Space Shuttle is the Model T, its time to consider the Model A or reconsider the X-33

The space shuttles are awesome, they can go into space over and over,they fly at over 12,000mph, nobody else but "US" have it save for the disposible Russian Buran....

However....
Its time to move on to better, operating the shuttles is like trying to keep a 70's year car on the road and putting a million miles a year on it, realistically thats a good comparision.

Parts were needed recently, where were they available at? E-Bay!

Some of the computing equipment is pre-pentium, pre-486, actually its more like Pac-Man 8066 chips, what were those? well put it like this, there is no comparison, hi tech watches have more computing speed!
It costs currently 500 million $$$ per shuttle launch, to replace a Shuttle, over 2 billion.

Its time to advance, the X-33 could be the next orbital entry vehicle, look really good at the opening video of the ST-Enterprise show and see the difference, we have the technology, its time to move up and on.
I did a Google search on the X-33, try it and see what its about, there is a lot on the net about it.
Here is a link for the X-33

Re: Space Shuttle is the Model T, its time to consider the Model A or reconsider the X-33

I have to agree, the cost per launch of the shuttle program has gone up to that of a disposable due to the reworking of the shuttles after each mission. The idea was a cost savings and reliability. If we can accomplish better costs with a newer system lets do it.

Re: Space Shuttle is the Model T, its time to consider the Model A or reconsider the X-33

A Shuttle launch costs far, far more than a disposable spacecraft. A launch costs maybe $100M (mostly the vast infrastructure, not consumables or amortization of the Shuttle). But the costs of NOT launching the Shuttle (in reality costs not associated with launching, not consumables and not amortization) is around $500M per launch (assuming one launch per vehicle per year).

The Russians, by contrast, will do a launch for ~ $25M and they can do it at a profit and with better reliability. The communists cancelled Buran because it didn't make economic sense, not because they couldn't do it – it's the capitalist Americans who seem unconcerned about the economics.

It is no accident that nobody uses the Shuttle for launches any more, commercial, military or scientific unless there is no other choice (and they design from the start now to avoid the Shuttle). The Shuttle can lift enormous weight, offers tremendous payload and mission flexibility – and simply costs too much for anyone to afford, even military.

I recently saw a quote on usenet: "The Space Station exists to give the Shuttle somewhere to go".

At this point I see little future in NASA for space work. Congress will never fund anything like the Shuttle again and NASA seems incapable of a no-sacred-cows rethink (such as, forget reusable spacecraft and forget this space-plane stuff until AFTER it's shown to be cost-effective).

However, I disagree with the complaint about old electronics. The Shuttle guidance system is a lot more like an industrial control system than a desktop PC running Microsoft bloatware. It's likely that it doesn't need any more speed or memory than it did 20 years ago, and if it works (and it does) then don't mess with it. It's the constant redesign and re-engineering of new components that kills costs and reliability – the better solution is to stockpile needed parts that are going out of production (this is standard practice in industrial systems). Payload and non-vehicle systems have gotten fancier but those run on fairly standard and modern notebooks.

The Shuttle is a marvelous piece of technology and we may not see its equal again in our lifetimes. Unfortunately we need to face up to the fact that there is a reason as to WHY we will not see it again...

PS. I have no objection to space-planes if they can be competitive – I just want to make sure that cost and reliability are the core goals and the platform is merely a way to get there, rather than the other way around. I would hand NASA a Proton/Soyuz blueprint & infrastructure plan and forbid any deviation that wasn't cheaper and at least as reliable.

PPS. I recommend the Dennis R. Jenkins shuttle books to fans. He releases a new edition every few years to cover new missions. It's a quality piece of work in a field with few worthwhile entrants.

Re: Space Shuttle is the Model T, its time to consider the Model A or reconsider the X-33

Yeah I think the space shuttle has seen better days. Probably a bad idea from the beginning actually. What about the Buran? If we could get some made in China Burans, that could be the way to go.

Why the hell are we giving not so cheap thrills to 7 "astronauts" anyway. Did anyone in the shuttle do anything that couldn't be better done by machines, and at a lot lower cost? I saw a picture of the 7 "astronauts" and it sure looked like a government affirmative action program to me.

