It's sad to see the Shuttle go without a replacement. And to jog my own memory of the day I saw the shuttle in the UK, here's a set of pictures from the day Enterprise visited Stansted Airport in the UK: http://www.flickr.com/photos/mike_ward/sets/7215760339467228...
I was there as a boy standing against the wire fence with my father to see this amazing machine. Bloody marvellous!
The Shuttle program is coming to a hard stop because the program was a failure. The Shuttle is monstrously complex, killed astronauts on routine low orbit missions, and its runaway costs enveloped NASA's budget, crowding out any alternative manned platforms. There is no next-generation Shuttle or iteration of the Shuttle because simply running the current version of the Shuttle consumed NASA.
After this last mission, the U.S. manned space program's capabilities will be back in the 1950s.
While I have to agree with your overall point, I'm not ready to cede that the shuttle hurt manned space exploration more than it helped. Despite its' shortcomings, the Space Shuttle has been a point of national (and I would imagine international) pride, it's an incredible machine that has inspired the dreams of millions.
Perhaps it did hurt more than it helped, in that it made the phrase you use, "routine low orbit missions" not sound ludicrous. Perhaps it was all just a massively expensive house of cards one gentle breeze away from failure, and on the occasions it did fail, people were surprised. We've only been sending people to space for fifty years, there's still nothing "routine" about low earth orbit, and every astronaut that has died in a shuttle knew exactly the risks they were taking.
My greatest hope is that the retirement of the remaining shuttles won't be seen by Americans (and the world in general) as a failure or a "sign of the times", but will be a rallying point. It's time to move on to bigger and better things.
We've only been sending people to space for fifty years, there's still nothing "routine" about low earth orbit...
That is the damaging legacy of STS. It's established the expectation that going to orbit can never be done at a reasonable price, that there will never be anything people can do in space worth the staggering cost of getting them there.
Getting to orbit could be routine, but we been marinating in expensive failure for so long the engineering that needs to be done to make it happen will never get public support in the US.
Well, that's arguably one of the defining features of capitalism; the engineering doesn't need public support in the US. It just needs some investors with vision and eventual profitability. The way other socioeconomic systems tend to destroy that feature in passing (on their way to some other goal) is one of the major reasons they have been such overwhelming failures in practice.
The last flight of the shuttle is a huge step in the right direction, historically so, not a regression. I respect it for what it did, but the best thing it could do now is retire with honor and dignity.
...the engineering doesn't need public support in the US. It just needs some investors with vision and eventual profitability.
Where is that profit going to come from? Space tourism? I will be very surprised if there will be a big ongoing demand for spending a few days vomiting in an orbiting can.
From providing services that are already being paid for, only for lower costs? Which generally has the effect of growing the economy in question?
You are aware that there already is a space industry, right? Private companies paying real money to put real satellites up for various reasons? It doesn't take much Microeconomics 101 to think that dropping the cost to launch by a factor of four will tend to grow the already-existing economy. Skepticism about whether a viable space economy can exist at all is too late, that ship has sailed.
Cheaper space access will enable more economic activity in existing domains, will enable new types of activities that aren't currently viable, and historically speaking, it's pretty safe to say that trying to guess in advance what will ultimately be the "killer app" is actually pretty hard, but given the existence of an already-viable economy it's more a matter of waiting and seeing than hoping.
Oh, there's definitely money in launching satellites. But that market is already served by commercial companies. What we're talking about here is manned flights to orbit.
You clearly underestimate the desire of the average American to make himself severely uncomfortable for the sake of a thrill. At the current level of expense, space tourism will never be more than a status symbol for the super rich, but get the cost bellow a few thousand dollars and add a few amenities to the experience and people will go hog wild for it.
You may be right, but I suspect interest will start to fade when the early customers get back and describe the experience. Inevitably one of the launches will go bad and kill the passengers. There will be calls for the government to make it safe, and that will be the end of space tourism.
50 years. The wright brothers flew in 1903, by 1953 there had been tens (maybe even hundreds) of thousands of aircraft built, and millions of people had flown on them. Commercial jet aircraft and supersonic military aircraft were being introduced. Air travel was expensive but within the reach of even the middle class with some savings, 20 million people a year were flying.
Yet after another 50 years flying has not become all that much cheaper. Unlike flying reaching Mach 25 takes a ridiculous amount of energy and there is little reason to suspect it will become cheap in the next 50 years.
