Hadn't it occurred to anyone that the Spruce Goose--with throttles thrown wide open, no cargo, and only a few tons of fuel where dozens would be needed--had managed to make 70 feet for 45 seconds? That it was so badly damaged by this sortie it would never fly again? How would we win battles with this plane--make the enemy die laughing? Couldn't anybody see the aviator's new clothes were not clothes at all?
The Spruce Goose remains today in the hangar where it came to rest 33 years ago. The record for most expensive flying machine has long since been surpassed. There's something heavier, too.
Columbia is the first of at least four space shuttles. It will blast into space like a rocket, and sail back like an airplane. It isn't a "capsule," as they called the Mercury orbiters, or a "module," as they called the Apollo moon machine. It's a spaceship, designed to be used over and over again, instead of thrown away like a rocket. Much cheaper than rockets, much more versatile, it is the key to the next phase of space exploration.
The space shuttle is to the Apollo module what the DC-3 was to Wright's flyer. With a fleet of these But something doesn't look right about the astronaut's new clothes, either. The Columbia has yet to fly. It's several years behind schedule, with no imminent prospect, despite official assurances, that it will fly at all. But more important, if it does fly, it won't do anything those old throw-away rockets couldn't do.
You've probably heard, for instance, that the space shuttle will retrieve damaged satellites and return them to earth for repair. Not so. It can't. Simply and flatly, can't. And, according to The Washington Monthly's sources, flying the shuttle will cost more, not less, than flying those old disposable rockets. If you haven't heard this, don't be surprised. After all, reporters clustered around Howard Hughes for years, begging to know when the Spruce Goose would fly and scribbling down the predicted dates.
Nobody spent much time asking what it would do once it got up there. Getting it up there was the drama. What it would do was Waning Moon Even as the Apollo 11 moonship was being primed for what President Nixon called "the most important event sine Creation"--the August moon landing--plans for a space shuttle were being drafted. By spring of , Apollo's impending success seemed assured.
The technological precision of Apollo was nothing short of remarkable; its builders and astronauts accomplished more than even the most optimistic among them predicted.
But even NASA officials had to admit that being on the moon didn't amount to much. Getting there was all the fun. Some space venture had to be found to succeed Apollo.
A special White House "task group" was formed to select the next program. Planetary missions were rejected as technically feasible but absurdly expensive. The moonbase was nixed as useless. The space station sparked a lot of interest, but it too was overwhelmingly expensive. Its components would be so heavy, NASA's entire budget would be required to pay for the launch rockets--to say nothing, as space proponents are wont to do, of building or servicing it. The task group members reasoned that a reusable space shuttle would be the logical first step to prepare for a space station.
Only the economy of a reusable shuttle could make the space station affordable. The shuttle was to be nothing more than that--a space truck to lug things back and forth to orbit. The craft itself would have no scientific function. It was assumed by task group members that, once the shuttle was approved, somebody, could devise some missions for it. The Saturn V moon rocket, for example, weighed 3, tons at blast-off, and you got exactly seven tons back--that dinky little "command module" the men rode in.
At first NASA asked for an all-reusable shuttle. Grumman and McDonnell-Douglas came up with a plan that called for two huge winged ships, each with its own pilots and engines, mated piggyback.
They would blast off together, with the larger ship-the booster-spitting fire for the first 10 to 20 miles of altitude. Then, fuel spent, it would circle back to land like an airplane. The Office of Management and Budget balked. Ten billion, it gasped--out of the question!
Design of the horse was referred to committee, where a compromise was found. A partially reusable shuttle was conceived. In this plan, the shuttle's main part would be the "orbiter. It would be a winged rocket-powered flying machine about the size and weight of a DC-9 airliner. This orbiter would carry 65, pounds of cargo into a low orbit, stashing the goods in a byfoot bay. It would be flown by a crew of two to seven astronauts. Not ridden by strapped-down guinea pigs like those capsules and modules, but, down by pilots.
Flown during landing, at least; the rest of the time they would pretty much watch the instruments. But there would be people in control--a concept popular with people, who seem to be less in control of things with every passing day.
The shuttle ship would be mounted piggyback on a cavernous foot long fuel tank carrying the frigid liquid gases to power the shuttle's main engines. Strapped to it would be two booster rockets, powered by reliable solid fuel. Their motors would be the fiercest ever imagined generating 2. Those insatiable trolls would burn through their fuel in scarcely a moment. Bolts and hoses fastened, the shuttle spaceship, its fuel tank, and the boosters would blast off together from Cape Kennedy, a tremendous troika of power.
