John Glenn's opinions on NASA's future

[Orbinaut Pete]

Former Senator and Mercury/Shuttle astronaut John Glenn has released a statement outlining his opinions on NASA's future – he wants a Shuttle extension!

Here's his full statement:
SpaceRef: "Statement of Senator John Glenn (ret.) Regarding NASA Manned Space Flight".

 

[Mantis]

Sounds like Senator Glenn has it right. The idea of essentaially terminating the US manned space program should be a non-starter.

 

[Director]

Actually, with all due respect, Mr. Glenn's opinion, as well as most of the other legacy astronauts that have chimed in on this subject using their celebrity and notoriety rather than the evidence, is grossly uninformed.

If the order to extend shuttle operations was given today, it would take years to start up production lines and its supplier base, at a cost of $2.4 billion dollars a year for the standing army (which is operations, not production). It just isn't going to happen.

And even if it did, it would still result in an American human space flight gap of a minimum of three full years, at astronomical costs. The reason the shuttle was shut down was for poor safety and high costs, in case you have forgotten, and the time to complain about it (Bush announced it by presidential directive in a speech in January of 2004) is long past. Indeed the time to complain about Constellation pro or con, is over as well.

 

[Urwumpe]

The USA have stopped their spaceflight program so often already, the fear should be gone...

 

[N_Molson]

The quickest, safest & cheapest way : buy some Soyuz, repaint them to the NASA/USA colors, add a few antennas and you've got a manned space program hail:S.P. Korolev).

That's a matter of money, politics & safety. The US could probably get the Orion capsule in less than 1 or 2 years. Most of the work is done. The safety of the capsule concept is proven by Mercury, Gemini & Apollo.

There is no reason why the DeltaIV rocket cannot be man-rated, it's safe compared to the launchers used in the 60's (except SaturnV, which was a technological & industrial wonder)...

(The Shuttle is a wonderful spacecraft, but is also by far the deadliest if you see the statistics. Looking safe & being safe are 2 different things !) wrong argument : if you see the statistics, the Shuttle is safer !

I love the Shuttle too, but there is something like feelings about it. It looks more advanced than any capsule. But to make it safe again, something like a "Shuttle-2" program would be needed, with 6 new orbiters. And that would be awfully expensive !


Edit :

To Urwumpe : I did the stat's and... you're right. I'm quite surprised !

Soyuz : 95 manned flights, 2 deadly failures --> Safety 97.89 %
Shuttle : 132 flights, 2 deadly failures --> Safety 98.48 %

Shuttle wins the match !

 

[Urwumpe]

The Shuttle is actually not much more unsafe than Soyuz, it is just more sensible once something went wrong and kills more people when things go really wrong.

 

[anemazoso]

I agree with some of what John Glenn is saying. He tries to look at the situation from a facts only point of view....with the exception of the shuttle option. I would be in favor of a shuttle extention if this decision was being made a year ago but the fact here is, it's to late. The only reason to justify the restarting of ET production is to build a side-mount variant. Keeping shuttle going is only going to burn money that could be used to field a solid long term solution in a relatively short time as in the side mount. The recently released study of SD HLVs is almost too late but still could be implemented. I wouldn't be against a NASA run effort go the side mount growth path as long as NASA forces the contractors to go fixed price instead of cost plus. At this point what choice would ATK and the like have? Either build a cheaper HLV now with growth options or loose out on the last best hope for big contracts. Continue to spur the commercial sector and start COTS-D.

My point is their is virtually no way we are going to keep shuttle running and field an HLV and a man rated system within any realistic budget NASA is going to get. As much as I hate this situation the fact is we are going to have to live with some kind of gap......though I would be happy to be wrong.

 

[Coolhand]

Buzz Aldrin was on coast to coast am just recently he also seemed in favour of extending the shuttle program.

The orbiter itself actually never failed though, right? it was twice destroyed by its stack. Once you're in space, and if you know your heatsheild is ok then its an easy, safe ride home.

Slightly OT, but I'll add that Buzz was not keen on the idea of establishing a moon base - as there's nothing to do there, but favoured a manned trip phobos, because theres like a sweet casino there or something.

