Unfortunately, the core problem that lay at the heart of the Challenger tragedy applies to the Columbia tragedy as well. That core problem is the space shuttle itself. For 20 years, the American space program has been wedded to a space-shuttle system that is too expensive, too risky, too big for most of the ways it is used, with budgets that suck up funds that could be invested in a modern system that would make space flight cheaper and safer. The space shuttle is impressive in technical terms, but in financial terms and safety terms no project has done more harm to space exploration. With hundreds of launches to date, the American and Russian manned space programs have suffered just three fatal losses in flightand two were space-shuttle calamities. This simply must be the end of the program.
Will the much more expensive effort to build a manned International Space Station end too? In cost and justification, it's as dubious as the shuttle. The two programs are each other's mirror images. The space station was conceived mainly to give the shuttle a destination, and the shuttle has been kept flying mainly to keep the space station serviced. Three crew membersExpedition Six, in NASA argotremain aloft on the space station. Probably a Russian rocket will need to go up to bring them home. The wisdom of replacing them seems dubious at best. This second shuttle loss means NASA must be completely restructuredif not abolished and replaced with a new agency with a new mission.
Why did NASA stick with the space shuttle so long? Though the space shuttle is viewed as futuristic, its design is three decades old. The shuttle's main engines, first tested in the late 1970s, use hundreds more moving parts than do new rocket-motor designs. The fragile heat-dissipating tiles were designed before breakthroughs in materials science. Until recently, the flight-deck computers on the space shuttle used old 8086 chips from the early 1980s, the sort of pre-Pentium electronics no self-respecting teenager would dream of using for a video game.
Most important, the space shuttle was designed under the highly unrealistic assumption that the fleet would fly to space once a week and that each shuttle would need to be big enough to carry 50,000 lbs. of payload. In actual use, the shuttle fleet has averaged five flights a year; this year flights were to be cut back to four. The maximum payload is almost never carried. Yet to accommodate the highly unrealistic initial goals, engineers made the shuttle huge and expensive. The Soviet space program also built a shuttle, called Buran, with almost exactly the same dimensions and capacities as its American counterpart. Buran flew to orbit once and was canceled, as it was ridiculously expensive and impractical.
Capitalism, of course, is supposed to weed out such inefficiencies. But in the American system, the shuttle's expense made the program politically attractive. Originally projected to cost $5 million per flight in today's dollars, each shuttle launch instead runs to around $500 million. Aerospace contractors love the fact that the shuttle launches cost so much.
In two decades of use, shuttles have experienced an array of problemsengine malfunctions, damage to the heat-shielding tilesthat have nearly produced other disasters. Seeing this, some analysts proposed that the shuttle be phased out, that cargo launches be carried aboard by far cheaper, unmanned, throwaway rockets and that NASA build a small "space plane" solely for people, to be used on those occasions when men and women are truly needed in space.
Throwaway rockets can fail too. Last month a French-built Ariane exploded on lift-off. No one cared, except the insurance companies that covered the payload, because there was no crew aboard. NASA's insistence on sending a crew on every shuttle flight means risking precious human life for mindless tasks that automated devices can easily carry out. Did Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon really have to be there to push a couple of buttons on the Mediterranean Israeli Dust Experiment, the payload package he died to accompany to space?
Switching to unmanned rockets for payload launching and a small space plane for those rare times humans are really needed would cut costs, which is why aerospace contractors have lobbied against such reform. Boeing and Lockheed Martin split roughly half the shuttle business through an Orwellian-named consortium called the United Space Alliance. It's a source of significant profit for both companies; United Space Alliance employs 6,400 contractor personnel for shuttle launches alone. Many other aerospace contractors also benefit from the space-shuttle program.
Any new space system that reduced costs would be, to the contractors, killing the goose that lays the golden egg. Just a few weeks ago, NASA canceled a program called the Space Launch Initiative, whose goal was to design a much cheaper and more reliable replacement for the shuttle. Along with the cancellation, NASA announced that the shuttle fleet would remain in operation until 2020, meaning that Columbia was supposed to continue flying into outer space even when its airframe was more than 40 years old! True, B-52s have flown as long. But they don't endure three times the force of gravity on takeoff and 2000*none on re-entry.
