Re: Shuttle Statistics...?


"Eric" <none@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:onltf.92847$lh.22756@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
> Hi,
>
> Mainly out of curiosity, I was trying to put together some statistics (per
> Orbiter) with the shuttles...

Google around much of this has been done.


>
> After every touchdown, you always hear how many million miles was flown
> during that particular mission.
>
> Thought it would be interesting to add the total number of miles each
> Orbiter has flown. (Not taking any major upgrades or anything into
account,
> simply the total number each one has flown under the name "Atlantis",
> "Discovery", "Columbia", "Challenger", etc.)
>
> Attempted to add the numbers up, from NASA's own websites, but even their
> numbers are full of holes.
>
> With the total miles, it would be interesting to calculate how many "light
> minutes" each has flown. Has any of them flown 1 AU yet?

Well quick BOTE...

Orbit: roughly 25,000 miles. 18 a day.

So that's 450,000 miles per day.

Or roughly 3,150,000 miles a week.

Average flight as I recall is about a week.

So, speed of light is roughly: 186,000 miles a second.

So roughly 17 "lightseconds" per flight.

Multiply over 113 flights that's roughly 32 minutes.

At roughly 93 million miles, 30 flights is roughly 1 AU.

Which if we do the math, that's roughly 3.76 AUs.

Times roughly 8 minutes, which gives 30+ minutes, so our numbers are in the
ballpark.
(rounding errors, assumptions etc.)


>
> Total number of astronauts flown on the shuttles combined? If you were
> putting together a shuttle astronaut re-union, and they were all coming to
> NY to be flown elsewhere for the re-union, how many 757-300's (with 280
> seats) would you have to charter?

2.

This is a bit harder. Average crew of 7*113 gives 791 astronauts.

But many are reflights. A few have flown up to 5-7 times.

So figure a rough ball park would be less than 1/2 that.

Again, there are numbers out there.

Dennis Jenkins has a great book up through the first 100 missions, but
that's obviously incomplete.

He'll have a new one out "in the future" (as I recally most likely when the
program finally ends).


>
>
>
>


.

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