WI: No Columbia Accident?

Like it says. For the sake of argument (and to avoid saying "well, then there will probably be a similar accident later due to bad NASA safety protocols"), suppose that post-Challenger changes are more...thorough, and NASA fixes the foam-shedding problem as soon as it comes up, or otherwise manages to avoid the whole issues; STS-107 is unremarkable except as the first flight of an Israeli astronaut. What happens?
 
Probably a delay to the Constellation Program; in fact it might not even be started. There will be less thought about a replacement for the Shuttle. If no accidents happen, it could stay in service until 2013.

A nonexistent Constellation program might result in the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter being built.
 
Probably a delay to the Constellation Program; in fact it might not even be started. There will be less thought about a replacement for the Shuttle. If no accidents happen, it could stay in service until 2013.

Well no, there almost certainly won't be a Constellation program as such. It would probably rely heavily on Shuttle in any case, like previous proposals.

And you are seriously underestimating the Shuttle's possible lifetime. I have a Shuttle book here written before Columbia, and it blithely states that the Shuttle service life might extend as far as 2030 (!). It is likely, barring major accidents, that the Shuttles would serve well into the 2020s.

A nonexistent Constellation program might result in the Jupiter Icy Moons Orbiter being built.

Perhaps. It was quite expensive, though, and the nuclear reactor was always going to be a sticking point.
 
And you are seriously underestimating the Shuttle's possible lifetime. I have a Shuttle book here written before Columbia, and it blithely states that the Shuttle service life might extend as far as 2030 (!). It is likely, barring major accidents, that the Shuttles would serve well into the 2020s.

:eek:

If you say so; after all, the Shuttle is the most capable and versatile launch system ever built. But commercial launches, and steadily improving Soyuz and Shenzen spacecraft, would eventually overtake it in terms of cost-effectiveness. I'd say that starting around 2012-2015, astronauts would start using another launch system (perhaps with SpaceX technology, like COTS) for reaching the ISS simply because it's cheaper than the Shuttle, but the Shuttle would still be used for construction of space stations and satellite repair/recovery, maybe until 2020 or 2025.

Perhaps. It was quite expensive, though, and the nuclear reactor was always going to be a sticking point.

There's some truth to that. If (a few) people protested the launch of the Cassini spacecraft :)rolleyes:) then there would probably be a huge uproar to a nuke-powered spaceship.
 
:eek:

If you say so; after all, the Shuttle is the most capable and versatile launch system ever built. But commercial launches, and steadily improving Soyuz and Shenzen spacecraft, would eventually overtake it in terms of cost-effectiveness. I'd say that starting around 2012-2015, astronauts would start using another launch system (perhaps with SpaceX technology, like COTS) for reaching the ISS simply because it's cheaper than the Shuttle, but the Shuttle would still be used for construction of space stations and satellite repair/recovery, maybe until 2020 or 2025.

Well, the thing is that none of the current commercial systems started development until after STS-107 (there was formerly one that had begun earlier, but it has gone out of business). This was at least partially because Bush announced that the Shuttle was going to be retired, so there was obviously a market opening up. Without that, there is much less incentive, since the possible commercial crew markets are going to be a lot more speculative. NASA is almost certainly going to moot Shuttle replacements during that time, like the Orbital Space Plane program before Columbia, but ultimately it's cheaper in the short term to keep a program going rather than replace it. So it's quite plausible that they just keep soldiering on into the 2020s with no replacement.

Also, Shuttle has the ability to basically fly 2 1/2 missions in one; it can carry a rotation crew, plus supplies, plus bring back stuff to Earth. It would take two Dragon flights to even come close to duplicating that, so it might turn out to be cheaper to fly X Shuttle flights than 2X non-Shuttle flights (even ignoring ATV, HTV, and Soyuz/Progress).

There's some truth to that. If (a few) people protested the launch of the Cassini spacecraft :)rolleyes:) then there would probably be a huge uproar to a nuke-powered spaceship.

Yeah, and it's likely to come in during the development stage. Like I said, it was also one hella expensive mission; the wind-up report estimated a cost of $16 billion, not including launch (that was estimated at another $5 billion for a three-launch scenario).
 
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Yeah, and it's likely to come in during the development stage. Like I said, it was also one hella expensive mission; the wind-up report estimated a cost of $16 billion, not including launch (that was estimated at another $5 billion for a three-launch scenario).

Wow. That's way too much for a recee mission, even to Jupiter's major moons. We could build a friggin' space elevator for that budget!
 
