Agree that the mission capabilities of NASA are pathetic.
They should be able to do everything of Apollo now faster with less people due to advances in computing and technology.
NASA has been continually underfunded for decades however.
Congress gives them just enough funding to pathetically trudge along without really doing anything.
Unfortunately the future will be private-sector.

__________________
When in doubt, WHACK the GAS and DITCH the brake !!!

Yes, there is such a thing as NORMAL, if you have to ask what is "NORMAL" , you probably aren't !
Failure may not be an OPTION, but it is ALWAYS a POSSIBILITY.
ALL systems are GO for MAYHEM, CHAOS, and HAVOC !

Great thread!

Regarding women in space, an anecdote-

Sally Ride's trip into space was covered by Gene Cernan and Lynn Sherr. I'll never forget Cernan turning towards Sherr sternly saying to her "there are 4 other astronauts on board" or something to that effect.

While social engineering is intended to bring about rapid change, and doesn't usually detract from the accomplishments of the individual, I feel the pushback is a natural reaction.

I was a junior in High School when Challenger exploded. I remember growing very, very tired of hearing about Christa McAuliffe. Yes - she paid the ultimate sacrifice for space travel - but so did six others! The media almost acted as if the other six knew the risks but Christa somehow did not.

The other six had family members at the launch also, but the cameras stayed squared up on her parents about 99.3% of the time.

__________________
I love sanding.

The problem isn't even that NASA is underfunded... Oh, they're underfunded, but underfunded in the bloated bureaucratic sense that they're underfunded for the huge "battlestar" plans they dream up, when you figure in all the bureaucratic waste and corporate welfare and the million other ways big gubmint bureaucracies figure how to pour billions down ratholes and spend it cutting self-made red tape.

Take for instance the Space Exploration Initiative under Bush the elder... I remember the bold proclamation on the steps of the Smithsonian on the 25th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, with the Apollo 11 crew on hand for the photo op, declaring the intention to go to "the Moon, Mars, and Beyond!"... Bush had tapped an old political supporter/friend as head of NASA, Richard "Dick" Truly, himself a shuttle astronaut (and Admiral IIRC) to head NASA. Truly was a "founding member" of the so-called "Shuttle Mafia" (the forces within NASA and in the NASA contractors, political arena, etc that were all dyed-in-the-wool shuttle supporters (at ANY cost, whether it made sense or not or was good for the country, space exploration, or anything else beyond their bottom lines or future "angles" or plans) and he was 100% pro-shuttle and against ANYTHING that would divert resources from the shuttle program or take emphasis or steal the thunder of the shuttle program. He was against the SEI from the very beginning, basically, but he took his marching orders ultimately from the White House, so he had to go along with it, or resign, so he grudgingly did. NASA was tasked to present a plan for the SEI, which Truly ultimately did, and in closed door discussions between the White House planners and Congressional staff, Congress was balking at the cost. Bush sent the plan back to Truly with instructions to "pare it down" and "get the cost down to something more reasonable" and basically Truly did the opposite, opened the floodgates and pretty soon EVERYBODY AND THEIR DOG were adding all their "pet projects" and new technology development projects to the SEI on the "critical path" (mission required hardware/tech) and of course the price ballooned. It went back to Bush's people, INFLATED instead of deflated, and he sent it back AGAIN, and again the same nonsense took place and they went around the mountain again... FINALLY the ultimate plan that Bush was stuck presenting was a $450 BILLION dollar behemoth program full of everybody's pet projects and juicy cuts of gubmint pork, which Congress derisively called "Battlestar Galactica" and laughed out of the halls of Congress, DOA. That was the end of that.