A rational person might have laughed out loud at the thought that although school buses are replaced every decade, a spaceship was expected to remain in service for 40 years. Yet the "primes," as NASA's big contractors are known, were overjoyed when the Space Launch Initiative was canceled because it promised them lavish shuttle payments indefinitely. Of course, the contractors also worked hard to make the shuttle safe. But keeping prices up was a higher priority than having a sensible launch system.
Will NASA whitewash problems as it did after Challenger? The haunting fact of Challenger was that engineers who knew about the booster-joint problem begged NASA not to launch that day and were ignored. Later the Rogers Commission, ordered to get to the bottom of things, essentially recommended that nothing change. No NASA manager was fired; no safety systems were added to the solid rocket boosters whose explosion destroyed Challenger; no escape-capsule system was added to get astronauts out in a calamity, which might have helped Columbia. In return for failure, the shuttle program got a big budget increase. Post-Challenger "reforms" were left up to the very old-boy network that had created the problem in the first place and that benefited from continuing high costs.
Concerned foremost with budget politics, Congress too did its best to whitewash. Large manned-space-flight centers that depend on the shuttle are in Texas, Ohio, Florida and Alabama. Congressional delegations from these states fought frantically against a shuttle replacement. The result was years of generous funding for constituentsand now another tragedy.
The tough questions that have gone unasked about the space shuttle have also gone unasked about the space station, which generates billions in budget allocations for California, Texas, Ohio, Florida and other states. Started in 1984 and originally slated to cost $14 billion in today's dollars, the space station has already cost at least $35 billionnot counting billions more for launch costsand won't be finished until 2008. The bottled water alone that crews use aboard the space station costs taxpayers almost half a million dollars a day. (No, that is not a misprint.) There are no scientific experiments aboard the space station that could not be done far more cheaply on unmanned probes. The only space-station research that does require crew is "life science," or studying the human body's response to space. Space life science is useful but means astronauts are on the station mainly to take one another's pulse, a pretty marginal goal for such an astronomical price.
What is next for America in space? An outsider commission is needed to investigate the Columbia accidentand must report to the President, not Congress, since Congress has shown itself unable to think about anything but pork barrel when it comes to space programs.
For 20 years, the cart has been before the horse in U.S. space policy. NASA has been attempting complex missions involving many astronauts without first developing an affordable and dependable means to orbit. The emphasis now must be on designing an all-new system that is lower priced and reliable. And if human space flight stops for a decade while that happens, so be it. Once there is a cheaper and safer way to get people and cargo into orbit, talk of grand goals might become reality. New, less-expensive throwaway rockets would allow NASA to launch more space probesthe one part of the program that is constantly cost-effective. An affordable means to orbit might make possible a return to the moon for establishment of a research base and make possible the long-dreamed-of day when men and women set foot on Mars. But no grand goal is possible while NASA relies on the super-costly, dangerous shuttle.
In 1986 the last words transmitted from Challenger were in the valiant vow: "We are go at throttle up!" This meant the crew was about to apply maximum thrust, which turned out to be a fatal act. In the coming days, we will learn what the last words from Columbia were. Perhaps they too will reflect the valor and optimism shown by astronauts of all nations. It is time NASA and the congressional committees that supervise the agency demonstrated a tiny percentage of the bravery shown by the men and women who fly to spaceby canceling the money-driven shuttle program and replacing it with something that makes sense.
Gregg Easterbrook is a senior editor of the New Republic and a visiting fellow of the Brookings Institution. Five years before Challenger, he wrote in the Washington Monthly that the shuttles' solid rocket boosters were not safe.
From the Feb. 10, 2003 issue of TIME magazine
He also mentions NASA shutting down their next-gen shuttle program down, but Lockheed-Martin I believe it is, is probably just a few years off from finishing up the Venture Star I believe it is, which is much cheaper to use.
