News:

"The phone is a remarkably complex, simple device,
and very rarely ever needs repairs, once you fix them." - Dan/Panther

Main Menu

Space Shuttle Endeavour up close and personal

Started by Dave F, October 12, 2012, 02:47:50 PM

Previous topic - Next topic

Phonesrfun

Other than the sidewalk viewers, was the general public allowed to follow along behind "parade" style? or did the public have to go hopping from vantage point to vantage point and try to find a parking spot at each place?

-Bill G

Dave F

#16
Quote from: Phonesrfun on October 14, 2012, 12:24:50 AM
Other than the sidewalk viewers, was the general public allowed to follow along behind "parade" style? or did the public have to go hopping from vantage point to vantage point and try to find a parking spot at each place?


There is a fleet of support vehicles and police both preceding and following the shuttle.  There really isn't much of a trailing parade of spectators.  However, tens of thousands of people have been lining the route, sometimes waiting for hours as the shuttle slowly moves along.  Maximum speed of the crawler is 2 MPH, but it is mostly traveling much slower.  The insurance policy provided to the movers is voided if the speed exceeds 2 MPH, so they are highly motivated not to get antsy.  Also, nobody would want to be known as the culprit who damaged this national treasure.  Public streets along the route are temporarily closed, and then reopened after Endeavour passes.  In many cases is it necessary to replace power lines and signal lights that were previously removed to provide clearance.  Shuttle's tail is 5 stories tall, but reaches 6 when mounted on the transporter.  Wingspan is 78 feet.  That doesn't allow much room for error.

The route took more than a year to figure out.  More than 400 trees had to be cut down, and that caused a big community uproar.  The Science Center has promised not only to replace all those trees, but to plant many more in addition.

It is currently Sunday, October 14.  Time in L.A. is ~10 AM.  Endeavour is presently about 1 mile from its destination, traveling east on MLK (Martin Luther King Jr) Blvd.  It did not reach the Science Center last night as hoped due to the unexpected slow going on MLK.  MLK is lined with many trees which could not be cut down, as they were planted in honor of MLK, and the local residents would not have tolerated that.  The 160 wheels on the crawler are all fully articulating, allowing the vehicle to be remarkably nimble at twisting and turning as it moves.  Watching it on TV is really mesmerizing.  Endeavour has spent the entire night (and all of this morning) threading its way past the trees, power poles and buildings on MLK, so far with no problems, but at a snail's pace.  The TV news, which is carrying the event live, figures that they will reach the Science Center in the next couple of hours.  The Goodyear Blimp Spirit of America, based in Carson, CA (a few miles south of LAX), has been providing some amazing aerial coverage.  Surely, some of this must be getting posted on the internet.  More later...

AE_Collector

Just watching some live footage this morning on the morning news here in Vancouver. Looks like it is stuck between a building and a lamp post at the moment from this angle! The announcers are joking that they have dropped below 3km (2 mph) an hour at the moment! Must be getting close though.

I am surprised how close they are letting people get. Looks as though they are directly under the wings standing on the sidewalks on each side of the road. Wish I was there!

Terry

Dave F

#18
Quote from: AE_collector on October 14, 2012, 01:05:17 PM
Just watching some live footage this morning on the morning news here in Vancouver. Looks like it is stuck between a building and a lamp post at the moment from this angle! The announcers are joking that they have dropped below 3km (2 mph) an hour at the moment! Must be getting close though.

I am surprised how close they are letting people get. Looks as though they are directly under the wings standing on the sidewalks on each side of the road. Wish I was there!

Terry
Yes, the wings are passing directly over the heads of the spectators on the sidewalks.  Friday afternoon, the police loosened the restrictions and allowed people to get closer, due to the remarkably-good behavior of the spectators.  Last night, at the final planned pre-museum stop at Crenshaw and MLK, there were more than 30,000 people, and no arrests by police.  That alone is probably some kind of record here in L.A. !

DF

McHeath

#19
Thanks for the pics and the first hand accounting of the move of the Shuttle from LAX.  We here in the Central Valley got rather cheated out in all this, the flyovers skipped us and did the Bay Area, Sacramento, LA and the coast.  Kinda reflects the way the state works I guess.

We'll have to get down to LA sometime to see the shuttle.  Never saw a launch, but we did regularly hear the sonic booms of re-entry back in the early years of the program when they were landing in Mohave and I lived in the South Valley.  