Commercial flights are cost-competitive with driving or just about any other form of travel over distances greater than several hundred miles. Tens of millions of people fly per year. An average ticket for a cross-continental trip is extremely affordable even for people in the lowest quintile of incomes. By what definitions has flying not become cheaper in the last 50 years?
As far as manned spaceflight, it's certainly fundamentally more difficult than air travel but that doesn't explain the lack of progress the last 5 decades have seen under NASA leadership. Indeed, we're already seeing the first fruits of a properly open and competitive launch industry, something that hasn't generally been possible for most of the last half century, and it is already beginning to revolutionize manned spaceflight. In the next 50 years if the industry keeps advancing they will have developed streamlined mass produced launch vehicles (Iridium proved that such a thing was possible for satellites, at massive cost savings), single stage to orbit vehicles, and truly reusable launch vehicles, all of which will ultimately bring manned spaceflight into the reach of ordinary folks.
First off the Median income adjusted for inflation has just about doubled since 1950 so while it has become more affordable relative to income relative to wheat there is little real change. The only quote on cost I had was for 1960 but "A round trip ticket between Cleveland and Washington D.C. was about $75. That's over $400 in today's dollars!" And guess what you plenty of airlines are selling tickets 400$ or more. There are some low cost carriers that cost far less, but it's more a question of lost service and hidden fees than improved technology. (You can easily be flying in a 30+ year old aircraft with some minor upgrades.)
As to reducing the cost to orbit. The shuttle could transport 50 people into orbit with some minor retrofitting in the cargo area. However, there is little reason to have done so because there is vary little demand to send people into orbit. When you get down to it much of the cost of the shuttle program is trying to maximize the utility of old hardware while minimizing risks. If you want cheap you need to set minor R&D improvements aside and focus on volume but there is just not enough demand to really reduce costs.
According to the US Bureau of Transportation Statistics the price of average domestic airfare has fallen by about 30% from 1975 and about 75% from 1950, in inflation adjusted dollars.
Even assuming that's correct,* we would still be looking at tickets to LEO in 2060 being significantly more than 250k inflation adjusted to 2010. And further assuming another doubling of inflation adjusted household income which seems even more unlikely LEO is not going to be cheap for the average American any time soon.
*AKA They included things like fuel surcharges, baggage handling fees, average trip length, and quality of service etc.
"The machine is a beautiful, wonderful piece of hardware. The orbiter system, the most complex system ever built by man to fly has never [...] had a failure that would have prevented that machine from landing safely."
Thank you for posting them. I understand I've seen the Shuttle in the UK too. Difficult to know by now what I'm remembering and what I'm remembering being told / seeing photos; I'd have been four. But I'm still glad to know that I have.
The shuttle may well have been too expensive, too dangerous and too limited in capabilities. But to me as a simple enthusiast it's still a truly glorious machine that would be sad to see go even with a better replacement on the next pad. Without that....
It's strange to think that in fifty years of manned spaceflight, NASA has only ever built four types of spaceship: Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, and Shuttle. The Shuttle had a good run. It was both technically awesome and in many ways ridiculous and pointless. Anyway, time for the future now.
It was a horrible failure. It was projected for 75 launches a year at about 25M$ (thats million dollars, not a software company in Seattle) per lauch from 1977 until the late eighties when it was scheduled to be replaced by something better. Instead it was 135 launches in 30 years at 1.6G$ per lauch, and it totally crippled NASA's capabilities to develop a replacement.
you may want to change G to B. In the United States, where dollars are used, G is more likely to mean "Grand", or 1k. B would be billion. Or, when all else fails, just type it out.
Things like kUSD or M$ appear to have come from science - it's putting an SI prefix to a unit. Personally, when I write M$, I mean one megadollar, not 1 milion dollars.
Agreed. Though we do sometimes write $5M, which is functionally equivalent. I've noticed in internet communication, it's common to say a numeral before the dollar sign. For example, "You're going to end up spending 100$ on that".
In this case it is, but it isn't in others (like kUSD or G$).
Oh, I always thought that you write a numeral before the dollar sign... Thanks for pointing that out. It differs between currencies - for example, british pounds are written before numeral (£42), but polish złoty are written after (42zł).
They did it!
Congratulations to Atlantis crew, NASA, and everyone involved. Maybe the Space Shuttle program wasn't exactly cost-effective and had it failures, but it sure sparked imagination of many, me included.