Bah. Had more thoughts but lost track of em. 
quote:
Unfortunately, the core problem that lay at the heart of the Challenger tragedy applies to the Columbia tragedy as well. That core problem is the space shuttle itself. For 20 years, the American space program has been wedded to a space-shuttle system that is too expensive, too risky, too big for most of the ways it is used, with budgets that suck up funds that could be invested in a modern system that would make space flight cheaper and safer. The space shuttle is impressive in technical terms, but in financial terms and safety terms no project has done more harm to space exploration. With hundreds of launches to date, the American and Russian manned space programs have suffered just three fatal losses in flightand two were space-shuttle calamities. This simply must be the end of the program.
Okay first one right there. Can't count the Russian program, but America has just over 100 shuttle missions (the four were each averaging about 25 missions a piece). The shuttle program has a roughly 1 in 500 chance of catastrophic loss of function. That's pretty high, granted, but the fact there have only been 2 shuttle incidents should tell you that 2/100 shuttle missions doesn't mean the shuttle is screwed, it means that someone wasn't doing their bloody job.
quote:
Will the much more expensive effort to build a manned International Space Station end too? In cost and justification, it's as dubious as the shuttle. The two programs are each other's mirror images. The space station was conceived mainly to give the shuttle a destination, and the shuttle has been kept flying mainly to keep the space station serviced. Three crew membersExpedition Six, in NASA argotremain aloft on the space station. Probably a Russian rocket will need to go up to bring them home.
The concept for a space station was not solely to justify the shuttle. I've heard that argument before. Just because the author of this tripe doesn't have the list handy of all the scientific innovations shuttle missions have led to doesn't mean they don't exist. It means the author was a dumbass who didn't do his research.
However, the ISS was designed specifically with the idea that the shuttle would be around to ferry goods and personnel up to the station. However, the Soyuz space craft, although not capable of ferrying all the new parts (the massive solar panels, for instance) is perfectly capable of sending up personnel, and unmanned rockets can send supplies. The shuttle did it a lot better, but the three remaining shuttles will be grounded for a while. The ISS will continue.
quote:
The wisdom of replacing them seems dubious at best. This second shuttle loss means NASA must be completely restructuredif not abolished and replaced with a new agency with a new mission.
Restructured? Abolish NASA? Yes that's right. Two failures, and we should scrap not only the shuttle program, but our entire space agency. That's like saying that if the FBI fails to solve 2 murders (no matter the number of successes), we should get rid of the entire agency. Get real. NASA had it's problems in the 80's and 90's, but by the end of the 90's it was on the right track financially and has had several major successes (Pathfinder and the Mars orbital satellite), with one comparitively minor loss (the Mars polar lander).
Screaming for NASA's blood is assinine.
quote:
Why did NASA stick with the space shuttle so long? Though the space shuttle is viewed as futuristic, its design is three decades old. The shuttle's main engines, first tested in the late 1970s, use hundreds more moving parts than do new rocket-motor designs. The fragile heat-dissipating tiles were designed before breakthroughs in materials science. Until recently, the flight-deck computers on the space shuttle used old 8086 chips from the early 1980s, the sort of pre-Pentium electronics no self-respecting teenager would dream of using for a video game.
The fact the shuttle uses pre-pentium 386 style chips is something computer enthusiasts in the know snicker over. I won't defend the 10 year lag in technology (and it is closer to ten years; the insinuation that it uses technology from the early 80's for all it's computer fun is just plain incorrect). They had to look on eBay for parts on several occasions because no one makes the stuff they really need.
On the other hand, that's why you have an agency of fucking geniuses running things. They created a completely fly by wire (that means there's no physical cable linking how hard you yank on the controls into what the control surfaces do), transatmospheric, orbital aircraft that does all the work necessary to complete missions that need modern answers and land safely back on the ground.