If we had bought those 7 some tickets to Disney Land instead, they could have gotten their thrills at a significantly lower cost to the taxpayers.

Now if we could send more senators up in those things, I'd be all for it. How many senators could we pack into one of those things? Those *******s seem to have nine lives though, probably all make it back.

Re: Space Shuttle is the Model T, its time to consider the Model A or reconsider the X-33

Hubble telescope work requires real astronauts - it's not designed for robots. Moreover, those guys really do need a lot of training and practice to do it because of the difficulty of even the simplest work in zero-G and the delicacy of the task - those astronauts earn their ride. And I wouldn't trust waldos (remote operation) for this.

But for the most part the passengers are superfluous, especially the pilot & commander. The launch and landing are almost entirely automated; I believe it is impossible to manually do any of it except final landing approach (it's too difficult for a human to juggle all of the target distance, velocity, flight dynamics & attitude, etc). It's my understanding that the only thing the autopilot can't do today is put on the brakes after touchdown.

(other tasks required to stay in orbit like opening the cargo bay doors probably require things the guidance system can't do alone)

The Russians can do resupply missions entirely unmanned.

The cost of the Shuttle itself is a problem but not the big problem – I vaguely recall that per-flight amortization was $10M to $20M (probably more now that it's clear the five will never average 100 flights per vehicle). The problem is the infrastructure required to operate it. NASA spends $2B+ per year to operate 4 Shuttles at an average of 4 to 5 flights per year. That is what kills you, and it means the Shuttle would be unaffordable even if someone gave it to them for *free*!

Re: Space Shuttle is the Model T, its time to consider the Model A or reconsider the X-33

It's been my experience that a government agency can do things well, and a government agency can do this on a reasonable budget, but never both at the same time. To try to do both can result in bad projects, and budget overruns, but most likely both at the same time.

I think part of the problem is that we've tried to turn NASA into a partially self supporting operation. I believe NASA should be a research agency, and that it's time we formally left launching satellites to commercial operations or the military. It's a waste of NASA talent to dump objects in orbit, and they'll never be able to compete with a for profit group.

I'm wondering if we should stop playing around with earth orbit things, and direct our efforts toward interplanetary travel. Just a thought.

Re: Space Shuttle is the Model T, its time to consider the Model A or reconsider the X-33

The issues with NASA are legendary. You might want to check out "Kings of the High Frontier" by Victor Korman. Tied for one of the best books I have ever read. Even though it is a work of fiction, how it describes what happens when NASA steps into the ring is right on the money.

You also might want to check out http://www.xprize.com/! This is the real space race and I can't wait until it comes to fruition!

Re: Space Shuttle is the Model T, its time to consider the Model A or reconsider the X-33

Regretfully it looks like the Russian Buran is a copy of the US space shuttle. Did a news search in Google, apparently the X-33 and X-34 are cancelled and will not fly due to budget cuts. I wouldn't be surprised if the next successor to the shuttle will be Canadian made. After all, a lot of the current shuttle hardware is Canadian made (Canadarm for instance).

Re: Space Shuttle is the Model T, its time to consider the Model A or reconsider the X-33

There wont be a replacement for this shuttle. They can't build one anymore, there is no pipeline anymore. Most of the vendors and companies that built the different parts have gone on to other projects and the expertise and specialized rigs and equipment are gone.

To restart the shuttle assembly line, while technically possible, would take years and cost nearly as much as starting from scratch. Indeed, it would be starting from scratch.

They have no real choice but to go forward with a new design. However, they haven't shown much gift for managing large projects recently. As Henry Spencers email sig says "Faster, Better, Cheaper requires leadership, not just management."

As far as the older tech. I believe that the onboard systems have all been updated fairly regularly. But many of the systems are still running original system, especially on the ground. The reasons for this are complicated as you might imagine. NASA has been sinking LOTS of money and effort into replacing the original data handling systems but has been completely unable to do this. Much of the work I believe has been trying to replace the custom hardware/embedded software systems with off the shelf PC hardware running linux. But this has been a total failure.