Being able to watch a live video feed of the launch is pretty amazing. Previously, TV coverage (if it existed at all) was terrible. This makes me wonder what the fate of NASA would have been if the past few generations had grown up with access to this kind of coverage. I'd like to think that NASA would have had a lot more support than they currently do.
Nearly 10% of the earth watched the lunar landing. But IMO the problem is that the "space race" was initiated & presented -- well, as a race! The goal was to beat the Russians, and once we did, interest waned.
The most depressing realization comes from comparing our actions between the Apollo days & now. As a response to Sputnik, this country managed to go from an insignificant investment in space to putting a man on the moon, and we did it in just over a decade.
Today? We don't seem to pay attention to these challenges.
You can still present the space race as a race. Landing on the Moon is the first lap. If a goal for the second lap existed - like a permanent moonbase or something like it, it could have continued.
As marvelous as the shuttles are, they are just an expensive way to go knee deep in space. LEO is boring because we already went much further. Let's set foot on the Moon once again, and launch from there (using local materials is a good excuse) to Mars and the outer planets.
Imagine how big a telescope could be with the lower gravity and how crisp its image with no atmosphere to disturb it or absorb parts of the spectrum. Or a radio telescope shielded (by the Moon) from Earth's radio emissions. And, if something broke, someone would dress up and drive there to take a look instead of taking a year of planning and a billion-dollar mission to, maybe, fix it.
In 1979, I watched the Enterprise+transporter fly in to Kennedy for the first time from the Indian River - that was a long time ago. Hell, it's even been 25 years since I turned on the TV to see Dan Rather using a model to explain the various external tanks and knew something bad had happened.
So while it is the passing of an era, with the ISS at the sharp point of manned space flight, I'm not about to let nostalgia cloud the objective fact that it doesn't matter whose hardware gets us off the ground and out toward the stars.
[edit] But that's not to imply that shuttle launches aren't really cool.
> it doesn't matter whose hardware gets us off the ground and out toward the stars.
On this, I disagree. Flying in an even older device (Soyuz) provided at a ridiculous rate from a "business partner" (calling Russia an ally is not quite accurate) is not the way we should be letting ourselves get into space.
I know the shuttle is far from perfect, but we should have had the Dragon or Orion capsule ready before shuttle retirement.
Turn off some air conditioners and get out of a few wars, and we could have easily kept going strong.
Soyuz 1 (1967) and Soyuz 11 (1971) both ended with fatalities. Four cosmonauts died. The Soviet Union did not hide those fatalities. Here is what best illustrates that: All their names are on the Fallen Astronaut memorial on the Moon, put there during Apollo 15, only a month after Soyuz 11 ended in disaster.
There have been no fatalities on Soyuz flights since Soyuz 11, all fatalities occurred early on. That’s forty years without fatalities, and that’s mostly why Soyuz is so safe and reliable.
Sure, more astronauts died during Space Shuttle missions but the Space Shuttle also brought many more astronauts into space than Soyuz. If you look at the percentage of fatalities Soyuz is only doing marginally better – one more dead cosmonaut and the percentages would be about the same. It’s not so much the raw numbers, it’s the forty years. Soyuz is a mature spacecraft, all the kinks have been worked out, the Space Shuttle was always too complicated to ever really work out the kinks, to ever really be considered safe.
I think im seeing the same vacuuming footage. Slightly off topic, but what's with all the people wearing baseball caps indoors. Wouldn't it obscure a large portion of your vision?
This is probably intended to minimize contamination of the equipment with hair. Apparently, they also have metal-on-metal seals on the main hatch, so the smallest pieces of dirt could potentially prevent them from working.
It's sad to see that we are retiring the US Shuttle program. In a recent article in the Economist about how the space race is now dead, the US is now are reliant on other countries to send folks up into space or the ISS ... even though they are planning on retiring the ISS in 2020.
I'm hoping that the privatization of the space programs (like SpaceX or Virgin Galatic) gets enough interest to fuel more funding and research into space travel though only a handful of rich folks could ever pay for a ride in one of those programs ...
Just saw it from Cape Canaveral. Quite an extraordinary feeling to watch and feel the very last shuttle take off. What makes it even better is that there was only a 30% chance that the shuttle would take off due to the weather. In my mind I'd written it off, being an entrepreneur, I should've known better than to do that :-P
This was an amazing, historical moment of our time. I even ran outside to grab my two-year-old son so he could watch it on TV with me. (Although he doesn't understand the significance, he keep saying "Space ship, daddy! Space ship!")
