This reminds me of an experience I had in Joshua Tree one evening.
The sun had just set and it was getting dark. I noticed two bright dots in the sky in close proximity to each-other. At first I thought "airliners", but had to rethink my hasty conclusion because the lights weren't blinking. I had to stop walking to really take in the scene: two very bright white dots in the eastern sky, about one closed fist at arm's length away from each other, moving across the sky slowly but consistently.
Having observed ISS before I knew how bright it could be. This certainly seemed like another ISS sighting, but what was the other thing? Then I remembered: the shuttle had launched not too long ago for a mission to ISS. Could I have just witness the moments after undocking? I checked NASA's data as soon as I got home and sure enough the undocking time was just prior to my observation.
This was among the last shuttle missions so I'll never forget that moment!
Immediately wanted to use this for my wallpaper, but was hoping I could find a better multi-monitor version. It still looks cool if you just center it, but it would be even better if the earth weren't cut off.
Couldn't find one, so decided to make it. I basically rotated and cropped it to get as much of ISS as possible, then added a bit more Earth. This way it looks like the planet is naturally just falling below the horizon of your monitors, rather than being cut off. Fortunately the space background is a nice deep black, so that's easy to extend.
The thing that impresses me the most about the shuttle is that it was designed in the mid 60's, built in the 70's/80's, and flew 100+ missions to space over ~30 years. I have a car that was built in the mid-80's and barely trust driving it a few thousand miles a year without it breaking down. I can't imagine what it took to keep the shuttles flying to space for so long without more major accidents.
There were six shuttles and had 25, 28, 10, 39, 33 & 0 missions each for a total of 135 missions and killed 14 astronauts. Not that impressive a record for something that was originally intended to do 55 launches a year.
Something I find more impressive is the B52 Bomber, first flew in 1952, finished production in 1962, expected to be in service until 2040. Will be in service for almost 100 years.
If like an aircraft, you were doing 1 hour of maintenance for every 10 - 20 hours driving, I'm sure your car would be more reliable.
I originally enlisted in the Navy as an Aviation Structural Mechanic (AM), and my first command was an F-14 squadron where I was assigned to airframes. On average, we scheduled 40 man hours for each flight hour (sometimes as high as 60). The F/A-18's that eventually replaced the Tomcats took about half that, but for most aircraft you're looking at 10 MMH/FH, at least, for mx alone.
That said, not all aircraft are created equal, and not all those Tomcats required all 40 scheduled man hours. Maintenance manning, at least in the Navy, is largely determined by man hours. So it isn't uncommon for commands to log as many hours as they can to keep billets, and possibly get a few additional ones. Billets are taken away if you show you can operate at fewer man hours.
I actually looked up the B-52 schedule and from what I could tell its maintenance and duty schedules aren't too out of line from recommended maintenance for a privately owned automobile:
The Boeing B-52 Stratofortress was introduced in 1952. Its mission is presently projected through 2044.[1] That's a ninety-two year mission.
There were 744 built, unit costs range from $9.28 million (1962) to $53.4 million (1988). The most recent new production was 1963, over a half century ago. Effectively the planes are rebuilt periodically, though some original components may remain (I'm not fully up on my B-52 maintenance procedures and schedules).
"Flyaway cost": $9.29m, in 1955 dollars, $82.53 in 2014 dollars)
Present maintenance costs: $10,406/hr.
That is equivalent to the purchase price of the aircraft every 8,000 flight hours.
AAA publishes a "cost of ownership" report for automobiles which assumes 15,000 miles of travel and an average of $0.05/mi maintenance, or $750/year.[2] This suggests that a B-52 level of maintenance is at least twice the going cost of automobile maintenance. But not hugely out of line given relative capital costs.
GlobalSecurity.org claims B-52 total service life being 32,500 - 37,500 flying hours.[3] Over the 92 year life of the program, that corresponds to a duty cycle of roughly 4.6%, vs. 5.7% for the automobile referenced above. It also gives us an annual maintenance cost per B-52 of $4.2 million -- or 5% of the total purchase cost. Over the 92 year life of the aircraft, that's equivalent to purchasing 4.7 new planes.
(Taken from a longer response to an allegation about failure to incorporate demand-side depreciation in GDP, largely deconstructed, demolished, and dismissed here.)
