PakledHostage

But that's just it. Is the glass half full or half empty? A lot of the criticism of the Shuttle program seems to be motivated by people's political ideology, by SpaceX tribalism, by people's belief that the Shuttle's very existence held us back from achieving some "Buck Rogers" vision of the future, etc. But those are all far from objective perspectives and the fervent certitude of those shuttle program haters is tedious. Sure the Shuttle design and program were far from perfect, but don't throw the baby out with the bath water... We learned a lot from the Shuttle program, both good and bad. Appreciate the upsides, learn from the mistakes, then move on and make it better next time. That's a large part of what real world engineering is all about.

Exactly. And in my former life, my own Pakleds were always pushing me to cut margins to "make it go", because being too conservative costs money. But a disaster resulting from stretching things too far is even more expensive so you've got to find a balance. History (and the Rogers Commission Report) finds that the Pakleds in charge of the Challenger launch decision pushed things too far, despite the protests of their engineering "hostages" that the launch would be conducted outside the razor thin limits that were necessary for Shuttle to be a practical, real-world entity.

As an engineer yourself, you know that is a ridiculous assertion... The shuttle isn't a car. It is as high performance a vehicle as ever existed. It is being imparted with literally megajoules of energy per kilogram during launch. It has to operate on razor thin margins or it wouldn't fly. Sure it is far from perfect and 20:20 hindsight has shown that there were areas that could have been improved from the outset. But compromises had to be made during its development and the people making those decisions probably: a) weren’t dimwits b) were privy to information that a bunch of armchair engineers on the internet aren’t considering in their criticisms The people making those decisions back in the ‘70s also certainly didn’t have the benefit of hindsight that we all have today.

And as has been mentioned upthread, that 1 launch failure was largely attributable to management failures. From Page 83 of the Rogers Commission Report:

I don't have time to summarize the whole report and it is better to go directly to the source anyway. You don't need to read the whole thing. Chapters III and IV are a good start.

There's a lot of misinformation swirling around in here that suggests that several people haven't read the Rogers Commission Report. I suggest that those who haven't read it please do so before spouting on about the causes of the Challenger accident and the accident sequence.

Scoff away then... It says more about your anti-shuttle bias than it says about the shuttle.

Thumb typing on a phone, pressing the wrong buttons, then no way (to my knowledge, anyway) to undo the mess. Dumb thumbs.

Dumb thumbs.

None. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Edit: Never mind... I am half asleep.

[citation needed]

Its thrust was significantly greater than Falcon Heavy's and comparing the two launcher's payloads directly is pointless. Sure Shuttle could "only" deliver ~16 tonnes to the ISS, but the Shuttle stack as a whole could place on the order of 90-100 tonnes into orbit, including the orbiter itself. You may scoff at the idea of including the orbiter in that number, but recall that the orbiter wasn't just dead weight. It was a self contained space station, laboratory, construction platform, satellite retrieval system, etc that was also capable of returning to a runway whole and with up to 14 tonnes of payload. And that portion of the orbital "payload" that returned didn't need to splash down into the ocean or plunk down onto the steppes of Kazakhstan and then be thrown away after each use.

Not "thread-jacking" (if that's a thing). Just keeping Falcon Heavy's size in perspective. And if you look back through this thread's 200 odd pages, you'll see plenty of other mentions of the Shuttle in here. But thanks for starting a new thread specifically about the shuttle...

So about 15% less than that crappy little Space Shuttle that everyone hates so much... Just sayin'.

Makes me think of that Simpsons episode where Lisa steals all of the teacher's answer books...

I don't understand your point? If the thing is doomed to re-enter, then the only choice may be where to bring it down. Presumably they'd then want to bring it down somewhere with the lowest probability that debris falls into the wrong hands. If someone is listening for that re-entry using infrasound detectors or whatever, then so be it; it would be coming down anyway.

There is also this (presumably real and attributable to the Zuma mission) photo taken over Sudan, 2 hours and 15 minutes after launch, that seems to suggest that it stayed up at least that long:

And that it stayed in orbit at least long enough to be included in the satellite catalog as "USA 280".

Maybe... If they float. And if they aren't pulverized by the waves first.

Indian Ocean = thousands of km x thousands of km Zuma << thousands of km x thousands of km And the Indian Ocean sometimes looks like this: Nobody is ever going to find the debris, whether that ocean is surrounded by former British colonies or not...

And that is a perfectly plausible explanation: the satellite fails to deploy from the second stage so they intentionally deorbit the second stage / satellite pair before the second stage's remaining fuel bleeds off. Time is of the essence because they need to be able to bring it down somewhere that its debris will never be recovered by hostile parties - somewhere like the Indian Ocean.

Pedantic correction to your pedantic correction: DST is never applied to GMT. When DST is applied in Britain, their timezone changes to BST (British Summer Time). This is analogous North America where, for example, EST (Eastern Standard Time) becomes EDT (Eastern Daylight Time) during the summer months. GMT is the colloquial term for UTC - the mean solar time at the Greenwich meridian - and it is based on the Earth's rotation, not some weird backy-forthy dance that we perform every spring and fall to allow ourselves to take advantage of longer evenings in the summer and brighter mornings in the winter.

So when do the LCC personnel get a bio break?

An hour before sunset. At least they won't freak out the locals again this time...