Hopefully, mankind will continue the exploration of space...
It's somewhat sad to see the shuttles go, especially without a replacement immediately to hand. Though hopefully the end up the shuttle program will pave the way for a manned launch vehicle that can get us out of LEO.
Due diligence has already been done by NASA. Contracts have already been signed. The Dragon is a go for ISS service.
I know at first this seems like a big and very risky and very uncertain change. But it's not: The private sector aerospace companies have been engineering and building our spacecraft all along^. This is evolutionary, incremental.
LEO is a solved problem now. By letting the private sector take over this tier, it frees NASA to work on advancing the science and state-of-the-art of further exploration.
^ Yes, of course NASA engineers were in the drivers seat, especially in engineering the systems, with private companies focusing on particular components. But my larger point of evolution v. revolution is the context I was getting at.
There's no betting going on at all. We're using the Russians (Soyuz) for now, and for the foreseeable future. Private firms like SpaceX or another NASA vehicle are a possibility, but neither of those options has been proven out at all, and certainly will not be ready for at least several years.
You're absolutely right. I probably should have qualified my statement as referring to manned exploration. (Sung1's comment did say "get us back into space"... I assumed the "us" referred to humans).
Yes, but the earliest estimate for a manned Dragon launch is 2014. Don't get me wrong -- I'm really pulling for SpaceX and sincerely hoping they are successful. In hindsight, my "proven out" comment sounds more pessimistic than was meant.
The supply situation of the ISS is quite interesting.
Soyuz[1], the Russian spacecraft, will continue bringing and returning people to and from the ISS (three each – seven is a typical Space Shuttle crew). Two Soyuz will continue to be permanently docked to the ISS (they will, of course, be regularly switched out whenever a new Soyuz flies to the ISS) and serve as lifeboats for the ISS’s crew of six. They are actually the limiting factor for the crew size – an evacuation of everyone on the ISS has to be possible at all times.
Soyuz will be the only spacecraft that can return something to Earth after the Shuttle retires. Since it’s designed to fly people and not cargo it’s certainly easy to imagine that Soyuz is far from ideal for this job – forget bringing back any big experiments.
Progress[2] is the unmanned cargo version of Soyuz. It will continue bringing cargo to the ISS. (Two to three tons per flight. The shuttle could bring about 25 tons to low earth orbit.) It’s, just like Soyuz, a very capable and reliable work horse. (It was the only spacecraft bringing cargo to the ISS when the Shuttles were grounded between 2003 and 2005.)
There are two other and newer cargo spacecraft: The European Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV[3]) and the Japanese H-II Transfer Vehicle (HTV[4]). The ATV automatically (like its name indicates) docks to the Russian part of the ISS and can bring up more than seven tons of cargo. It can also boost the station into a higher orbit (as is regularly necessary). The second ATV Johannes Kepler only recently successfully finished its mission, was filled with trash, undocked and burned up in the atmosphere.
The HTV can bring about six tons of cargo to the ISS. It has a pressurized and an unpressurized cargo section (meaning anything that’s supposed to be attached somewhere outside the ISS doesn’t have to go through and fit through the airlock, it can be brought to the ISS in the unpressurized cargo section). It has no complicated automated approach system like the ATV, it is simply grappled by the Canadian “robot” arm (well, it’s more a crane than a robot, really[5]) and attached to the American part of the ISS. Since it’s docking to the American part of the station, the docking hatch is large enough to accommodate International Standard Payload Racks[6] which are used everywhere in the non-Russian part of the ISS. The ATV can’t bring those racks to the ISS since it docks to the Russian part of the station (and their hatches are too small). The HTV also only recently successfully finished its second mission and burned up in the atmosphere.
That’s the current situation, I will leave it to someone else to explain what the future might hold (SpaceX’s Dragon spacecraft, for example). Bringing cargo back from the ISS is the only real problem, there will only be Soyuz after the Shuttle retires.
The ISS can currently also not be extended, well, at least not the non-Russion part. Bringing up all the modules was a job the Shuttle was perfectly suited for. That’s no problem since the ISS is done. They actually managed to pretty much complete it, even looking at the original plans. Heck, even the Cupola[7] made it.
I was there as a boy standing against the wire fence with my father to see this amazing machine. Bloody marvellous!