It's one thing to say there needs to be an upgrade (in another thread I was quoted as saying something to the effect that "you can add new dials and breaks to a 69 Stingray, but it's still a 69 Stingray"), but it's completely another thing to infer that the shuttle is a piece of shit.
quote:
Most important, the space shuttle was designed under the highly unrealistic assumption that the fleet would fly to space once a week and that each shuttle would need to be big enough to carry 50,000 lbs. of payload. In actual use, the shuttle fleet has averaged five flights a year; this year flights were to be cut back to four. The maximum payload is almost never carried. Yet to accommodate the highly unrealistic initial goals, engineers made the shuttle huge and expensive. The Soviet space program also built a shuttle, called Buran, with almost exactly the same dimensions and capacities as its American counterpart. Buran flew to orbit once and was canceled, as it was ridiculously expensive and impractical.
The Russian space program was only ever good enough, really, to make rockets. And even then, if you look at their history of space travel, they had some of the worst incidents you can imagine. One of their early rockets detonated on the launch pad at Baikonur and it killed quite few people. It'll be a sad sad day when comparing American high tech to Russian high tech and find us on the losing end.
Keep in mind the Russians are the ones who, at the end of the Cold War, would have only gotten roughly a third of their ICBM's off the ground.
quote:[/qb]
[/qb]Capitalism, of course, is supposed to weed out such inefficiencies. But in the American system, the shuttle's expense made the program politically attractive. Originally projected to cost $5 million per flight in today's dollars, each shuttle launch instead runs to around $500 million. Aerospace contractors love the fact that the shuttle launches cost so much.
NASA has had it's problems with cost overruns. I'd like for anyone to point to one area of government-funded operation that hasn't. Of course everyone wants to hitch their wagon to a cost cow; that's going to happen and a small amount of it should be expected and, unfortunately, accepted. NASA was in bad financial situations in the 80's and 90's, but the new head of operations (amongst other new guard folks) has managed to bring costs down.
quote:
In two decades of use, shuttles have experienced an array of problemsengine malfunctions, damage to the heat-shielding tilesthat have nearly produced other disasters. Seeing this, some analysts proposed that the shuttle be phased out, that cargo launches be carried aboard by far cheaper, unmanned, throwaway rockets and that NASA build a small "space plane" solely for people, to be used on those occasions when men and women are truly needed in space.
We do use unmanned rockets more for ferrying things up. The fact is people need to go into space. The fact is that sending people into space to lend their ingenuity to situations has produced some of the greatest moments of the space program out of what could have been the worst tragedies (Apollo 13, anyone?). It is impossible to foresee every...single...event...that can occur. You don't learn by planning for the worst, and when something unexpected happens, wetting your pants and giving up.
And it's nice for this guy to say the "space plane" is an option, but this is the same guy who seems to be saying costs are too high and we shouldn't be going anyway. Development of new hardware is expensive. The next gen shuttle/space plane got to the computer modelling stage and has been put on indefinite hold due to lack of funding. Can't have it both ways.
quote:
Throwaway rockets can fail too. Last month a French-built Ariane exploded on lift-off. No one cared, except the insurance companies that covered the payload, because there was no crew aboard. NASA's insistence on sending a crew on every shuttle flight means risking precious human life for mindless tasks that automated devices can easily carry out. Did Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon really have to be there to push a couple of buttons on the Mediterranean Israeli Dust Experiment, the payload package he died to accompany to space?
Here comes the martyr speech. He chose to go. He knew the risks, and he knew the importance. John Glenn, Alan Sheppard, Buzz Aldrin; know those names? He was to Israel what they were to us. Whoever wrote this article should be ashamed for turning a hero's life and a hero's death into something tearing down the very institution the hero believed in. Did he have to go? Damn right he did. Not because someone forced him to go, but because there has to be someone to take the first step in ANY DANGEROUS BUT NECESSARY ENDEAVOR. Shame on the writer of this article.
quote:
Switching to unmanned rockets for payload launching and a small space plane for those rare times humans are really needed would cut costs, which is why aerospace contractors have lobbied against such reform. Boeing and Lockheed Martin split roughly half the shuttle business through an Orwellian-named consortium called the United Space Alliance. It's a source of significant profit for both companies; United Space Alliance employs 6,400 contractor personnel for shuttle launches alone. Many other aerospace contractors also benefit from the space-shuttle program.