At an altitude of 20 miles, the spent boosters would fall away, floating down on parachutes. They would be fished out of the sea and used again.
The shuttle's own engines would keep firing until, nine minutes after launch, their fuel was exhausted. Then the empty fuel tank would tumble away, to burn up in the atmosphere. Since it's only a tank, NASA reasoned, it's cheaper to let it fry than bolt on all the navigational and heat-shielding hardware needed to get it back. The shuttle would go about its business in orbit. Lacking main-engine fuel, it would employ two small reaction rockets for maneuverability and to slow it down for reentry.
Once back in the air, it would glide toward a landing field, setting down like an airplane but "dead stick"--without any power to compensate for miscalculations. After landing it would be refitted, mated to a new tank, strapped to two refilled boosters, and blasted off again. The agency explained that having a crew of pilots aboard would add "flexibility" and "new dimensions" to space flight, but otherwise NASA wasn't terribly specific about what the astronauts would do.
It was assumed that with the horse under construction some carriage maker would build something for it to pull--a space mission only a shuttle could handle. Meanwhile, petting the animal became an obsession. It would be "the dawn of a new age" Nixon , a "breakthrough" Ford , the first "commuting to space" Carter.
James Gehrig, staff director of the Senate Commerce Committee's space and science subcommittee, sums up the two features that shuttle backers have cited again and again: its "wonderful advantages of higher payloads and lower costs.
Didn't quite make it that year, and won't this year. NASA officials won't be too upset if it doesn't fly next year either because when you're not launching them, you don't have to explain awkward things like higher costs and lower payloads.
Arc lights gleam off its impossibly smooth surface. They shine round-the-clock, as technicians work double ten-hour shifts, six days a week, trying to make the shuttle spaceworthy. Columbia was supposed to be finished last March, when it was transferred from the factory of the prime contractor, Rockwell International. No one is certain when--or even if--the remaining work will be finished. The drydocked Columbia represents at once all the shuttle program's problems.
They are: delays; cost overruns; performance underruns; and lack of work for the horse to do. Delays, the least important problem, are the easiest to understand. The rockets it is supposed to replace have always been throw-away affairs for very pragmatic engineering reasons: the fiendish forces of space flight twist and sizzle machines into scrap.
Rocket engines are essentially explosions with a hole at one end. Exploding gases roar out the hole, shoving the rocket in the opposite direction. The act of firing does such violence to the rocket engine, immolating and warping its components, it's impractical to use again even if you can get it back. Yet the shuttle's main engines will have internal pressures three times greater than those of any previous large engine, NASA says and the goal is to use them on 55 flights before an overhaul.
To truly grasp the challenge of building a space shuttle, think about its flight. The ship includes a byfoot open space, narrow wings, and a large cabin where men must be provided that delicately slender range of temperatures and pressures they can endure.
During ascent, the shuttle must withstand 3 Gs of stress--inertial drag equivalent to three times its own weight. While all five engines are screaming, there will be acoustic vibrations reaching decibels, enough to kill an unprotected person.
Then the shuttle must glide along, under control, at speeds up to Mach 25, three times faster than any other piloted aircraft has ever flown. After reentry, it cascades through the air without power; finally thunking down onto the runway at m.
The like-sized DC-9 lands, with power, at m. Rockets are throwaway contraptions in part so that no one piece ever has to endure such a wild variety of conditions. The shuttle's design goal is to take this nightmare ride times.
The main cause of delay is currently the shuttle's refractory tiles, which disperse the heat of reentry from the ship's nose and fuselage. Columbia must be fitted out with 33, of these tiles, each to be applied individually, each unique in shape. The inch-thick tiles, made of pyrolized carbon, are amazing in two respects. They can be several hundred degrees hot on one side while remaining cool to the touch on the other.
They do not boil away like the ablative heat shieldings of capsules and modules; they can be used indefinitely. But they're also a bit of a letdown in another respect--they're so fragile you can hardly touch them without shattering them. Fixing them to the Columbia without breaking them is like trying to eat a bar of Bonomo Turkish Taffy without cracking it. Most of the technicians swarming over Columbia are trying to glue down tiles.
The tiles break so often, and must be remolded so painstakingly, the installation rate is currently one tile per technician per week. All this mounting was supposed to be finished before Columbia left Rockwell's factory. When it wasn't, the work had to be resumed at the Cape. The move also allows computer testing to proceed while the tiles are being mounted.
Some suspect the tile mounting is the least of Columbia's difficulties. The tiles are the most important system NASA has ever designed as "safe life. If they fail, the shuttle burns on reentry.