Then we got Bush the younger, which was basically a 100% retread of the old man's presidency (complete with Middle East War to finish what the old man started and called off too soon) complete with a retread of the SEI; this time the "Moon, Mars, and Beyond" program was called the "Vision for Space Exploration" (VSE) and was basically just a modernized retread of the same pet-project dumping ground over-inflated pork-barrel project that the SEI had been. Introduced in the wake of the Columbia tragedy where the technological brittleness of the shuttle system was demonstrated for the entire world to see how antiquated and risky it truly was, the VSE was originally to use a "spiral development" type of program to adapt existing rockets and technology to give NASA new capabilities as the shuttle was wound down and phased out and ultimately retired, while new rockets and vehicles were developed to take its place for the new mission in a graduated approach. That was the plan of then-NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe and Admiral Steidle who were directing and supporting the effort, but of course the shuttle mafia space-state politicians and aerospace industry lobbyists from the shuttle contractors didn't want their golden goose reallocated, so they dredged up plans for a super-duper uber-rocket using repurposed shuttle components in a "cost saving" redesign using 'existing' shuttle hardware, and rammed it through. O'keefe was shown the door and the shuttle mafia's "inside man" Mike Griffin took his place, pushing his version of a shuttle-derived super-rocket (Ares V) bigger than Saturn V as an essential part of the plan, coupled with a back-of-the-napkin design for a shuttle boosted SSME powered upper stage crew vehicle ultimately called "Ares I". It was HEAVEN for the shuttle mafia, as they were now not only selling shuttle parts to NASA and getting paid to operate the shuttle system for NASA, but now they were getting fat contracts to "redevelop" this "existing technology" to operate properly in the new vehicle designs as well! Of course Ares I ran into huge technical problems-- it was a road to nowhere anyway and all the "cheap and easy" promises were completely unrealistic and shot down one by one, and design problems only mounted as the design process continued, until it ultimately was scrapped in 2010, along with the "Constellation Program" that grew out of it, and its partner Ares V's design had bloated alongside it as the anemic performance of Ares I forced more and more of the weight IT was supposed to launch onto the Ares V, which by this point had COMPLETELY maxxed out what little flexibility to increase performance was inherent in the design, and of course also maximized its price.

SO, the shuttle mafia politicos, now desperate that their shuttle derived monsters were now slain, came up with the "Space Launch System" (Senate Launch System) "retool" of Ares V to do BOTH launches, which basically started the whole ball rolling from square one all over again. We've been stuck with it ever since, even as its cost has ballooned FAR beyond any of the original "cost saving" estimates of the "money-saving shuttle-derived" crowd, and taken YEARS longer to develop than ever anticipated with the shuttle-derived crowd's "quicker and cheaper than clean-sheet designs" promises... all while ignoring NASA's OWN in-house studies (RAC-2) that SHOWED that a clean-sheet, serially-staged, kerosene first stage and liquid hydrogen upper staged 3 stage vehicle was the most flexible and per-flight cost efficient design for the "Moon, Mars, and Beyond" mission... (IOW, a modern version of the Saturn V, a reinvented Saturn V type design).

Now SLS is running into the very problems some of us (like me) were saying back in the early 2010's-- that it would end up being OBSCENELY expensive (back then the estimates were a BILLION dollars per launch, now it's up to TWO BILLION per launch, and counting...) and it would basically be obsolete before it ever flew given technological progression in the other launch vehicles then under development... And now, here we are...

In the meantime between the SEI and VSE, we got the bloated ISS program, which is another story unto itself...

As long as you have old shuttle hacks like Gerstenmaier calling the shots within NASA, this is the kind of utter crap you're going to get-- billions and decades spent on what ultimately is corporate welfare to old shuttle contractors to develop a kludge design that's super expensive to develop and operate and is obsolete before it ever flies... and which eats up SO much funding that there's NO MONEY left to develop payloads for the mega-booster OR perform missions with it anyway!

Later! OL J R

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The X-87B Cruise Basselope-- THE Ultimate Weapon in the arsenal of Homeland Security and only $52 million per round!

The difference was, five of the astronauts were "professional" astronauts, two were essentially "guests" or filling seats for various purposes... Greg Jarvis had won a contest at his shuttle contractor company "Hughes" to win a flight on a shuttle as a "payload specialist" (which was basically a "slot" NASA created to allow people to fly on the shuttle with minimal training or responsibilities on a mission, IOW fill in seats with people to create "goodwill" and garner more support for the agency). Unfortunately for Greg Jarvis, he was bumped from an earlier flight to make room for "more important" people like Senator Jake Garn of Utah (a major shuttle contractor state where Morton-Thiokol, the SRB solid propellant manufacturer, was located) and Representative Bill Nelson, who also flew on a prior shuttle flight, purely for the purpose to gain support for the shuttle program and NASA funding in Congress.

Others, like Christa McAuliffe, where flown simply as PR stunts. Interest in NASA and support for spaceflight efforts were seriously flagging in the general public and gubmint which frankly had much bigger fish to fry, and NASA was anxious to stir up public support and gain attention and excitement about the space program. Flying a "dump truck" to space wasn't particularly exciting, particularly with no station to go to at that time and mostly "make work" and experiments "peeing in jars and looking at stars" to do once they WERE in space... So NASA's PR machine dreamed up the "teacher in space" program to increase visibility and support. Along with it they dreamed up the "reporter in space" and "artist in space" program to fly reporters and ultimately artists in space to better connect with a largely disinterested public. Christa McAuliffe was selected from thousands of candidates largely on her gender, appearance, and charismatic personality... in short, because she'd make good PR on TV while "teaching a class from space" via TV downlink from the orbiter. It wasn't exactly coincidental that they timed the mission to coincide with the Presidential State of the Union address either, despite NASA's assertions to the contrary after Challenger was lost. It might not have been a "priority" but it was DEFINITELY a consideration.