The reason is in the nature of modern systems vs real custom system design. The shuttle systems are a very fast stream of data which has to be processed and run through decision making matrixes and the result has to be guaranteed to be out in a certain amount of time. For example, an over pressure reading at one point necessitates a valve closure in another within 20ms or the pipes burst. Regardless of what else is in the data stream or what else is happening. With the original embedded systems the engineers knew exactly how long it would take the bytes that made up the reading to get into the system, exactly how long it would take to fall through the decision making logic and exactly how long it would take to formulate the control response and send it to the next controller and close the valve. This was possible because these folks designed the hardware and the software that ran on it in a non-multitasking environment in a specialized data handling language that they developed to be able to do this specific task. This is a real time system in the true sense of the word, and that is what's necessary.

No modern computer is a real time environment. They have not been up to the task. No matter how much money and pentium horsepower and extra memory they cannot guarantee 100% when what will happen. Imagine if there is a page fault and the system swaps between that first event above and the second. Don't try to make a computer hardware/software argument of how to do it using a realtime kernel extension or some such, NASA spent hundreds of millions on this and it simply can't be done.

So the original system now runs on new custom hardware, and it continues to run the whole place this way. The readouts and screens are all updated but the backbone of the whole place is still running the same programing language that was developed to get us to the moon.

I would not call this a failure, I would call it a great triumph of the original engineers (one of whom is a great friend of mine which is why I know anything about it) The tragedy is that NASA has lost their mind-share. The great people that developed that original system have all left (or retired) and the younger folks of that caliber are no longer attracted to work there. Speaking with one fellow he commented that the last A should be at the beginning because it was administration that they did the most of. There are still terrific people, some of the best and the brightest, but they are not being given the leadership that they need to make it work. It's a management crisis. But it's also an incredible task. I don't think most people realize the complexity of what they really do to make any of this work at all. When you talk to the people who are really building it and putting it together it's truly staggering. Perhaps blaming managment is too easy, but I've worked in enough large companies to have that be my gut reflex

These things are very hard. Building a new system and getting it to work will be equally difficult. If the higher ups try to apply standard IT buzzwords, more money will go down the pit and more people will die when it goes wrong. The reality is that no managment is trained enough to make the choises. They have to start with the problems and come up with good solutions, whatever they might turn out to be. It is current management thinking everywhere that I've worked to get what they think are the best tools first and then tell the engineers what to do with them. That doesn't work.

Re: Space Shuttle is the Model T, its time to consider the Model A or reconsider the X-33

Has anyone remotely thought for a second that the in-flight software could have been hacked or had a trojan virus to cause the shuttle to do one or several maneuvers that would cause it to lose control? like a runaway rudder, or too steep a re-entry angle?

Re: Space Shuttle is the Model T, its time to consider the Model A or reconsider the X-33

I don't think that is possible, or at least practical. First of all they aren't running windows so there aren't any "hack the shuttle" scripts that you can download.

The software is all crc'ed and verified at the byte level as it is uploaded to the shuttle (or at least it used to be, I remember specifically times they had to reload things because of a single bad byte in one place or another) But the simple fact that they can reload it all from remote control means that it's theoretically possible.

But again, it's not simple stuff. You can't just run the "increase re-entry angle" script, because there isn't any such thing. Though I have no first hand knowledge of it I've known and spoken at length to 2 separate programmers who have worked on various systems and they are very large and complex. I don't think that there is any one person who could do such a thing even with full access to the site and systems.

I would call it extremely unlikely, but not impossible.

Re: Space Shuttle is the Model T, its time to consider the Model A or reconsider the X-33

The guidance system has five computers, not one. The fifth is running an entirely independently-written set of code. All include considerably self-checks and sanity checks on the others.

The point was to say "rather that assume no computer ever orders an insane action we'll check for it". That includes the software load fingerprint as well as outputs as it runs.

You can never say never but you'd have the hack the software, and the checker, and the loader, and verifier, and you have to do it on all five computers (which includes two entirely different sets of software).

In short, a sabotaged computer looks like one that has failed (in hardware or software) in a particularly bad way, and there's a lot of work that went into dealing with this possibility.

Re: Space Shuttle is the Model T, its time to consider the Model A or reconsider the X-33

Originally posted by Stefan:
I wouldn't be surprised if the next successor to the shuttle will be Canadian made. After all, a lot of the current shuttle hardware is Canadian made (Canadarm for instance).

