I just watched the shuttle Atlantis land on spaceflight nows' website.
what a beatuiful machine that is.
a picture perfect landing to finish it's career.
it's almost a sin to stop using them now.
Roy
Roy, I would not go so far as to define it as "sin," but it's close. The "issue" from
my knothole on the universe is that we
threw away the External Tanks that were
designed to be "building blocks" for a
real space station! Each ET would have provided 20,000 ft³ of usable volume in orbit. The "hatch cut-outs" were chem milled into the panels and it only took a small thermit charge to open them up to install hatches (I did the demonstration of this in 1982). The original design was to have seven ET's in a ring with one (axially) in the center. That would have been 160,000 ft³ of useful volume for eight launches! Instead, we have a flying callbox.
The gelatin that solidifies urine was originally developed to provide an ionizing radiation shield for the ET-bases space station. I am three decades out of this loop, but it amazes me that we have
not applied this technology to the ISS. Here we are three decades later and we are
still only playing around in the margins.
Although the exception proves the rule, solar energy strikes planet Earth at a maximum nominal value of 1 kW/m². Solar energy in orbit averages 1.6 MW/m². We
demonstrated the ability to get 5 MW back to Earth from orbit using a particle beam in 1976 (Chair Heritage Program --
Aviation Week & Space Technology, August-October 1977). The recommendation at the end of the Chair Heritage Program was that we needed to do a 40 year test of this "power downlink" before committing to it. Here we are three decades on and we have
still not begun those tests!
I was a "technician" on the (I believe) second "PowerSat" project in 1971-72. I have worked on two more "PowerSat" programs in the interim. NASA is today "planning" to screw around with microwave power transmission (235 W/m² maximum allowable power density) sometime in the next decade. The current "state of production" in solar panels gives an output of 110-130 W/m² from a 1 kW/m² input. Here in Washington State, the average output from a solar panel actually runs in the 30-40 W/m² range. (There is a Japanese research project that claims to have reached 400 W/m² from a 1 kW/m² input, but this is still experimental and, at last report, costs $12,000/m² to manufacture and only has a 2-3 year lifespan.) As it costs $50,000/lbm to launch stuff into orbit, the microwave "solution" is not particularly practical.
The "sin" is that we have failed to act and have turned things over to amateurs. The first contract I ever won "on my own" (i.e. under the auspices of Herr-Meister Muller at Everett Tool & Die) was to do the injection mold and trim-die manufacture for the first HP hand held (but not pocket) calculator. The program was
entirely funded by NASA.
I was paid for my work with genuine U.S. government Hollerith card checks (issued by NASA). Over the next seven years (1968-1975), HP made (according to annual reports) $1.3 billion in
profits from their Corvallis (OR) calculator operations. (HP was exempted from paying taxes on those operations as part of their contract with NASA). When you take all these types of things into account, the Mercury through Apollo programs
saved the American economy during the "recession" of the 1970's. Who today thinks about such things?
That is the "sin."