At any rate, the other five members of the crew, being professional astronauts, were well versed in the limitations and hazards of the shuttle system, and accepted those risks as part of their chosen profession as astronauts, particularly the commanders and pilots, but the mission specialists (which were largely scientists, doctors, and various other highly trained specialist astronauts) who were professional full-time astronauts were knowledgeable (to varying degrees) of the shuttle's problems and accepted those risks as astronauts. The "payload specialists", particularly those selected for "free rides" and as PR stunts like Christa McAuliffe, were mostly unaware of the shuttle system's problems. Most of what they knew of the shuttle program was the carefully crafted PR NASA had created around the shuttle program, that it was a perfectly safe "airliner to space" providing "cheap, routine access to space". NASA had carefully groomed the appearance of the shuttle program to minimize the problems and overstate the successes and capabilities of the shuttle system. To a disinterested public and non-savvy outsider unfamiliar with the specific technological problems the shuttle program had demonstrated on previous flights and programmatically overall, virtually everybody not intimately involved in the program believed the NASA PR. When the world's foremost space administration, who had taken us to the Moon, said their vehicle was safe and efficient, virtually everyone just took it on faith and believed it. Remember that this was before the current era of massive distrust of government, back when most (certainly not all) people had a basic level of trust and faith in their government, not like now (and perhaps the revelations after Challenger were in some small way part of the beginning of the massive erosion in the public's trust and faith in their government that has become the "norm" nowadays... might be an interesting topic of research). At any rate, such "single mission" minimally trained 'astronauts' like Greg Jarvis and Christa McAuliffe would have had little/no "inside information" on the shuttle hardware and program problems and would have been operating mostly 'blind' other than the general safety training and mission-specific training they would have required to fly the mission. They certainly didn't get the "full picture" from the management, training personnel, or full-time astronaut flight crews. Such subjects were basically taboo and weren't openly discussed; no more than they had been in the lead-up to the Apollo 1 fire-- the crew KNEW the capsule and program had ENORMOUS and SERIOUS problems, but even Gus Grissom had said that if he refused to fly it it would be the end of his career, and so he just had to do the best he could and "hope for the best", and accept the risks. So it was in the shuttle-era astronaut corps, particularly pre-Challenger.

What was MORE dangerous was, NASA itself had come to believe it's own PR, as had large segments (if not most) of the astronaut corps itself. NASA had had several "close calls" and "near misses" in previous flights, in particular with eroded O-rings and burned SRB cases that had fate been slightly different WOULD have resulted in the loss of those prior missions and crews... BUT NASA management took the position that "since nothing bad HAS happened, nothing bad CAN happen" because of those issues, created band-aid approach "mission rules" or "launch constraints" to address the problems seen (most of which NASA also capriciously "waived" when they interefered with the launch schedule or other mission parameters) which basically were totally inadequate and didn't address let alone solve the underlying issues that had caused those malfunctions on previous flights... hence when an SRB casing was returned from the ocean with a hole burned through the O-ring area big enough to put a man's head through on a previous flight, and investigation revealed the O-rings sealed poorly the colder it got, since it was 53 degrees the day of that launch, NASA simply issued a "launch constraint" that the SRB O-rings should be above 53 degrees at launch-- which of course they waived whenever it suited them, as it did with Challenger. NASA had come to believe the shuttle was an "airliner to space" providing "cheap, routine access to space" and that it could be operated like an airliner, instead of the experimental and extremely complicated and technologically brittle system that it was. There was also enormous pressure to meet the over-inflated expectations and cost savings that NASA itself had created for the shuttle system in selling it to the Congress and various presidential administrations over the years prior to the shuttle even flying, hence the enormous pressure to launch and "keep to the schedule" to "prove" the shuttle was what NASA *said* it was and had presented it as.