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<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Nobody is doing a space-plane concept any more unless NASA is requesting it and doing 100% of the funding. Getting one vehicle to do so many things makes it expensive and unreliable.

There have been a few small attempts at reusable vehicles such as ROTON, but these have attracted zero investor interest and will continue to get none until the government shows a willingness to use private (investor-financed) launchers. I'm not sure that any reusable vehicles are being seriously pursued right now.

The Pegasus launcher is about the only "independent" effort I can think of to launch anything.

Re: Space Shuttle is the Model T, its time to consider the Model A or reconsider the X-33

Originally posted by James S:
No modern computer is a real time environment. They have not been up to the task. No matter how much money and pentium horsepower and extra memory they cannot guarantee 100% when what will happen. Imagine if there is a page fault and the system swaps between that first event above and the second. Don't try to make a computer hardware/software argument of how to do it using a realtime kernel extension or some such, NASA spent hundreds of millions on this and it simply can't be done.

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<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Are you sure you aren't mixing up software and hardware issues? I'm not sure what you mean by "no modern computer is a real time environment".. I believe that modern computer hardware is certainly capable of real time tasks (if that is what you mean). I'm sure there are other applications of modern hardware where the operating parameters are similar if not far stricter than the ones on the shuttle.

Software is another matter. Your reference to page faults and system swaps are software issues. Of course, commercially available operating systems are going to be less reliable and less efficient than dedicated software written from the ground up. Trying to adapt their systems to something like Linux is obviously going to be problematic, if not impossible. But that doesn't mean that its the fault of modern hardware.

Graham

Re: Space Shuttle is the Model T, its time to consider the Model A or reconsider the X-33

You know, the sad part of all of this is that no excuses can be made. For all the complexity that James S is trying to wow us with is the very reason it shouldn't be so complex.

If its too complex for NASA to hack it, NASA shouldn't be doing it. But the real issue is that NASA is a bloated government agency with a monopoly on space flight. This Bus Goes Nowhere

The X-Prize will take care of that soon enough. And, hopefully 5 years from now, we'll all have our Skycar. With those two issues put to bed, hopefully NASA will be also.

Re: Space Shuttle is the Model T, its time to consider the Model A or reconsider the X-33

I agree - I would have hoped that systems could be revamped using more modern technology to reduce complexity, not increase it.

While the 'if it works leave it be' argument is ok for a while, progress is all about the drive to do things better.

I also think that the shuttle fleet should have been retired by now.

Graham

Re: Space Shuttle is the Model T, its time to consider the Model A or reconsider the X-33

Originally posted by Stefan:
Regretfully it looks like the Russian Buran is a copy of the US space shuttle. Did a news search in Google, apparently the X-33 and X-34 are cancelled and will not fly due to budget cuts. I wouldn't be surprised if the next successor to the shuttle will be Canadian made. After all, a lot of the current shuttle hardware is Canadian made (Canadarm for instance).

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<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Buran is long been past tense. It was all Russian technology – only the shape and basic layout was a US copy. To this date it has never been explained why it was built – it was a military project, and the Russian military has never said what the purpose was.

X-33 didn't work well and was grossly over budget. X-33 was just a bad idea: an SSTO, new engine technology, new heat-shield technology: how many things do you slap onto one project with no possible budget growth to cover problems?

X-34 was a lot more reasonable. At the time of death it was a suborbital vehicle. It died when NASA switched gears and mandated design efforts to avoid embarrassments. X-34 had chosen redundancy through having multiple vehicles in case one failed, keeping the systems on each vehicle cheap and simple (this is THE RIGHT way to do it). After hardware was being built NASA suddenly required redundancy within vehicle systems (after having approved the initial design) but refused to pay for any of it. It's likely this was just an excuse by NASA to get the project killed since nobody is going to accept that kind of nonsense.

Re: Space Shuttle is the Model T, its time to consider the Model A or reconsider the X-33

Originally posted by Gun Nut:
The X-Prize will take care of that soon enough.

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<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Has X-prize been funded? Last I heard they didn't yet have the prize money.

A better task for NASA might be to develop new systems such as an aerospike engine and to leave the taxi service (Shuttle) to others.