And from what I've read the entire program was really flawed from the start.  The supposedly inexpensive re-usable system ended up being the most expensive single thing ever built, 192 billion at last count that I read.  (1.5 billion per launch, while NASA originally said it would cost about 54 million per launch when the program was being developed, in current money)  They also expected to do 50 launches per year originally!  

Meanwhile the Russians have continued along with 60's era Soyuz systems and had remarkable success.  No one seems to know the actual costs of a launch of a Soyuz rocket, the Russians ain't talking, but estimates from knowledgeable sources start at 45 million per launch.  

The shuttles also killed more astronauts than any other system in history.  A 40% vehicle failure rate. 

Von Braun wanted to continue to develop the Saturn V program, and expected manned flights to Mars in the 1980s.  Ha!  We'll be lucky if we see that in our lifetimes.  The shuttle system seems to have been a significant wrong turn in space exploration.  (my two cents, others mileage may vary) :)

Dave F

#20
Quote from: McHeath on October 16, 2012, 12:39:18 AM
<snip>...And from what I've read the entire program was really flawed from the start...

...The shuttle system seems to have been a significant wrong turn in space exploration.  (my two cents, others mileage may vary) :)...
The idea of a reusable spacecraft was quite ambitious and forward-looking, but the money just wasn't there to do it right (is it ever?).  There are many blogs, documentaries and other sources of info that detail all the compromises that had to be made in order for the project to be approved, so I won't get into any of that here.  That said, even with all the bad stuff, the shuttle still was an amazing and relatively-successful vehicle.  It (they) put more people into orbit than all previous U.S. spaceflights combined, deployed and repaired many satellites, made possible the construction of the ISS (International Space Station) and, in the process, provided employment for tens of thousands of people all over the country.  Not too shabby.  I know I'll miss it.

Endeavour update:

After a 16-hour delay due to mechanical problems with the crawler and the need to squeak by all the obstructions on MLK Blvd, the Shuttle has finally arrived at the California Science Center, to the cheers of thousands of anxiously-waiting people.  Happily, it arrived without sustaining any damage -- not a single scratch.  If you were watching any of the spectacle on TV, you can appreciate the challenge the move posed.  Sarens, the heavy-lift moving company that did the job, has good reason to be proud.  They certainly earned their money.

Endeavour will go on public display in its temporary hangar later this month.  I can't wait to hop on the recently-opened Expo rail line and toodle down to Exposition Park to see it.  In the next three years, a new 200-ft tall building will be constructed to properly display the shuttle in its vertical launch position.  From what I've heard, the science center has managed to rustle up a couple of SRBs and an External Fuel Tank, so the ultimate display will definitely be pretty impressive.

I'll post more pics of Endeavour's stay in the La Tijera parking lot soon.  I've got to find time to pick up the camera flash cards from my brother.

DF

Dave F

Quote from: McHeath on October 16, 2012, 12:39:18 AM
<snip>...And from what I've read the entire program was really flawed from the start...

...The shuttles also killed more astronauts than any other system in history.  A 40% vehicle failure rate....

...The shuttle system seems to have been a significant wrong turn in space exploration.  (my two cents, others mileage may vary)...
I reread your comments several times and felt I had to make an additional response:

Yes, it's true that the vehicle failure rate was 40%, but I think that's a misleading way to view it.  From 1981 to 2011 there were 135 launches carrying a total of 833 people.  Two launches resulted in failures where the vehicle and crew were lost.  Two out of 135 is 1.48%.  Not perfect by any means, but good enough that I would have jumped at the chance to go.  Certainly, each astronaut suiting up for a mission did not have a 40% chance of not coming back.

Incidentally, under slightly different scenarios, both the Challenger and (particularly the) Columbia incidents might very well not have resulted in any fatalities.  But that's a subject for another time...

As a species, we are only beginning to develop the means to explore places beyond the earth.  Maybe someday we will harness wormholes or some other exotic means of transportation but, for now, spaceflight in chemically-fueled rockets is the best we can do.  Far from being a wrong turn, the shuttle contributed a ton of knowledge and experience to our progress in said exploration.

