an asteroid.

The gross glutted wealth of the federal government; the venality and stupidity of our representatives; the lobbying power of big rent-seeking corporations; the romantic enthusiasms of millions of citizens; these are the things that 14 astronauts died for. To abandon all euphemism and pretense, they died for pork, for votes, for share prices, and for thrills (immediate in their own case, vicarious in ours). I mean no insult to their memories, and I doubt they would take offense. I am certain that I myself would not -- certain, in fact, that, given the opportunity, I would gleefully do what they did, with all the dangers, and count the death, if it came, as anyway no worse than moldering away in some hospital bed at age ninety, watching a TV game show, with a tube in my arm and a diaper round my rear end. I should be embarrassed to ask the rest of you to pay for the adventure, though.

** There are actually reasons to think we may have been lucky so far. News item: "Steve Poulos, manager of the Orbiter Projects Office at Johnson Space Center in Houston, acknowledges there is ‘a debate' inside the agency about the threat posed by space debris. One school of thought is that a fatal debris strike is ‘probable,' Poulos said. But he said others think such an event is likely to be ‘infrequent'." Uh-huh.

[Astronuc]

These astronauts knew the dangers, and they faced them willingly, knowing they had a high and noble purpose in life. Because of their courage and daring and idealism, we will miss them all the more. 

I am troubled by this statement.  The 'accident' should not have happened.  It was preventable, as was the first accident with Challenger.  The astronauts and the US public deserve better.  I am quite sure if the astronauts knew what was or wasn't on the minds, they might have refused to go.

Both accidents occurred because of bureaucratic indifference or arrogance, but the 'bureaucracy' did not do, the people who accepted management positions did.  It comes done to personal choice, which in the case of Challenger and Columbia was a mixture of conceit and denial.  And that makes me very angry , especially when it costs lives.

We might miss them, but certainly not as much as the parents, spouses, sibling and children of the astronauts.

[Astronuc]

STS-114
Return to Flight Mission
Launch Planning Window: July 13 - 31

Payloads Installed at the Launch Pad

Shuttle technicians have installed Discovery's payloads, including NASA's Italian-built Multi-Purpose Logistics Module Raffaello into the Shuttle's payload bay. Other cargo includes a new Control Moment Gyroscope for the International Space Station and the Orbiter Boom Sensor System which will help the astronauts inspect the Shuttle's thermal tiles.

Discovery's crewmembers have completed training for their mission's first spacewalk in the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory at Johnson Space Center. The crew also continued to review rendezvous procedures. The launch window for STS-114 runs from July 13 through July 31.

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STS-114 to Demonstrate Repair Techniques, Deliver Equipment to Space Station
The STS-114 crewmembers will deliver supplies to the International Space Station, but the major focus of their mission will be testing and evaluating new Space Shuttle flight safety, which includes new inspection and repair techniques.

STS-114 is classified as Logistics Flight 1. Among the Station-related activities are delivering new supplies and replacing one of the orbital outpost's Control Moment Gyroscopes (CMGs). STS-114 will also carry the Raffaello Multi-Purpose Logistics Module and the External Stowage Platform-2.

The crew is slated to conduct at least three spacewalks while at the ISS. The first spacewalk will demonstrate repair techniques of the Shuttle's Thermal Protection System. During the second, the spacewalkers will replace the failed CMG with one delivered by the Shuttle. On the third, they will install the External Stowage Platform.

[Astronuc]

Return To Flight Task Group -

http://www.returntoflight.org/

See the site for the latest activities on the Shuttle issues.

[Astronuc]

NASA Sets July 13 Shuttle Launch Date
Discovery to Take to Skies More Than Two Years After Columbia Disaster
By MARCIA DUNN, AP

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (July 1) - NASA plans to blast into space on July 13 after more than two years on the ground, capping a series of safety modifications and delays since the shuttle Columbia broke apart in the sky, killing seven astronauts.

The agency said NASA's best minds have made the Discovery as safe as possible.

''We are being as smart about this as we know how to be, but we are up against the limits of our human knowledge,'' NASA Administrator Michael Griffin said Thursday in pronouncing space shuttle Discovery ready for liftoff. ''If someone wants more, they're going to have to find smarter humans.''

NASA set the date after a two-day, high-level review of whether the craft is ready.

''Based on a very thorough and very successful flight-readiness review, we're currently 'go' for launch of Discovery on July 13,'' Griffin said.

Launch director Mike Leinbach said his team was celebrating with hearty backslaps. ''It's a great, great feeling to be less than two weeks from launch,'' he said.

Leinbach said his only worry, at least for now, is the seemingly nonstop stormy weather. As he addressed the late-afternoon news conference, thunder rumbled and rain poured down.

Earlier in the week, an advisory panel concluded that NASA failed to meet three of the 15 safety recommendations issued by the Columbia accident investigators in 2003. Despite many improvements, the shuttle is still vulnerable to pieces of foam or ice falling off the external fuel tank at liftoff, and the astronauts still have no reliable way of fixing damage to their ship's thermal shielding once in orbit, the group said.

But Griffin and others at NASA said they believe those risks have been reduced to an acceptable level. He said NASA did everything possible to make the fuel tank safer and developed rudimentary patches for Discovery's crew, in case of small holes in the shuttle's thermal skin.

''The proximate causes of the loss of Columbia have been addressed. Many other things which could have been of concern or would have been of concern have also been addressed,'' Griffin said. ''We honestly believe this is the cleanest flight we have ever done. The only other flight that will ever be cleaner is the next one.''

Griffin said spaceflight is always risky. ''We've done what we can do to minimize that based on the state of our knowledge today,'' he said.

Discovery will carry seven astronauts to the international space station, along with sorely needed supplies and replacement parts. If Discovery suffers irreparable damage en route, the astronauts will move into the station and await a rescue by the next space shuttle flight, Atlantis - a situation NASA considers an extreme last resort.

Griffin said he met on Thursday with Discovery's commander, Eileen Collins, and her crew, who told him they do not want NASA rushing but assured him they are ''go for launch.''

A large chunk of fuel-tank insulating foam smashed a hole in Columbia's left wing during liftoff in January 2003 and caused the shuttle to break apart during re-entry two weeks later. All seven astronauts were killed.

NASA's main focus following the accident was on keeping big pieces of foam from falling off the fuel tank. It was not until this past spring that engineers fully realized the dangers posed by ice, which can form on the tank once the super-chilled fuel is loaded. That prompted NASA to delay the mission from May to July and install another heater on the redesigned tank.