Ooooo conspiracy! Evil! Underhanded dealings! Big Brother is watching you! Wait...that last one doesn't really fit, does it. Why make the Orwell reference? Makes me think the author of this increasingly infuriating piece of tripe never actually read 1984.
I imagine the fact that multiple companies operate under one banner is to ensure that no one company owns the patents to all of the shuttle's technology. Look at the stealth fighter, for instance. Two companies (Lockheed Martin and McDonnel-Douglass, I believe) have been competing over their stealth planes for years. McD-G has been stalling on bringing out the newer model. The thinly-veiled insinuation is that it's a ploy to get as much money out of the government as it can. The government responded by unveiling LM's (rather futuristic looking) "Bird of Prey" stealth fighter prototype (was covered in Popular Science recently) to sort of hint that they could go elsewhere if McD-G wasn't willing to ante up already (I could have the company names reversed, but the general gist of things is corrupt).
Do you really want that sort of thing going on with the shuttle? And before you say that the government could muscle in and make people play nice, make sure you're not one of those liberal alarmists who squeal like a piggy at the idea of the government doing any such thing.
quote:
Any new space system that reduced costs would be, to the contractors, killing the goose that lays the golden egg. Just a few weeks ago, NASA canceled a program called the Space Launch Initiative, whose goal was to design a much cheaper and more reliable replacement for the shuttle. Along with the cancellation, NASA announced that the shuttle fleet would remain in operation until 2020, meaning that Columbia was supposed to continue flying into outer space even when its airframe was more than 40 years old! True, B-52s have flown as long. But they don't endure three times the force of gravity on takeoff and 2000*none on re-entry.
Actually that's true. On the other hand, the entire next-generation project was put on indefinite hold. And this author continues to not know what he/she wants. To get a space plane or the next generation shuttle, you have to spend money. It won't magically appear in the hangar free of charge. In the mean time, you can't mothball the shuttle program.
quote:
A rational person might have laughed out loud at the thought that although school buses are replaced every decade, a spaceship was expected to remain in service for 40 years. Yet the "primes," as NASA's big contractors are known, were overjoyed when the Space Launch Initiative was canceled because it promised them lavish shuttle payments indefinitely. Of course, the contractors also worked hard to make the shuttle safe. But keeping prices up was a higher priority than having a sensible launch system.
They would be the very companies who'd get lucrative contracts to develop the next generation tech, and design the new model, and test it, and build it. Plus in the interim they're still earning money keeping the shuttles up and running. Tell me again where they'd be losing money? There's more incentive to be developing stuff AND working the shuttle angle than there is to stick with the shuttle program alone.
Plus, it's not like the shuttle is using the exact same technology it's always had. They do upgrade the technology. They do change things and install new components. It's a ten year LAG in technology (IE they're ten years behind), not "we only use technology from 22 years ago"
quote:
Will NASA whitewash problems as it did after Challenger? The haunting fact of Challenger was that engineers who knew about the booster-joint problem begged NASA not to launch that day and were ignored. Later the Rogers Commission, ordered to get to the bottom of things, essentially recommended that nothing change. No NASA manager was fired; no safety systems were added to the solid rocket boosters whose explosion destroyed Challenger; no escape-capsule system was added to get astronauts out in a calamity, which might have helped Columbia. In return for failure, the shuttle program got a big budget increase. Post-Challenger "reforms" were left up to the very old-boy network that had created the problem in the first place and that benefited from continuing high costs.
Would it make anyone feel better if there was a scapegoat? There's a systemic problem, shared by Congress, NASA, the technicians who failed to test things, and plain dumb luck (especially if it WAS just a chunk of ice that knocked something awry in the wing).
As for the much-lauded idea of an escape pod (which, believe it or not, most developers say is reasonably feasible), the cost of refitting the existing shuttles to incorporate an escape pod would 1. ground the fleet, 2. require enormous amounts of redesign to the shuttle, and 3. cost almost as much in the end as it would cost to just develop the next gen shuttle.
quote:
Concerned foremost with budget politics, Congress too did its best to whitewash. Large manned-space-flight centers that depend on the shuttle are in Texas, Ohio, Florida and Alabama. Congressional delegations from these states fought frantically against a shuttle replacement. The result was years of generous funding for constituentsand now another tragedy.
