Today we are seeing problems with the shuttle, too many problems. As I have said in the past, the space shuttle was ill conceived, poorly designed and is a death trap. I have seen calculations listed on the internet by different engineers that rate the chances of the shuttle exploding at 1 in 200. How would you like to take a plane trip to Europe, for example, knowing that your chance of survival was only 199 in 200? I bet you wouldn't fly, unless it was a matter of life and death. As of the writing of this article, the shuttle is in orbit and the damage to its heat shield is being inspected. They may be forced to stay on the International Space Station, if the shuttle is deemed to be in too bad a shape to make the return trip to earth. The problem, as everyone knows now, is that a hole was made in the tiles on the ship that serve as a heat shield. The heat shield protects the shuttle from burning up as it reenters earth's atmosphere. The heat is caused by friction as the speeding shuttle descends. If they have to stay on the space station, they will have to wait about 7 weeks for a replacement shuttle to fly up and get them. They will be going from one potential death trap to another.

Hole In Shuttle Endeavour's Tiles

It has been known for quite some time that the tiles on the shuttle are nothing but trouble. I have heard a couple of explanations about what happened to the shuttle to cause the problem. The first thing that I heard was that a piece of foam broke off and struck the tiles. The second thing that I heard was that the foam was frozen solid. The second explanation is probably true, as I find it hard to believe that just a piece of foam could have done this. But here is the important thing, it was also a piece of probably frozen foam that caused the Columbia shuttle to blow up. It broke off and struck the leading edge of the left wing. The foam was known as the Left Bipod Foam Ramp, but who cares what it was called, all that matters is that this was now a known problem, but yet it happed again. I would like you to know one thing about the shuttle even if you can't remember anything else, try and remember this, there is no escape pod of any kind aboard. If anything goes wrong on launch and the shuttle is in danger of exploding, there is no way off. What a disgrace. Do we value the lives of the astronauts so little that we would put them in such a position? Some say, "you never hear them complaining (the astronauts)". I say so what, a human life is worth more than the few bucks that are saved to redesign the shuttle to provide an escape route during launch. Maybe it wouldn't help when the shuttle is in orbit, but at least it would be something. I know, other people say it is far too expensive to do and the few bucks I am talking about might be millions upon millions of dollars. So what, we are wasting hundreds of billions of dollars in Iraq, Iran and other places and on all sorts of weapons development, most of which will never see the light of day? We waste enough money in Iraq building shoddy buildings that are practically falling down, like the infamous police station that was built where the roof collapsed almost immediately after construction, to redo the shuttle to make it safe, a hundred of times over.

Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster

Did you ever wonder how dangerous it was to be an astronaut? According to Wikipedia, the free online encyclopedia, 5% of all astronauts launched into space, die. This figure includes all the launches ever made. One of the problems is that the old launches had less people on the vehicles. Today we have seven people on the current shuttle that is in trouble. It is capable of holding ten people. The figure of 5% includes launches, reentries and orbits. Just in the two prior space shuttle disasters, Challenger and Columbia, 14 people have died. Don't you think that the technology we currently use should be safer than the technology used about 40 - 45 years ago? The first shuttle was rolled out in 1976, it was the Enterprise. The first official launch occurred in 1981 when the Columbia headed for orbit. The entire purpose of the shuttle was to make space trips routine and cheap. Wow, they are certainly anything but safe and cheap. The shuttle turned out to be the very most expensive way to launch a payload into space and seems to be far less reliable than first thought. About the only thing that the shuttle is any good for is launching secret satellites. Sure it can launch commercial ones and it has, but the cost is much more than using a rocket such as the French Ariane Rocket or one of the Russian rockets. As a matter of fact, we are now using a Russian rocket engine that has 30% less parts and is more dependable than other engines. The space shuttle is not capable of performing the mission that it was built for.

So exactly what is a space shuttle? It is an orbiter attached to two huge tanks of explosive fuel that has over 250,000 parts, many of them critical. It is, for all intents and purposes, a flying bomb. The shuttle can take cargo into orbit, but it cost over $26,000 a pound several years ago to do, while rockets cost about $3,000 per pound during the same period of time. Even those secret satellite launches I spoke of above, could be done by our own rockets. So what is the purpose of this piece of junk and why are we still using it? That is a very easy question to answer. Its purpose is to service another piece of junk and that is the International Space Station, which serves no purpose and has cost us tons of money. It is said to be international, but we have helped finance some other country's contributions to it, according to some sources on the internet. There is just about nothing that can be done on the space station that can't be done in an orbiting shuttle. If we had a decent shuttle, we wouldn't need the space station or the junk shuttle that we now use. The space station is strictly a public relations ploy, it is supposed to show that the world is united in the exploration of space. If that is true, then why did the Chinese shoot down their own satellite and send thousands of pieces of metal into orbit to threaten other satellites? This certainly doesn't sound like we are too united to me.

Lets look at the shuttle mishaps since the program began:
Fatal
1986 - Challenger breaks apart on liftoff. An "O" failed. Some say that if an escape module would have been available that they could have been saved. Seven died.
2003 - Columbia broke apart on reentry. A piece of frozen foam struck the ship. Seven died.
Non Fatal
1985 - One engine on Columbia shut down and a second almost did.
1999 - An electrical short knocked out the controller for the two main engines on Columbia.
2007 -Tiles were damaged by frozen foam on shuttle Endeavour.

So how long has the problem with foam existed? Believe it or not, the problem has existed since the beginning of the shuttle program. While most people didn't hear about it, foam has shredded off various shuttles. Most of the foam didn't hit anything, or we would have had a lot more problems. In 2005, Lockheed unveiled a replacement for the space shuttle. Boeing and Northrop Grumman also have designed a replacement vehicle. NASA has said that it will pick one of the two in 2008. What I find fascinating is that the Lockheed design seems to resemble the old Russian design where a space shuttle sat atop of a rocket. In the Lockheed design the shuttle sits on top of a stubby ascent stage with the mission module between the ascent stage and the shuttle.

A personal note is in order here. The flight contains a female teacher on board, as did the Challenger, a shuttle that blew up killing the crew which included Christa McAuliffe the first teacher on a shuttle and she was also a female.This teacher was also the backup for McAuliffe on her doomed flight, If anything happens to the teacher on the current flight, I am sure that some of the astronauts will be apprehensive about taking another with them on any future flights..