Christa McAuliffe's flight on Challenger was to just be a beginning. The second "teacher in space" (McAuliffe's backup) stuck it out in the astronaut office for years until NASA finally was willing to try again and rewarded her for her tenacity in waiting it out with a shuttle flight. NASA had intended to trot out a number of "*whatever* in space" astronauts to drum up support and increase public interest and excitement and support for the shuttle program... the next up was the "reporter in space", which long time space beat reporter Jay Barbree was intensively training for (and nearly killed himself jogging on the beach to get into better shape to be in the front-runners for the reporter-in-space astronaut slot, when he collapsed of cardiac arrest on a Florida beach and luckily for him, was seen and gotten prompt medical aid and was hospitalized for and recovered from). The "reporter in space" program was basically in its infancy when Challenger pulled the plug on all those PR stunts-- the "artist in space" program which was to follow it never got off the drawing board, basically, and all discussion of other such programs like the "everyday man in space" selected from the general public was promptly dropped and never heard from again in the wake of Challenger. Had Challenger NOT happened, NASA would SURELY have gone full steam ahead on these other PR stunt projects to drum up public interest and prop up flagging support for the shuttle program. It's also CERTAIN that eventually one of the shuttles WOULD have suffered Challenger's fate, it was only a matter of time, not "if" but "when".

Indeed the "lessons learned" from Challenger were sadly repeated 17 years later with the loss of Columbia and its crew... again a shuttle and crew was lost to a problem which was well known and had been amply demonstrated by a number of near misses and close calls that could have destroyed previous flights, and if it had not happened to Columbia it's almost certain it would have happened to another shuttle at some point, and it was SHEER LUCK that it had not happened previously, or that the damage incurred when it HAD happened on prior flights had not been sufficient to destroy the vehicle on those flights, just like Challenger.

Later! OL J R

__________________
The X-87B Cruise Basselope-- THE Ultimate Weapon in the arsenal of Homeland Security and only $52 million per round!

All-

As if most of you have not heard, the launch for this afternoon at 4:33pm (eastern) is still on schedule as of 10:45 this morning.

Weather is currently a 60% chance of go, but late spring in FL can bring rain and lightning at any time. But, hopefully, the weather will not be a problem today.

Earl



P.S. - Here's a quick status on things leading up to launch (from the NASA site):

"Countdown clocks are ticking toward the launch of a new era in human spaceflight. With today’s scheduled launch of NASA’s SpaceX Demo-2 mission at the agency’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, American astronauts will once again launch on American spacecraft from American soil to the International Space Station. Liftoff of the SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and Crew Dragon spacecraft carrying NASA astronauts Robert Behnken and Douglas Hurley is targeted for 4:33 p.m. EDT from Kennedy’s historic Launch Complex 39A.

Don’t miss a minute of today’s events. Follow the countdown live starting at 12:15 p.m. EDT on NASA Television, on the web at http://www.nasa.gov/live and here on the blog.

Behken and Hurley are spending the morning in the Astronaut Crew Quarters inside Kennedy’s Neil Armstrong Operations and Checkout Building, where they’ll sit down for a preflight meal five hours prior to launch. The crewmates will receive a weather briefing at approximately 12:15 p.m., then begin suiting up in the crew quarters’ Suit Room around 12:30 p.m."

__________________
Earl L. Cagle, Jr.
NAR# 29523
TRA# 962
SAM# 73
Owner/Producer
Point 39 Productions

Rocket-Brained Since 1970

...and scrubbed for today for weather criteria violations. I think the next attempt is Saturday.

Earl

__________________
Earl L. Cagle, Jr.
NAR# 29523
TRA# 962
SAM# 73
Owner/Producer
Point 39 Productions

Rocket-Brained Since 1970

GRR.
Shades of STS-1 in 1981.
Saturday at like 3:22 is next window, followed by Sunday.

__________________
When in doubt, WHACK the GAS and DITCH the brake !!!

Yes, there is such a thing as NORMAL, if you have to ask what is "NORMAL" , you probably aren't !
Failure may not be an OPTION, but it is ALWAYS a POSSIBILITY.
ALL systems are GO for MAYHEM, CHAOS, and HAVOC !

Neat watching the suit-up, capsule ingress, and closeout procedures... The gull-wing door Tesla replacing the astro-van is a nice touch LOL Everything looks SO Star-Trek-y, so slick and modern compared to the shuttle era, where everything looked very much like carryover from Apollo, but then again, the space shuttle was a vehicle built with cutting edge technology-- from 1974 LOL Crew Dragon was built using cutting edge technology from the mid-2000's... 40 years later. (Yeah, I know there were upgrades along the way, but that was one of the problems with shuttle-- it was going to need MAJOR upgrades and integrating the upgrades with the existing technology in the shuttle's other systems was getting ever increasingly more difficult and expensive to do).

Next attempt on Saturday, about 3:30 in the afternoon, about an hour earlier...

Later! OL J R

__________________
The X-87B Cruise Basselope-- THE Ultimate Weapon in the arsenal of Homeland Security and only $52 million per round!