[Nuclear1]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-12589183?utm_source=twitterfeed&utm_medium=twitter

The US space shuttle Discovery has docked at the International Space Station.

It has docked for the last time, as it is set to be retired after this mission and placed in a museum.

This is the 13th time it has flown to the space station, where it is to deliver a new store room and a sophisticated humanoid robot.

Only two further flights remain by Endeavour and Atlantis, which Nasa wants concluded in the coming months.

Discovery set off on its 11-day mission from the Kennedy Space Center on Thursday.

Only two more left guys...

[watsisname]

It's sad the shuttle program's almost over.   I'm hoping to drive down to the Cape and watch one of the last two launches.

[General Battuta]

End of an era.  Last time I was down there a bunch of the (unhappy) Cape staff said the orbiters were basically in factory condition. Just no money to keep them flying.

[Kosh]

The shuttles should have started being phased out 20 years ago. About time these dinosaurs went extinct.

[Nuclear1]

The shuttles should have started being phased out 20 years ago. About time these dinosaurs went extinct.

Well...with the MIC sucking away all of NASA's funding, they have to make do with what they have, which isn't much.

And they've done a wonderful job with what they have.

[General Battuta]

The shuttles are amazing, great pieces of engineering. Whether they're economical is a moot point, we have nothing better and no will has ever existed to try.

[Kosh]

The shuttles are amazing, great pieces of engineering. Whether they're economical is a moot point, we have nothing better and no will has ever existed to try.

No, they most certainly were not great pieces of engineering. Thanks to meddling by the Air Force, the designs were overly complicated and needed huge support staffs to maintain properly. Classic design by committee.

The fact that we have nothing better has quite a bit more to do with NASA's bureacratic inepitutude than any percieved advanced engineering.

http://www.idlewords.com/2005/08/a_rocket_to_nowhere.htm

[General Battuta]

The shuttles were fantastic pieces of engineering. There's simply no disputing it. No orbiter has ever suffered a significant failure. Arguing that the design was compromised from the beginning is tangential; they performed beautifully in a role never before attempted by mankind.

Could they have been designed better? Also indisputably - nothing in that link is new to anyone paying attention - but it hardly matters. Everything can be improved, of course, but no improvement has been made because no will has existed to do so. There could be a thousand things that might have been done better, but they will all pale beside the achievement the orbiter represents.

The shuttle remains a monument to engineering excellence, simply because it is so complex and yet performs so well. Its retirement is the end of an era.

[StarSlayer]

Colombia disintegrating during re-entry seems like a significant failure.

[General Battuta]

Colombia disintegrating during re-entry seems like a significant failure.

That was a failure with the launch system, not the orbiter - the entire ramp assembly was a stupid idea, and (as with Challenger) clearly shouldn't have flown. All the warning signs were there, NASA just ****ed it up. Culture of risk.

[StarSlayer]

Fair enough.

One of the astronuts, Stephen Bowen, is from Mass and served on SSNs in the Navy, so in his words he's been to the deep blue and the dark blue, which I thought was pretty cool.

[General Battuta]

I mean there are clearly plenty of things wrong with the orbiter and the STS as a whole, but that doesn't stop it from being basically a miracle machine. There are situations where you can argue that your glass is half empty, but when the other half is full of cancer-curing fire-suppressant fat-burning champagne and it tastes good even though it's like 50 Kelvin and you're bathing in the methane seas of Titan, you don't really have a right to complain.

By which I mean that while there are many things wrong with the system as a whole they're basically excused by the fact that it meets an enormous engineering challenge, doesn't blow up every other launch and successfully moves people and machinery into and back from space. Those aren't exactly low requirements - the Russians certainly couldn't meet them.

I'd like to have some badass replacement that is way more economical but it hasn't happened and honestly it's probably not going to.

[Kosh]

By which I mean that while there are many things wrong with the system as a whole they're basically excused by the fact that it meets an enormous engineering challenge, doesn't blow up every other launch and successfully moves people and machinery into and back from space. Those aren't exactly low requirements - the Russians certainly couldn't meet them.