If enough fall off, the shuttle may become unstable during landing, and thus un-pilotable. The worry runs deep enough that NASA investigated installing a crane assembly in Columbia so the crew could inspect and repair damaged tiles in space. Verdict: Can't be done. You can hardly do it on the ground. According to the computers, as long as you can bring the shuttle back into the atmosphere, you can fly it to the airfield even if the tiles are damaged.
Former Apollo astronaut Richard Cooper doubts the computers know what they're meeping about. Many of the projections are based on the magnificent accuracy of the Apollo landings. Apollo went to the moon, came back, and dropped all its little manned modules into a target area about the size of Los Angeles International Airport.
But Apollo modules were ballistic projectiles. They were slightly asymmetrical and thus had a little lift for control, but basically they fell like well-aimed stones. The science of ballistics is much more precise and predictable than the art of flying. To assume that experience with one is the same as experience with the other is to confuse a slingshot with a seagull. The only way to find out about something as big and balky as Columbia, Cooper says, is to launch the thing and see what happens.
Computers have never flown with the unpredictable combination of damaged tiles that a shuttle may experience. They've never been whacked by a sudden, nonprogrammed gust of jetstream wind. They've never flounced like a twig on the crazy rapids of "bias"--the bland physics term for unexplained variations in the earth's gravitational and magnetic fields.
These are the wild, uncharted rivers of space. Unknown; unknowable; beyond programming. To find out if your ship can cope with them, you have to take it up there.
One Year And Holding The people struggling with the tiles serve a useful function. They make the rest of the project look good by comparison. IUS, will float away from the shuttle and fire satellites into the high altitudes that shuttles can't reach.
Yet Secretary of Defense Harold Brown recently assured Congress that IUS is not a problem--because of "revised operational requirements and shuttle program delays. Columbia is to be powered by the first large, high-performance "cryogenic" rocket engine, burning liquid hydrogen for fuel instead of kerosene. Cryogenie engines can achieve the impossible dream-combustion efficiency of 99 percent. But the shuttle's cryogenic engines have the annoying habit of blowing up.
Not conducive to 55 reuses. The failures, of course, are taking place on the test stand. During development, it's assumed that some engines will blow up; pushing them to the limit is part of testing. But the shuttle engines often start flaming under normal operational conditions. And then there was this embarrassing snag that made checking their reliability all but impossible. Do you want to help?
Just register and log in to edit our pages. You can also join our rainbowsix contributor community on our Discord. Categories : Siege Patches Patches. Hidden category: Pages with hard coded colors. Contact Us Send an email Chat with us Contact. This page was last edited on 22 October , at Licenses for other media varies. Year 6. Crystal Guard. North Star. Crimson Heist. Year 5. Neon Dawn. Shadow Legacy. Steel Wave. Void Edge. Thanks a lot in advance. I run a iphone 4, 32 GB, with iOS4 4.
Posted on May 8, AM. Page content loaded. May 8, AM in response to platon57 In response to platon Typically, when you update a desktop Windows or Mac OS, you just get the changes patch or delta update. Apple chose to provide all iOS updates as the full OS, rather than just the changes. I suppose that's because Apple felt it was a safer, more robust, easier-to-manage process. Users simply download and install one file, and whatever version of the system you're on, you know it's complete and correct.
Prior to the advent of the iPhone. You'd get multiple versions of the same update, depending where in the world you were and what features you wanted; you'd get separate updates for the basic OS and for the radio; the installation processes was multi-step and had severe bricking risks. So the Apple process was, at the time, a breath of fresh air. It was easy to understand, didn't need any technical knowledge, and was consistent.
There is a suggestion that iOS5 will include the ability to update over the air i. If that happens only speculation thus far - nothing official from Apple , that will help those of us who have less-than-perfect broadband in my case, I get reasonably solid 2MB connection, but I have to update 3 different devices, so I get the pleasure of 1.
If the over-the-air method comes to pass, I suspect we might get an option - take just the changes over the air, or take the full file via iTunes.
May 8, AM. May 9, PM in response to nick In response to nick What's interesting is the moral if not legal point of who is liable for the cost of these massive downloads. The "fix" is necessary for the proper and continued secure functioning of the device. Sure, some security patches fix unforseen issues that have literally come out the blue and taken everyone by surprise. Sure — but I've worked in IT long enough to know that some security issues are also caused by other factors such as staff incompetence, limited project budgets and short timeframes.
Here's a real-world example: iOS 1. Tough luck for anyone who owns both products. Now, each contains security improvements that cannot be downloaded on their own, but consider the following facts:.
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