Again...they'd still get paid for doing the same job for the next gen shuttle. This author wants to use the shuttle incident to attack how Congress works, apparently.
quote:
The tough questions that have gone unasked about the space shuttle have also gone unasked about the space station, which generates billions in budget allocations for California, Texas, Ohio, Florida and other states. Started in 1984 and originally slated to cost $14 billion in today's dollars, the space station has already cost at least $35 billionnot counting billions more for launch costsand won't be finished until 2008. The bottled water alone that crews use aboard the space station costs taxpayers almost half a million dollars a day. (No, that is not a misprint.) There are no scientific experiments aboard the space station that could not be done far more cheaply on unmanned probes. The only space-station research that does require crew is "life science," or studying the human body's response to space. Space life science is useful but means astronauts are on the station mainly to take one another's pulse, a pretty marginal goal for such an astronomical price.
Bull Fucking Shit. Ever take any medication through an inhaler (not including asthma medication) and you're using technology derived from space study. Micronization? Space study. Bone loss/osteoporosis information? Space study. We don't send people up just to check one another's pulse. We send people up so we can see what goes on with them in space, then gauge how they function when the come back down.
quote:
What is next for America in space? An outsider commission is needed to investigate the Columbia accidentand must report to the President, not Congress, since Congress has shown itself unable to think about anything but pork barrel when it comes to space programs.
And what can the President do without Congress and (to a lesser extent in this case) the Supreme Court? It's a three party system, dumbass. And there's going to be at least three inquiries (no doubt more), and one of them WILL be an independent inquiry. They said that the night this happened.
quote:
For 20 years, the cart has been before the horse in U.S. space policy. NASA has been attempting complex missions involving many astronauts without first developing an affordable and dependable means to orbit. The emphasis now must be on designing an all-new system that is lower priced and reliable. And if human space flight stops for a decade while that happens, so be it. Once there is a cheaper and safer way to get people and cargo into orbit, talk of grand goals might become reality. New, less-expensive throwaway rockets would allow NASA to launch more space probesthe one part of the program that is constantly cost-effective. An affordable means to orbit might make possible a return to the moon for establishment of a research base and make possible the long-dreamed-of day when men and women set foot on Mars. But no grand goal is possible while NASA relies on the super-costly, dangerous shuttle.
1. Space station before moon base, dumbass. If you can't do one, you sure as hell can't do the other, plus a space station is an ideal staging point.
2. You need the shuttle to complete the space station.
3. A decade's loss of the shuttle would be a waste of money, manpower, and effort that we could quite likely never recupe later.
quote:
In 1986 the last words transmitted from Challenger were in the valiant vow: "We are go at throttle up!" This meant the crew was about to apply maximum thrust, which turned out to be a fatal act. In the coming days, we will learn what the last words from Columbia were. Perhaps they too will reflect the valor and optimism shown by astronauts of all nations. It is time NASA and the congressional committees that supervise the agency demonstrated a tiny percentage of the bravery shown by the men and women who fly to spaceby canceling the money-driven shuttle program and replacing it with something that makes sense.
ARGH! HE DOES IT AGAIN! Don't use someone's words or noble sacrifice to support something they never would have agreed with. God what a dumbass.
quote:
Gregg Easterbrook
Ah okay so it's a dude, who seems to be promoting his own pet theory. But he's not biased! oh no!
[ 02-03-2003: Message edited by: Ja'Deth Issar Ka'bael ]
edit: ubb wins. if this were linux, that would have formatted my hard drive! 
sigpic courtesy of This Guy, original modified by me
quote:
True, B-52s have flown as long. But they don't endure three times the force of gravity on takeoff
actually B-52's arent civil certified but if they were they would be required to withstand a minimum of +5.7g and -2.9g to be certified in the normal category.