DF

twocvbloke

I think the 40% bit is more a figure of the shuttles lost than the failure rate, if the failure rate was that high, then they'd have grounded the fleet a long time ago... :o

Regarding propulsion, I read on another forum that they have managed to work out how to move something in a similar manner to that of the Warp drive from Star Trek, of course it's only one of those "We could do it, but, money dictates that we won't" things, so I wouldn't expect to see anything on that theory put into practice anytime soon... :-\

I should see if I can find the article...

twocvbloke

Here it is, and just happens to have a picture of the USS Enterprise on the page too...  ;D

http://tinyurl.com/8n4wlnm

There's also a nice long science bit from NASA themselves (33 page PDF file, if you have enough time to read it!!):

http://tinyurl.com/d3bos6x

Dave F

Quote from: twocvbloke on October 17, 2012, 04:12:18 PM
<snip>...I think the 40% bit is more a figure of the shuttles lost than the failure rate, if the failure rate was that high, then they'd have grounded the fleet a long time ago... :o
Yes, "40% failure rate" is, in itself, a misleading and incorrect way to describe it.  40% of the vehicles were eventually lost, but the odds of that happening on any single launch were only 1.48%.

Also, concerning the comment that  "The shuttles also killed more astronauts than any other system in history":  There were 32 astronauts assigned to fly Apollo missions (not counting flights to Skylab or the Apollo-Soyuz mission).  Three were killed in the Apollo 1 fire.  Three out of 32 is nearly 10%.  If 10% of the shuttle astronauts had been killed, the total would have been somewhere near 83 fatalities, many more than those who perished on Challenger and Columbia.   So, from a statistical point of view, getting into an Apollo capsule was far more risky than buckling up in the shuttle.

McHeath

The Russians have launched over 1700 Soyuz rockets with 4 fatalities, the most recent in 1970.  (out of 18 fatalities during spaceflight programs worldwide)  All of the other spaceflight fatalities are from the shuttles.  During the 80's the Russians, Soviets then of course, were launching as many as 60 a year. 

The shuttles are very very cool looking, and a great idea.  But they simply did not work like they were supposed to.  In the end they were shockingly expensive, fragile, and very slow to turnaround for reuse. 

The Soyuz fatalities happened during the early phase of the program, the last 42 years of non lethal flights seem to suggest that the bugs are worked out.  The shuttle accidents happened both early and late in the program, indicating that NASA was unable to fully get control of the problems inherent in the system.  While a 1.48% failure rate on any given launch seems low, the price was very high when it did fail.  Billions of dollars in the vehicle wasted, and of course the incalculable price of the people lost both to their families and friends and to the scientific community. 

I'm not saying that competence is not there in NASA, we went to the moon in the 60's afterall, and the latest Mars programs are outstanding.  But the shuttle program was the product of budget cutting, narrow visions, and flawed implementation.  We could, and should, have done better. 

Of course now we have nothing.  Some private companies are working on launch systems, but I think Red Bull might get a guy in orbit before the United States of America does again.   :-\

And of course I remember exactly where I was when I heard about each shuttle disaster.  Sort of one of those "When JFK was shot" type memories. 

Anyway, this is all my two cents.  I respect your difference of opinion, and have greatly enjoyed your report of the shuttle movements in LA.

Dave F

Quote from: McHeath on October 18, 2012, 02:13:59 AM
<snip>...Anyway, this is all my two cents.  I respect your difference of opinion, and have greatly enjoyed your report of the shuttle movements in LA.
Believe it or not, I actually do agree with most of what you have said.  It seems that NASA  has, more or less, also come to the same conclusion, as the shuttle program has been cancelled --  prematurely, some would argue.  All of that considered, I still think that the knowledge and experience gained from building and operating the shuttles was a big step forward in our quest to understand the universe, expense and tragedy notwithstanding.

twocvbloke

It's funny reading about the successful Russian Soyuz missions, as back in the USSR days, the russians too tried a shuttle system, the Buran, almost identical visually to the NASA shuttles, but they only had a total of about 3 hours flight on the initial test flight, and they were grounded ever since, and the USSR fell and it was left in a hangar, the Buran was still in existence until a few years ago when said hangar collapsed (blamed on inferior USSR construction techniques) and destroyed the vessel...  :-\

Makes you think though that once upon a time, they were though upon as inferior, and as the enemy, yet Russian soyuz rockets have been up and down like a bride's nightie, performing all kinds of missions, for both sides, and are probably going to be about the only thing left for the western world to get us up into the final frontier without some ulterior motive (china comes to mind for that)...

Quote from: McHeath on October 18, 2012, 02:13:59 AMI think Red Bull might get a guy in orbit before the United States of America does again.   :-\

My money's on Richard Branson and his Virgin Space operation, after all, they have proposed a craft named the VSS Enterprise... ;D

Dave F

Here are a few more pictures from our visit to Endeavour's move on October 12. 
More to follow later.

Dave F

More...