Space Truckin' -- Japan to launch space freighter Sept 10

[hbarcat]

Japan will launch its first domestic cargo spaceship to the International Space Station ISS on September 10, a Russian space official said on Monday.

The spacecraft was built by Japan's space agency JAXA, and will lift off on board the country's new H-2B rocket. It will deliver about 4.5 metric tons of scientific equipment to the orbital station.

"The launch of the Japanese H-2B carrier rocket with the HTV-1 unmanned cargo spacecraft is scheduled for September 10, 2009 [at 17.01 GMT] from the Tanegashima Space Center in southern Japan," an official from Russia's Mission Control said, adding that the freighter is expected to dock with the ISS on September 17.

The spacecraft is a solar-powered cylinder about 10 meters long and 4.4 meters wide. It can haul up to 6 tons of cargo, but will be loaded with less cargo on its maiden flight.

http://en.rian.ru/world/20090907/156049932.html



This is the way to build spaceships - specialized vehicles to perform specific functions. It's ridiculous to put crew members on board heavy cargo lifters because it's not only dangerous but it cuts the amount of cargo that can be carried to orbit to a fraction of that of an unmanned flight.

And if you can put heavy cargo in an unmanned vehicle then you can make a specialized crew carrier that is far cheaper yet also safer.

We've screwed around long enough with the Space Shuttle (and lost some astronauts that we shouldn't have) and I look forward to the time when the U.S. (along with many other nations) are going into space with vehicles that are more about practicality than about image.

IMO, of course.


Good luck to Japan on Sept 10th.

[IconBasser]

cool.

I wonder if space-truckin' is actually an economically superior method to our current ones... I imagine it wouldn't be at this point, as I think it costs somewhere around 10 Million dollars to launch a rocket now-adays [could be wrong. In fact... I probably am].

[boing]

Amen. The Space Shuttle is a glorious triumph of engineering and national pride, but disposable rockets are cheaper, safer, and more reliable. At least until the space elevator goes online.

[Gard]

Originally Posted by boing

Amen. The Space Shuttle is a glorious triumph of engineering and national pride, but disposable rockets are cheaper, safer, and more reliable. At least until the space elevator goes online.

^what he said. Verbatim.

Man, I love the Shuttle, and when I lived in Orlando, I always made it a point to watch the launch (one of the few things I miss about that area), but the reality is that it fell so far short of the original concept that it is almost useless - despite the absolute "cool" factor.



The whole space elevator idea is brilliant, if someone can find a way to engineer the darn thing. For a bit of an idea of how it will work and what it could achieve, read "The Fountains Of Paradise" by Arthur C. Clarke, who was always at least 10-15 years ahead of everyone else...

[Happynoj]

Originally Posted by Gard

The whole space elevator idea is brilliant, if someone can find a way to engineer the darn thing. For a bit of an idea of how it will work and what it could achieve, read "The Fountains Of Paradise" by Arthur C. Clarke, who was always at least 10-15 years ahead of everyone else...

He was over 70 years late with the space elevator idea though...

[Rattman]

Originally Posted by boing

Amen. The Space Shuttle is a glorious triumph of engineering and national pride, but disposable rockets are cheaper, safer, and more reliable. At least until the space elevator goes online.

Hey hey!! Someone else here loves the "space elevator" concept... Right...right then, get those carbon nanotubes designed and manufactured so the space elevator will become an economic reality . . . . The space shuttles are museum pieces that should have been retired like more than 10 years ago.

[CrispyDelicious]

Makes me think of:

http://www.imeem.com/hiphopmusic/mus...hs-with-wings/

Yup. Space-truckin' hip-hop.

[Philbiker]

Originally Posted by boing

Amen. The Space Shuttle is a glorious triumph of engineering and national pride, but disposable rockets are cheaper, safer, and more reliable. At least until the space elevator goes online.

As far as I'm concerned the Shuttle is an embarrassing failure. The fleet was how many, 5 vehicles? and two of them failed catastrophically killing all on board? Hell, Soyuz probably has a better safety record.

[boing]

Challenger was destroyed by a failed management culture, and while Columbia was fatally damaged by technical risks inherent to the design, the same "we've always gotten away with it before" mentality allowed the seriousness of foam strikes to be dismissed too easily.

Even Apollo killed the first crew while they were still on the launch pad, and nearly killed another in space. That STS has flown 114 missions with a downsized fleet of re-cycled vehicles speaks to the accomplishment, I think.

[Gard]

I'm going with boing here: the failures of the Shuttle system, its falling short of the original concept/design spec notwithstanding, are not with the hardware or those that operated or maintained it, instead they were completely within the management of the program.

It wasn't perfect, but it's the best thing that's ever gotten to orbit to date. Consider this math:

There were a total of 12 manned Apollo missions, one fatal accident (Apollo 1) and one non-fatal accident (Apollo 13). Fairly, you can call 13 a "half failure", no fatalities, but the mission was incomplete (I agree with those that refer to it as a successful failure, probably the brightest moment in NASA history was getting those three men back home alive), so call it a 1.5 in 12 failure or .125 failure rate.

There have been 114 manned Shuttle missions with two failures, both with fatalities, giving it a 2 in 114 or a .0175 failure rate.

That is a SIGNIFICANT difference in success/failure rates.