Re: Space Shuttle is the Model T, its time to consider the Model A or reconsider the X-33

While Graham is right that page faults and memory swaps are OS specific incidents James´ original statememt that standard PC hardware isn´t and can´t be real-time capacable is nonetheless 100% accurat.

The underlying reason being the interrupt driven nature of the original IBM PC which is still the base of all current standard PC designs.

Just for short - all and everything inside the standard PC is interrrupt driven, hardware AND software wise, each and every device or task requests and gets attention from the CPU through interrupts - which as the name implies INTERRUPTS the CPU operation then - those (in the case of hardware interrupts) gets sorted by number inside the interrupt controller and then routed through to the CPU which through its interrupt pin (in the case interrupts are allowed at all through a specific bit in a control register which can be set to disabled in case another routine just CAN´T get interrupted while its running) gets stopped in what its doing, moves all register data to its stack, looks up the Interrupt number in the interrupt controller, then jumps to the right routine for that specific interrupt number which it finds in its interrupt table - then starts to work on whatever it gets told by that routine - when finishing this it tries to get back to its "original" task and tried to get back its data from the stack and continues to work and what it was doing before ... just to get interrupted again by the next interrupt happening.

Originally all input and output was done that way - over time some things (like the parallel output being enhanced from interrupt driven and in reality mostly polled to DMA driven by EPP and ECP parallel port hardware modifications) got modified but the underlying principle is still the same and this is the reason no matter what OS is running on it it just can´t get anything close to realtime - there once was (and still is) an attempt at an real-time Unix named QNX from canada running on standard PC hardware but it always was only a niche of a niche typ of thing and still AFAIK never was "really" real-time based on the underlying hardware design.

Klaus

Re: Space Shuttle is the Model T, its time to consider the Model A or reconsider the X-33

Originally posted by James S:
There wont be a replacement for this shuttle. They can't build one anymore, there is no pipeline anymore. Most of the vendors and companies that built the different parts have gone on to other projects and the expertise and specialized rigs and equipment are gone.

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<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Agree 100%. And everyone who remembers WHY the blueprint chose one way rather than another is retired. You either have to mindlessly copy all pointless details (re: Russia's B-29s) or redo the design process just to understand what you're building.

As Henry Spencers email sig says "Faster, Better, Cheaper requires leadership, not just management."

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<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">Here's an interesting way of looking at it: who was the Max Faget or Wernher von Braun of the Shuttle program? Were there any leaders?

This was possible because these folks designed the hardware and the software that ran on it in a non-multitasking environment in a specialized data handling language that they developed to be able to do this specific task. This is a real time system in the true sense of the word, and that is what's necessary.

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<font size="2" face="Verdana, Arial">I'm not sure I agree that I agree with this section. Nobody's got a gun to their head saying that they must turn on "protected" mode or the pager or virtual memory. A modern desktop is very much a 1970's-type environment when in DOS.

Other groups do real-time just fine in industrial environments. JPL does it for space probes. It's not new or an unusual capability. People rarely use Pentiums for this sort of thing (and obviously never Windows) and it becomes a lot more practical once you get away from Wintel. I suspect the JSC people struggling with this are doing something silly (ordered to "Use off-the-shelf parts!" and thinking PCs) and ought to talk to JPL about how to do it, or track down some of the original Shuttle guidance software team.

The Shuttle has ancillary computers to do e-mail, planning & scheduling and I suspect these are what is giving them trouble. The critical guidance system (auto-pilot) works pretty well and ought to be left alone unless there's a reason to mess with it. Payload controllers and the non-critical systems are probably fairly up-to-date somewhat off-the-self laptops and probably have lots of problems, but they're also not mission critical.

The market for industrial process control computers does not resemble the PC market in any way. We're used to constant churn in hardware and software which the industrial customers basically forbid: they want to buy one system, get it working, and then buy the same thing over and over for potentially decades. They expect to be notified when parts go out of production and assume they'll wind up stockpiling spares.

I worked at a chemical plant in the mid-1980's that used core memory and FORTRAN process control software because that was what was developed in the early 1960's and worked fine: given a reliable and debugged system they weren't going to change it without cause. None of the hardware was that old and they bought new parts all the time. The new parts weren't cheap but they were a lot cheaper than the cost of designing and debugging a new system.