Also, incidentally, I dropped you an email concerning your "Internet with a Human Face" blog posting, seen that by chance?
Cars have annual production runs in the tens to hundreds of millions. There were six shuttles built (one a replacement). Keeping production facilities upon and staffed to create one or two craft per decade was impractical.
Similar arguments apply to military aircraft: the last B-52 was completed in the mid 1960s. Dies and machining for the SR-71 Blackbird were destroyed after the initial production run was completed. Aotomobile production and economics simply don't apply.
At the time, it was a top-secret government project. That plane was the best spy resource our government had. We did not want the plane, nor its designs falling into the hands of others.
To prevent them from falling into the wrong hands and another nation building an SR-71:
> In 1968, a presidential order required that all molds and tools used to build the SR-71 be destroyed so that the plane could never be built by anyone again. This also meant that spare parts could not be made, so if there were any major problems, planes in storage would have to be cannibalized.
http://www.strategic-air-command.com/aircraft/reconnaissance...
> 8. How many SR-71's were built? 50 Blackbird airframes of various designations. The dies or molds were destroyed as directed by then Secretary of Defense McNamara to prevent any other nation from building the aircraft.
http://www.wvi.com/~sr71webmaster/srqt~1.htm
i'm guessing these shuttles got routine maintenance (your car probably did too.. ) but also heavy inspections before and after every trip. We can make things last, it just takes a lot of effort and/or generally a lot of money..
The shuttles required months of maintenance work after each trip, including stripping out and completely disassembling the main engines, plus painstaking inspection and potential replacement of each and every heat shield tile.
All amazing engineering achievements, and yet such white elephants in so many ways. The Mars Rovers and Space probes have been so much more valuable for science.
I wouldn't write off the shuttle so quickly. It flew 100+ missions, brought up the Hubble and helped fix it, brought up parts of the ISS, etc. Sure it didn't get past low earth orbit but it did a lot of great stuff.
Bringing up parts to the ISS doesn't count. It's done even less for science than the Shuttle. :-)
Richard Feynman expressed great scepticism about the Shuttle, and its scientific value. In his books he writes how he never came across a single scientific paper that referenced it -- check out the chapter titled "Committing Suicide" of "What do you care what other people think?".
The shuttle is a tool. If you're growing crystals in space or trying to measure gravity waves, you don't mention the spacecraft, but you have to get the experimental equipment up there some how or you can't do it.
Note: Not saying the Shuttle was the most suitable solution, but I think that 'it was never referenced in papers' is not a useful fact.
No way. Anyone -- anyone -- who wrote a paper based on experimental data retrieved on the Shuttle would absolutely list the Shuttle, the flight, and the date. Basing research on data gathered in zero-gravity (technically micro-gravity freefall) environment would be so exceptional that the specific spacecraft would have to be listed.
It would be like publishing a particle physics paper using data gathered at the LHC and not mentioning that you got the data from the LHC.
Man, the shuttle's cargo bay was rediculously huge. Lofting that whole volume for a routine iss resupply seems insanely wasteful. (I know that it is expensive to loft mass, not volume. But in this case it is volume that needed to be enclosed in a shell that could survive reentry.)
This is astronaut Sunita Williams providing an extensive video tour of the ISS. Gives you a feel for what life is like up there. For example: they need to take care that the use of the stationary exercise bike doesn't set up vibrations that shake the exterior solar panel arrays.
[D]uring the Space Shuttle Endeavour's last trip
to the International Space Station in 2011 May,
a supply ship departed the station with astronauts
that captured a series of rare views. The supply
ship was the Russian Soyuz TMA-20 which landed in
Kazakhstan later that day.
The sun had just set and it was getting dark. I noticed two bright dots in the sky in close proximity to each-other. At first I thought "airliners", but had to rethink my hasty conclusion because the lights weren't blinking. I had to stop walking to really take in the scene: two very bright white dots in the eastern sky, about one closed fist at arm's length away from each other, moving across the sky slowly but consistently.
Having observed ISS before I knew how bright it could be. This certainly seemed like another ISS sighting, but what was the other thing? Then I remembered: the shuttle had launched not too long ago for a mission to ISS. Could I have just witness the moments after undocking? I checked NASA's data as soon as I got home and sure enough the undocking time was just prior to my observation.
This was among the last shuttle missions so I'll never forget that moment!