The Shuttle fell short of its original promise (more due to politics than anything else, Congress refused to fully fund the program), but calling it a "failure" is not quite accurate, is it?

As for the Shuttle versus Soyuz, here's an interesting discussion:

http://www.airliners.net/aviation-fo...ad.main/54404/

[Jazz Ad]

The real issue is that we're relying on 40+ yo technology for manned vessels and launchers. Space programs run on very short money and barely made significant progress since the Moon race era.

[Gubna]

[Jazz Ad]

Kenworth Space shuttle?

[L-A]

Oh, I know what the space truck is there for. Plans in 20 minutes.

EDIT: There.

[hbarcat]

I think that's a very interesting point of discussion about why we catastrophically lost 2 space shuttles and crew. Some say it was inherent in the design and these losses were unavoidable and some say it was a problem with management that ignored problems and took unnecessary risks.

In my opinion, it was definitely both. Management systematically ignored warnings about risks from it's own engineers and gave in to public pressure to make flights very much more often than was safe. Yet there was always a high risk of failure that was irreducible in a design so complex and so much at the edge of rocket technology and that risk is still there to this day. At the beginning of the Shuttle program the risk was about 2-3% per flight while the current risk is about 1/2 - 1% per flight for catastrophic failure including loss of crew according to NASA engineers.

The failure of management was not that they didn't fix problems - they fixed them as fast and as well as could be expected considering how the Space Shuttle was designed and built. Their failure was in misrepresenting to the public that the vehicle was safe (claiming a ludicrously low risk of 1 failure per 100,000 flights).

Richard Feynman personally conducted a thorough investigation of the first Space Shuttle failure and wrote a report to Congress about his findings. Here is a summary:

Personal observations on the reliability of the Shuttle
by R.P. Feynman
http://www.fotuva.org/feynman/challenger-appendix.html


A few anecdotes:

If a reasonable launch schedule is to be maintained, engineering often cannot be done fast enough to keep up with the expectations of originally conservative certification criteria designed to guarantee a very safe vehicle. In these situations, subtly, and often with apparently logical arguments, the criteria are altered so that flights may still be certified in time. They therefore fly in a relatively unsafe condition, with a chance of failure of the order of a percent (it is difficult to be more accurate).

Official management, on the other hand, claims to believe the probability of failure is a thousand times less. One reason for this may be an attempt to assure the government of NASA perfection and success in order to ensure the supply of funds. The other may be that they sincerely believed it to be true, demonstrating an almost incredible lack of communication between themselves and their working engineers.

In any event this has had very unfortunate consequences, the most serious of which is to encourage ordinary citizens to fly in such a dangerous machine, as if it had attained the safety of an ordinary airliner.


......

Let us make recommendations to ensure that NASA officials deal in a world of reality in understanding technological weaknesses and imperfections well enough to be actively trying to eliminate them. They must live in reality in comparing the costs and utility of the Shuttle to other methods of entering space. And they must be realistic in making contracts, in estimating costs, and the difficulty of the projects. Only realistic flight schedules should be proposed, schedules that have a reasonable chance of being met. If in this way the government would not support them, then so be it. NASA owes it to the citizens from whom it asks support to be frank, honest, and informative, so that these citizens can make the wisest decisions for the use of their limited resources.

[KPAX]

India's recent moon mission didn't go so well:
http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2009...5271251695620/

[hbarcat]

Originally Posted by KPAX

India's recent moon mission didn't go so well:
http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2009...5271251695620/

. . . learned valuable lessons from the mission, adding they must look for devices less susceptible to radiation in future expeditions.

Nice.

[Selta]

I think everyone who is saying about the re-vamp of "the Shuttle" needs to take a nice look at NASA's current budget... they really don't have much to work with. We won't be seeing a new shuttle from them I don't think.
Rather, we'll see it come from the private sector, where success has already been demonstrated.
Yes, the shuttles have served their purpose, and have a tenure much longer than ever anticipated. They are well over due for replacement, but NASA will not be able to afford said replacement.
Turn this political if you want, but it's just the facts:
Year Nominal % 2007 Constant $
1990 12.429 1.0% 18.019
1991 13.878 1.0% 19.686
1992 13.961 1.0% 15.310
1993 14.305 1.0% 18.582
1994 13.695 0.9% 18.053
1995 13.378 0.9% 16.915
1996 13.881 0.9% 16.457
1997 14.360 0.9% 15.943
1998 14.194 0.9% 15.521
1999 13.636 0.80% 15.357
2000 13.428 0.75% 14.926
2001 14.095 0.74% 15.427
2002 14.405 0.72% 15.831
2003 14.610 0.66% 16.021
2004 15.152 0.66% 15.559
2005 15.602 0.65% 16.016
2006 15.125 0.56% 16.085
2007 15.861 0.57% 15.861
2008 17.318 0.60% 17.138
2009 17.2 0.55% 17.2
2010 18.7 (proposed) 0.52% 17.7 (proposed)

Comapred to:
1963 2.552 2.8% 24.342
1964 4.171 4.3% 33.241
1965 5.093 5.3% 33.514
1966 5.933 5.5% 32.106
1967 5.426 3.1% 29.696
1968 4.724 2.4% 26.139
1969 4.253 2.1% 21.376
1970 3.755 1.7% 18.768
1971 3.381 1.6% 15.717