 

[Mantis]

Spaceflight is dangerous and the shuttle is no exception. In 130 odd missions it's lofted several hundred people into space (more than any other space vehicle in history I'd bet given it's crew size) and returned the vast majority of them safely to earth. The problem is that the public, fueled by a hysterical media looking for sensationalism rather than news has a far smaller apetite for risk than astronauts do.

 

[Andy44]

The orbiter itself actually never failed though, right? it was twice destroyed by its stack. Once you're in space, and if you know your heatsheild is ok then its an easy, safe ride home.

That sort of thinking is what led to the two accidents.

That is, past performance is not guarantee of future return. The turkey who gets fed and pampered for a thousand days has no evidence that he will ever be wronged, but then one morning he wakes up and his head gets cut off and he is served for Thanksgiving.

Years ago there were questions about the SSME turbopumps failing, damaging the tail of the orbiter badly. The bugs were ironed out, the reliability was increased, but the consequence could not be lessened, and the possibility cannot be completely eliminated. There are other failure modes on the orbiter which have been mitigated but not eliminated as well.

I don't mean to be a Debbie Downer, though; as far as I can see the orbiters are about as safe as any spacecraft can expect to be.

If we had flown Apollo 120 times, who knows what unseen problems might've cropped up. Even in Apollo's short history, there was at least one near-fatal flight accident, two if you count the final Skylab mission in which the crew was almost asphyxiated during entry and splashdown.

 

[lennartsmit]

From the article

The Russians do not have a heavy lift capability

What about the Proton and the upcoming Angara and Rus-M

Shuttle: The world's only heavy lift spacecraft

Check out this link: [ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_heavy_lift_launch_systems"]Heavy lifters[/ame]

Is he trying to make the US look like the only nation that's able to reach space correctly or is that just me?

Other then that I think the US should have started with finding an alternative of the Shuttle. The Shuttle is for station-construction. as a crew ferry it's just to expensive.

In comparison:
1 person launched on a Shuttle:$1.3 billion dollars/7=$186 million per person
1 person launched on a Soyuz: $48 million dollars (cargo brought by progress included)
(the soyuz may cost as much as $80 million due to rising costs of raw materials)

Agreed, the shuttle can take more supplies up.

Sources:
Shuttle
Soyuz

 

[Coolhand]

i agree that past performance does not indicate that nothing will fail in future.

Thats not what i'm trying to say however... which is that had failures not occured in the stack in the previous 2 accidents, both columbia and challenger would very likely have returned, barring some other mishap, and therefore the orbiter itself is apparently a pretty safe system. If you could just magic it up into space somehow, would you rather travel back to earth in the spaceshuttle, or a soyuz, or any capsule?

If its up to me, i'd much rather catch the shuttle back from the station (err, and looking at the stats, i'd prefer to use it on the way up too!) than rely on a pod, i personally would feel safer on that shuttle, though you seem to think this trust in nasa here is misplaced...? Do you feel that the corner cutting that lead to the accidents is still in play in NASA and that it affects a platform that has returned from space successfully (assuming something on the way up hasn't punched an unprecendently large gaping hole in its heat sheild) 100% of the time?

That sort of thinking is what led to the two accidents.

That is, past performance is not guarantee of future return. The turkey who gets fed and pampered for a thousand days has no evidence that he will ever be wronged, but then one morning he wakes up and his head gets cut off and he is served for Thanksgiving.

Years ago there were questions about the SSME turbopumps failing, damaging the tail of the orbiter badly. The bugs were ironed out, the reliability was increased, but the consequence could not be lessened, and the possibility cannot be completely eliminated. There are other failure modes on the orbiter which have been mitigated but not eliminated as well.

I don't mean to be a Debbie Downer, though; as far as I can see the orbiters are about as safe as any spacecraft can expect to be.

If we had flown Apollo 120 times, who knows what unseen problems might've cropped up. Even in Apollo's short history, there was at least one near-fatal flight accident, two if you count the final Skylab mission in which the crew was almost asphyxiated during entry and splashdown.

 

[Andy44]

I agree, I also would rather ride the shuttle, smoother ride up and definitely back down.