Aircraft life is not measured in years or miles. Aircraft life is measured in either hours or cycles. A cycle is one liftoff, a normal flight, and one landing. The B-52 fleet, though 40 years old at this point is still relatively young as far as aircraft life goes.
quote:
This meant the crew was about to apply maximum thrust, which turned out to be a fatal act.
bzzzz wrong again.
"Throttle up" refers to the space shuttle main engines and were not related to the destruction of Challenger. [ 02-03-2003: Message edited by: Kermitov ]
Remembered some of my other comments as well. He says that he personally had warned that the Solid Rocket Boosters were dangerous, but when the one that destroyed Challenger went off, it was one bad O-ring. One piece of badly made plastic that made a leak. Not the entire design of the rocket.
Also, on the note of the computers, yes even now they are pretty low end computers, but if we can get to the Moon and back as many times as we did with FAR cruder computers, I don't think that is any reasonable argument for any sort of failure, and this guy is just massacaring a horrible event into a war on something he knows just enough to be dangerous with.
quote:
Alaan enlisted the help of an infinite number of monkeys to write:
Go go Deth!Remembered some of my other comments as well. He says that he personally had warned that the Solid Rocket Boosters were dangerous, but when the one that destroyed Challenger went off, it was one bad O-ring. One piece of badly made plastic that made a leak. Not the entire design of the rocket.
Also, on the note of the computers, yes even now they are pretty low end computers, but if we can get to the Moon and back as many times as we did with FAR cruder computers, I don't think that is any reasonable argument for any sort of failure, and this guy is just massacaring a horrible event into a war on something he knows just enough to be dangerous with.
I think most people miss the point. Computers designed to go into space are NOT the highest end pentium 12 70 gigahertz screamers because the computers in an application like that are designed to last. Arguing about computing power in one of them is stupid anyway because they are purpose built to do exactly what they do, no more, no less.
quote:
Cornelius Gould Stuyvesant was naked while typing this:
*blah*From the Feb. 10, 2003 issue of TIME magazine
Wow. Where the heck did they dig up that Flat Earther?
(This part I heard from a friend years ago back when he was helping design chips for Cell phones at Qualcomm) First of all, as far as Space is concerned, microchip technology tends to lag 3-4 generations behind regardless of what it is used for. We often don't realize just how protected we are down here on the ground and how muhc that helps us when we are designing new electronics. Up in space, the radiation is MUCH harsher than down here, so it hits and degrades microchips a lot faster than they would down here.
Considering how small memory chips, cpu's, circuit boards, etc... have gotten lately ( to the point where a stray bit of cosmic radiation that gets through our atmosphere can have an increasingly high, but still remote, chance of screwing something up), if we were to just buy a computer and send it up into space it would probably stop working within months, if not weeks.
Thus the reason why space stuff (Most satillites we depend on now a days are still at best in the 486 era of processors power wise) is because they spend YEARS making sure the chips are hardened enough to last up there. (Of course in the Shuttle's case, we have that lag time added in to the difficulty of retrofiting 20 year old technology to take in stuff that's even 5 years old; how easy would YOU find it to say install a Pentium processor into a system designed for 8086 processor speeds and make sure everything still works as it did before?).
Anyways, I digress.
The other anecdote I wanted to mention was about the Israeli Astronaut.
My boss was over in Israel when Columbia took off; he was helping upgrade the Messaging system in their Airport. And he told us yesterday how when the Columbia took off, the entire country was effectively shut down while everyone watched the launch. There were no planes taking off or landing, not many people wandering the streets, etc; everyone was glued to the screens watching the launch with a pride that he had been surprised at. I suspect that That was one of the main reasons (with his own personal goals and desires and his own mission of course), the israeli astronaut wanted to go on that mission and why he went; the desire to be the first of his country to leave the atmosphere and to give his country men the chance to see that despite all that goes on on their home front even they can get above it all (literally in his case).
Anyways, I'm not sure why I'm typing this, it's not even on topics for this. Oh well; I just wanted the chance to get it out I guess. 
