I'm with Skinwalker. To blame this on NASA doesn't seem right. They're doing the best they can with what they got.
As for developing a new form of space travel for NASA will take billions of dollars and years. We'll most certainly have to use the shuttles in the meanwhile to maintain the ISS.
This is a long overdue apology.
Two posts up I made a accusation to Andy867 about being ignorant of the workings of NASA as I defended their ability to handle the Space Shuttle Program's administration.
I was probably very wrong and, Andy, I apologize. Sincerely. This has been nagging at me off and on for quite some time and I finally did a search and dug this post up. I didn't remember that the person I was so scathing to was, in fact you, but I did remember the tone I took.
I read, last summer, a book by Richard Feynman: "What do you care what other people think?" In it, Feynman goes into detail about the Challenger investigation (he was a physicist on the committee) and the culture of NASA (from his description, "cultures" would be more accurate) and how this was the main contributor to the faulty "O" rings.
It struck me then, and the apology should have come then, that my assumption about NASA was completely wrong. Having grown up on or near a NASA base as a child (Wallops Island, VA), I had some pre-conceived notions about NASA. I was always impressed with their thouroughness and dedication to a mission, even the small ones. My family was friends with many NASA administrators and, as a toddler, I even had U-2 pilots and crew show me their aircraft and even babysit for me (a guy named Luke, who everyone nicknamed "Coolhand").
In short I was biased and made an emotional response based on that bias. I still hold NASA in very high regard when it comes to the way they operate, only now, I realize and concede that they are people. And as such, have all the same fallibilities as the rest of H. sapiens. Cultural norms, particularly the pressures of the "bottom line" of money and funding can creep into any organization and corrupt it, especially as it grows in population.
I was emotional and biased and I was far more belligerent than I should have been.
I should be ashamed of myself.
SkinWalker
Just to rack up more bad stuff against NASA, I've been told a conference where some NASA guy proposed cooling a space probe with liquid He-3 Now, recycling He-3 in a zero-g environment is impossible, so they proposed simply allowing it to evaporate into hard vacuum! 3 litres of liquid He-3! AFAIK that's half the available He-3 in the world! Just where did they think that everyone else was supposed to get their helium from after that? At twice the price, at least? Stupid gits with no respect for rare and precious resources.
[edit] Just to give a sense of scale to this, a litre of gaseous He-3 costs roundabout a million dollars.[/i]
What a sec, is He-3 just processed helium? There's loads of helium on the planet.
Secondly, you're not truely losing it because it would still be in Earth's gravitation field, right? It would eventually just settle back into the atmosphere.
Originally posted by razorace
What a sec, is He-3 just processed helium? There's loads of helium on the planet.
Nope. It's a helium isotope (like U-235 is a uranium isotope). And it's an isotope that we don't have in plenty.
Secondly, you're not truely losing it because it would still be in Earth's gravitation field, right? It would eventually just settle back into the atmosphere.
1) We're talking about a deep space probe.
2) He-4 cannot escape the atmosphere, because it is too heavy, but He-3 is lighter by 25%. I don't know whether He-3 can escape but it would seem likely.
3) Even orbiters are so far out in space that the Earth's gravitational field is too weak to hold back He-3
ok, more specifically, is it just rare because it is hard to create or because it's a rare resource that we can't create thru other means?
Well, it's a combination, really: There's not a lot of it in the atmosphere, it's hard to extract, and it's hard to store and transport.
As for your other question, then yes, theoretically we can make it, but not in any significant quantities. Besides, even if we could make industrial scale manufacturing plants, you'd still need a nuclear reactor to power it, even without considering waste energy. I sure could find some better way to use a nuclear plant.
Define "not a whole lot". You can have a element be very low density (like Uranium) but have a whole lot since there's a lot of earth to refine it from.
'Not a whole lot' in absolute numbers. Even if we could improve our means of refining, there'd still be a fairly low upper cap to how much we could produce in total. I don't have the exact figure, but it's a noble gas, and it is fairly light, so one can conjecture that it will tend to escape the atmosphere little by little. Furthermore, it has a high binding energy, which means that it's tough to create in natural processes (He - 4 is much, much more likely). And lastly, it might be unstable, but I'm not sure about that. I'll have to look it up if you want to know.
Its ok Skin, some of my remarks were biased in that I was very upset by NASA's lack of resourcefulness to investigate the possibility that the foam that struck the left wing could cause complications, especially since NASA doesnt have the best track record.
What I found really interesting was about 6 months ago, I read a report that way stating that NASA is looking into making a repair procedure for future flights, which could possibly help prevent future incidences, such as the Columbia accident.
For me, the procedure of space repair would be the standarization of parts for the crafts that go up, and make them into components and sections to that if say a wing does get struck, they can initiate a procedure that would have systems start-up that would act as a counter while that section of the wing is removed and repaired, or possibly have the repair vehicle be able to dock with the shuttle or station whatever and help it maneuver while the repairs to the section of the wing, nose, whatever, are being completed.
Well, the problem with that strategy is that you'd have to waste huge amounts of resources to do so. They discussed it at the time, but the shuttle didn't have enough fuel to make a run to the space station had they discovered the problem in the first place.
Personally, I think they just need to construct a new shuttle design with a titanium hull that can survive reentry. The problem is that we've haven't been giving NASA the funding to do such projects. As such, they've been stuck with an inferior design for decades.
The main problem with creating redundant systems is that it takes up weight, and every kg you want to send into orbit costs valuable fuel. Personally, I think that they should scrap the shuttles and use more specialized craft instead. The shuttle is basically a catch-all: It's designed to carry out the following operations
1) Bring stuff into orbit
2) Bring people into orbit
3) Carry out repair functions and experiments in orbit
4) Fetch stuff back to Earth
5) Fetch people back to Earth
Now if the shuttle can use two, three, or four of those capabilities, it pays to use it, but more often than not, it has only one mission, meaning that you send a lot of useless functions into orbit, which is more expensive and hazardous than using single-purpose craft.