Like I said, the orbiter is about as safe as any other spacecraft we've seen.

But both the orbiter alone and STS as a whole are a very complicated set of machinery, with not much margin for error built in. Do I think NASA is being sloppy now? I'll give them the benefit of the doubt; they seem to have been bitten very hard by Columbia. But what do I know? I don't work on the program, so I have no way of knowing personally.

The thing to remember is that before each accident they thought they had it all worked out. It's the stuff they aren't thinking of that hurts them the most. The morre complex the system, the more this applies.

I'm not calling them irresponsible; I'm just saying that 30 years of flying STS and it still teaches its creators new tricks.

 

[Coolhand]

Sure, lets not forget that its really the first of its kind too. And given the complexity its remarkable to me how well its performed.

interestingly, in a slightly grim way, despite its complexity which you might think would be its achilles heel, the reasons why the orbiter has twice been destroyed are relatively simple... as simple as piece of foam in the last instance... Both being easily preventable.

Unfortunately i think the orbiter itself has become a victim of being popularly percieved as some sort of death wagon that we're better off without... people think shuttle they think of Challenger exploding and bits of Columbia raining down over texas, and its completely undeserved... Its just that they've seen the footage a hundred times on tv and news and the shocking images stick with people more than the images of it returning successfully, which of course only gets the briefest of mentions on the news.

 

[tblaxland]

as simple as piece of foam in the last instance... Both being easily preventable.

ET foam spalling has proven to be anything but simple to prevent, demonstrated by the fact that it is still an ongoing issue. Keeping external foam coatings on metal structures in extreme environments has been a problem for a long while - even the X15 had issues with it 45 years ago.

 

[Coolhand]

No, i mean preventable in that it could have been inspected and the re-entry prevented.

 

[Andy44]

The X-15 had an ablative heat shield which failed, not foam, IIRC...

But yeah, the foam was a problem going all the way back to STS-1. Young and Crippen said all kinds of stuff was hitting the windshield on the way up.

The problem is that there are so many little things that can get you, and you only have limited people and time to chase them all. So you worry about what you think is the big stuff, or stuff which doesn't require a flight stand-down, and you use statistics of successful flights to lie to yourself about the foam and the o-rings and the other warning signs, since those are too hard and too expensive to fix right now.

 

[tblaxland]

The X-15 had an ablative heat shield which failed, not foam, IIRC...

Different purpose, but the spray application of it was what I was thinking of. Perhaps they are not really comparable because the density is different by an order of magnitude anyway...

 

[AirSimming]

Whether Soyuz is safer than the Shuttle or not depends on how you look at it. Potentially, Soyuz can become as safe or as unsafe as the Shuttle or any other such a machine. Historically, Soyuz was safer than the Shuttle for now. To my knowledge, there was no crew loss in the Soyuz program for 39 years now, whilst there was two crew losses, 14 astronauts, in the STS program within 17 years. Combined with the potential requirement for STS-400 and OBSS and backflip maneuver, that makes me think the Shuttle potentially is unsafer than Soyuz, additionally because the post-Columbia investigation suggested to look for a replacement as far as I know.

Soyuz is the primary crew vehicle for the ISS program from the beginning. And it will become the primary crew vehicle for US astronauts whilst the Shuttle will be retired not only because of money or because they just decided to do so. There are reasons for this. But of course we mostly won't hear that it's actually more unsafe than many thought before STS-107 pointed to it. One has to get rid of design flaws, or if not possible in case of STS, one should look for a new system...

Anyway, this is how ESA looks at Soyuz:

http://www.esa.int/esaMI/Delta_Mission/SEM8XK57ESD_0.html

SpaceRef also hase a high opinion of Soyuz:

http://eu.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=12839

 

[Orbinaut Pete]

Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Texas), Ranking Member on the Senate Commerce, Science, and Transportation Committee, today said she strongly supports former Senator and astronaut John Glenn's statement highlighting the risks of relying only on the Russian Soyuz vehicles for American access to the ISS.

SpaceRef: "Hutchison Strongly Supports John Glenn Statement on NASA".