Posted on 05/18/2003 5:23:01 PM PDT by anymouse
A highly-regarded spacecraft designer says the space shuttle should be retired and the human space program suspended until a better vehicle can be built.
This newest critic is Max Faget, 81, who designed the Mercury space capsule and had a managing role in the design of other U.S. human launch systems, including the space shuttle, Apollo and Gemini. He has received almost every commendation that exists for engineers and was inducted into the Ohio-based National Inventor's Hall of Fame earlier this year.
"The bottom line is that the shuttle is too old," Faget said this week. "It would be very difficult to make sure it is in good shape. We ought to just stop going into space until we get a good vehicle. If we aren't willing to spend the money to do that, then we should be ashamed of ourselves."
Faget (pronounced fah-ZHAY), director of engineering for human spacecraft design at NASA for 20 years, was blunt in his criticism of the growing U.S. reliance on the Soyuz. The craft ran into problems this month when a three-man crew returning from the space station landed hundreds of miles off course.
NASA engineers at the working level said privately that they regarded Faget as "a giant in the space community whose opinions are worth more than anybody else's."
In Faget's view, the choices are obvious.
"We ought to get a decent vehicle," he said. "It could carry fewer people, but it ought to be a new vehicle."
Faget said such a program might make sense, but he questioned why anybody would use the same shuttle architecture that he pioneered almost 30 years ago.
(Excerpt) Read more at kansascity.com ...
The Titan II refurbishment was not as sucessful, these silo queens experienced stress corrosion cracking from the Cape salt air.
Those Titan IIs were sitting in a silo for decades. I wouldn't propose launching astronauts on those, but on newly built Titan IIs. As for the corrosion, I heard about the problem, but only on a missle that had been sitting on the pad for an unusually long time. (You may know more about this than I, my knowledge is dated) I don't believe that there is an inherent design problem with the Titan II, because they were launched from Florida successfully in the Gemini program.
All of the old hands that worked on Titan and Atlas when it was a man rated vehicle are dead or retired.
This is a legitimate big issue, but there has got to be oodles of documentation from the original days and the refurbishment. And we obviously would not be recreating the original Gemini spacecraft, there would be a lot of substituting of current technology. We don't need to know exactly how they did everything in 1966, just workable parameters.
Judging from what I have been looking at on the web, I would switch from a Titan to the Atlas 5, launched from Complex 41 at Cape Canaveral. If I remember correctly, this pad is just south of the Shuttle pads. Vehicles are delivered to the pad by rail. Either add a new vehicle assembly building for NASA's use, or add a rail line from Complex 41 to the Shuttle assembly building, which is practically next door, and assemble man rated Atlas 5's in the shuttle assembly building.
I still think the hurdles of getting a proven technology to work again are lower than to to replace the shuttle with an unproven next generation vehicle. If the shuttle is going to be permanently grounded, we can get back into space quicker by using variations on what we've got now, using the launch facilities we have now. Then, once we've got a working manned program again, start work on developing next generation launch vehicles, and keep our Titan/Atlas system as a backup/rescue system.
Yeah, but I almost think that was his point.
I was offered a job at NASA/Goddard once many years ago when NASA was going places. Those days are gone. NASA is going nowhere, kind of sad for the space agency.
Two, technically three, slanders against me for no reason I can see. What gives? There are many in the scientific community who believe manned space flight should be halted.
NASA has been trying to relive the excitement of the 1960s, when every HS kid knew astronauts names, for the last 30 years. It isn't working. They did golf on the moon, popcorn on the shuttle, the first black in space, the first female in space, the first Israeli, the first Senator, the first teacher in space--all of it got the attention of only those connected to those in orbit.
I suspect not one American in ten can tell you the names of any of the astronauts killed in the last disaster.
It is important to get the younger generation interested in space. Throwing one person--at horrendous cost--up after the next into orbit to do pointless experiments is not the way to do it.
That's right. It isn't working. Need a new program, something to catch the attention of the young people and get them going like wildfire on their math and science homework. Man in space is a part of it, but obviously no longer a goal in itself.
Ad Astra Y'All
Kids! What about groanups? Mobile Internet moonCam with a shovel-scoop would be a blast. BagdadCam was okay, but I'd pay ten cents a minute to drive the moonCam over to a rock and tip it over to watch the ants swarm out.
Um... putting a man in space? Of course, I assume that's your point. Guess what? I disagree. We will go. We will make it profitable and we will stay this time.
An excellent article on what we should do is in the April Wired. Basically he argues that we should go up and push the ISS into a holding orbit (it is an investment we may want to use) then mothball the shuttle fleet while we develop a mission, not to space but to someplace. Go to the Moon and set up a permanent habitat with telescopes. Go to Mars. Go to the asteroids (this is the one I like) and prove that there is profit to be made (my idea, not his). But go someplace.
The article is at:
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/11.04/start.html?pg=2
The key would be a 10 year program at the current funding of 6 or so billion per year. And NASA would have to be allowed to carry over any money not spent in the current years budget. I guarantee you we'd have a vehicle and a mission, if not a success, within that 10 years.
Of course I've also been an advocate of putting up a fixed contract, say $10 billion, for successful delivery of a usable space station to the first company to deliver it, on orbit. I bet we'd have that up and working too.
Why do you like that one?
Why? Just because? Only reason I can see--at the present time--to have manned flights is to discover the effects of it on humans. Robots can do any other scientific research faster and much, much cheaper.
Initially telescopes, both visual and radio, would be ideally positioned in the airless low gravity environment. The Far Side would especially help radio observations. The low-gravity would make maintenance operations vastly easier than the current situation with Hubble and its currently unbuilt successor.
Furthermore, the moon would make a good way-station for launching and manufacture of deep-space manned probes to the rest of the solar system and beyond. The soil is chock full of titanium. Solar smelters would allow feasibility for its production in usable form. Welding of titanium requires an airless environment. A manufacturing colony would then be able to do the gross module fuselages, assembly and fittings. The rest could be lifted from earth using the Big Dumb Boosters into parking orbits then ferried up on unmanned ionic-thrust transfer vehicles.
Clearly not true. We can design individual tools to do individual jobs, but we can't design and deploy a general purpose scientific instrument that can react to new facts on the scene. We have to design and send an entirely new device in most cases. And forget it if something goes wrong. I somehow think an astronaut could have yanked on the "umbrella" antenna of the Galileo if they'd been along for the ride.
More importantly just because isn't a rational position and worthy of debate. We need to get out there in order to establish a presence other than on earth for our species. We CAN'T stay here much longer, relatively speaking. We'll either kill off the ecosystem or it will kill us, or some external force will kill us both off. We have to go on to the next environment and make it ours, or we need to curl up and die. I prefer to go on. Now, do we need to do that Tuesday? Only to satisfy my own impatience, and to make sure that the folks that go speak english and not mandarin or hindi.
I for one see the benefits in space travel and I think scraping the program would not only be overreacting but disasterous for advances in science.
Why do you like that one?
Profit motive. We can get there for much less energy expenditure and odds are we'll be able to find something someone can make a profit from. That will guarantee a vibrant space industry.
Larry Niven has a lot of neat short stories in his Known Space series that deal with the possibilities. I also read alot of Gerard K O'Neill's books, papers and articles about L5 and related industrialization of space (even got to talk to him for about 1/2 hour when he was stopped over in SF many years ago and visited the store where I worked - he was shocked someone recognized him!).
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