The Buran and the Soyuz disagree. The real problem with the shuttle design was entirely the fault of the Air Force, who gave up developing their own spaceplane and instead hijacked NASA's next gen spacecraft plans, pushing for features which required costly redesigns (time wise and greatly adding complexity), and in the end we ended up with an overengineered and overly expensive product with said features never being used by the Air Force. Engineering isn't just about meeting challenges, good engineering is about making your designs as simple as possible.

And yes, we should judge the merits of program on its affordibility because that was one of its main selling points. But in addition to needing thousands of people to maintain each of the orbiters (whose salaries greatly drove up the cost of the program), just based on economies of scale it wasn't possible to launch more than two of them in a month because NASA could only build 24 of those big orange fuel tanks a month.

Read about it, in all its details

[General Battuta]

You're now literally linking stuff I read years ago and repeating points you made in your last post. You're not telling me anything I don't know, I just have a different view on the topic than you do.

Judging the merits of the orbiter is separate from judging the merits of the program. There are fantastically overengineered and expensive cars which are completely unsuitable for the task of wide sale to middle-class Americans so they can move their families about. This does not stop them from being amazing pieces of engineering.

[Herra Tohtori]

You shouldn't retire a system until you have something ready to replace it...

From the perspective of space research, retiring the shuttles is bad until something shows up that can do the same job. Unfortunately, like Battuta pointed out, it doesn't seem likely in near future - there is not much commercial or political interest in space flight at the moment, aside from unmanned probes and communications satellites.

Which is very disappointing as a whole.

[StarSlayer]

"DArgo, I havent heard of anything like anything before. My planet doesnt even go to the moon anymore."

[Mika]

You shouldn't retire a system until you have something ready to replace it...

...unless the said system was mostly useless in the first place.

Remote controlled vehicles have done a lot of research in the recent years. I don't see the point of sending a man to pick up stones from the surface of the Mars when a robot can do the same with a fraction of the cost and risk. If there were a way to colonize Mars, that would be different, but at the moment the remote controlled missions seem to be a lot more effective.

Upper atmosphere missions then, I don't know. Perhaps fixing satellites could be something that cannot be done with a robot, and that might be a reason to develop a new shuttle. But my understanding of this is that it is a lot more cheaper to build a new satellite and let the old one burn instead of fixing it - and there is only one case where this has been done, that being the Hubble telescope. The telescope was defective from the start though, and that should have been noticed in the testing before it was on the orbit.

[General Battuta]

You need at least some kind of manned launch capability for an important reason - you need to study the effects of prolonged time in space on the human body if you're going to have any chance of moving people on long journeys.

[Herra Tohtori]

The space shuttles are just as mostly useless as Earth is mostly harmless. It's all about the scope of things, and the shuttles have definitely filled a certain niche for heavy lifting and manned space flight that will remain empty in the immediate future. Undoubtedly as soon as need arises, a system will be put together to fulfill requirements. I hope it happens in our life time...

[Mika]

The space shuttles are just as mostly useless as Earth is mostly harmless. It's all about the scope of things, and the shuttles have definitely filled a certain niche for heavy lifting and manned space flight that will remain empty in the immediate future. Undoubtedly as soon as need arises, a system will be put together to fulfill requirements. I hope it happens in our life time...

I beg to differ. Shuttle itself is by no means necessary. Presently, rockets can fulfill the cargo lifting cheaper and safer. The cargo can as easily be humans. Actually, I've been wondering why NASA has kept the shuttle program as long as they have. I remember reading that the original plan was to build an assembly line for shuttles and that the final number of the shuttle fleet should have been around 20. What happened is that NASA built 4 prototypes, and each, according to my understanding, requiring slightly different tools. No wonder this approach accumulated costs as the assembly line was never realized.

After each mission, quite a lot of stuff still needs to be renewed from the shuttles so I don't wonder the comments that the shuttles are still in pristine condition. Though the skeptic in me would like to question that too.