Also, Shuttle has the ability to basically fly 2 1/2 missions in one; it can carry a rotation crew, plus supplies, plus bring back stuff to Earth. It would take two Dragon flights to even come close to duplicating that, so it might turn out to be cheaper to fly X Shuttle flights than 2X non-Shuttle flights (even ignoring ATV, HTV, and Soyuz/Progress).

I don't think so. I've seen a "baseline" number of $500 million per shuttle mission. SpaceX will be able to fit at least two and probably three Falcon 9 flights into that figure in a few years. When you factor in the higher flight-rate they'll definitely be able to achieve, and the greater safety of any design where you don't hang a fragile heat shield next to an ice- and foam-shedding cryo tank ... I can only say I watched this morning's last STS launch with relief that 1) no more people were killed and 2) the great winged pork trough will finally retire to museums ...
 
The commercial providers (Boeing, Orbital Science, Sierra Nevada, and even Space X) had better prove that they can do what NASA's asking them to do, otherwise, it's the Russians and Soyuz for the ISS mission. (Until MPCV and Heavy-Lift arrive, unless Lockheed-Martin-MPCV's prime contractor-can convince NASA to put MPCV on an existing rocket for the ISS mission)
 
Wow. That's way too much for a recee mission, even to Jupiter's major moons. We could build a friggin' space elevator for that budget!

No, no you really couldn't. The tech development alone for a space elevator would probably cost hundreds of billions of dollars, and that's ignoring the actual construction costs. Beyond the well-known tether problems, there are propulsion problems (how do you power the elevators?--remember, just running a wire up doesn't work, for the same reason you need super-materials to build the tether), oscillation problems, speed problems (an elevator would be unsuitable for carrying people because of the long passage through the van Allen belts; unless you had prohibitively heavy rad shielding, anyone on board would be dead, or wishing they were by the time it finished getting to GEO), base problems (ie., where to put it), and so on and so forth. Space elevators are...hard.

GBurch said:
I don't think so. I've seen a "baseline" number of $500 million per shuttle mission. SpaceX will be able to fit at least two and probably three Falcon 9 flights into that figure in a few years. When you factor in the higher flight-rate they'll definitely be able to achieve, and the greater safety of any design where you don't hang a fragile heat shield next to an ice- and foam-shedding cryo tank ... I can only say I watched this morning's last STS launch with relief that 1) no more people were killed and 2) the great winged pork trough will finally retire to museums ...

This may all be true, but it is totally irrelevant. Under the changed circumstances of a no-Columbia world, it is extremely unlikely that COTS and therefore Dragon will look anything like they do today, if they even exist at all. Similarly for Falcon 9, and SpaceX in general.
 
No Columbia Accident Means NASA Stays in Drift Mode

My bad. I thought the Columbia disaster in 2003 was the Challenger disaster in 1986!
After a little Wiki-walking, my conclusion is that STS was on its way out anyway. They were wearing the poor things out and had no real ideas or projects in the pipeline what to replace them with once ISS was done even before the disaster.
My heart goes out to the crew and their loved ones but NASA MSF missions were on borrowed time and gear they couldn't afford to maintain, much less replace because of NASA's ever-shrinking budget.

NASA's management has gotten a lot of flak for being dysfunctional cowboys that didn't want to listen to contractors and rebuild crews noting problems they couldn't fix and management wouldn't address.

The only POD I can see is that Bush I and Clinton don't keep cutting NASA's budget and shook up the complacent culture about safety. That would've prevented the disaster and gotten something in the pipeline that preserves American manned spaceflight after STS is retired.

Even if W was dead serious the day he was inaugurated about going to Mars and making a permanently-inhabited moonbase happen, had exactly the right NASA Administrator in mind, etc getting the heavy-lift capacity and astronaut pipeline would've taken 10X the $$$ allocated to make it happen in a decade.

At any rate that's my 2 cents.
 
Bradley Edwards (Ph.D. - Physics) says otherwise:
http://www.amazon.com/Space-Elevato...=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1310394998&sr=1-1

He says $10 billion, and that's including a fudge factor (can't remember how much off the top of my head).

I seriously doubt it, Ph.D. or no. To put it into perspective, he's guessing it would cost half as much to build a space elevator as it did to build the Channel Tunnel, even though when we built the latter we had a much better handle on the needed technologies (all pretty mature in 1994!) than we do for the technologies needed for a space elevator.
 
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