Posted on 05/18/2011 4:23:50 PM PDT by SunkenCiv
[Credit: NASA] Explanation: Explanation: Two days ago, powerful yet controlled explosions rocketed the Space Shuttle Endeavour on its final trip into Earth orbit. The above image was taken seconds after liftoff as the massive orbiter and six astronauts began a climb to a height where the atmosphere is so thin it is unbreathable. The shuttle, on mission STS-134, is expected to dock with the International Space Station (ISS) today. The Endeavour will deliver to the ISS, among other things, an ambitious detector called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer 2 (AMS), a detector that over the next few years could detect a significant abundance of specific types of dark matter, charged antimatter, and even a strangely possible variation of familiar matter called strangelets. The very last trip for any space shuttle is currently planned for mid-July when Atlantis will also visit the space station.
(Excerpt) Read more at apod.nasa.gov ...
Take a good last look.
IBTP?
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“Take a good last look.”
That’s the second to last launch of our manned space program. When it’s over we’ll be dependent on the Ruskies to get us to LEO - just the way the Leftist in this country like it.
If there aren’t any significant delays in SpaceX’s space technology development we should be able to have a private, manned space program by about 2014.
isn’t it docked at the ISS now??
pics of that would be good too
If it were up to me I’d ditch the outer space treaty. Tell NASA to drop earth sciences and muslim outreach and concentrate on long duration lunar missions with an eye on a permanent lunar base.
Id tell private industry that any money they can make in space is theirs for the taking if they have the desire to go get it.
Why look at pics, when you can watch it yourself! (browse to your area to see flyover times)
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/cities/skywatch.cgi?country=United+States
Great pic. Thanks for the post.
The sooner the Shuttle is abandoned the better. If the shuttle's low performance begat the low orbit space junk of an ISS and that low orbit allows a private start-up to get its leg-up into the market, well, maybe that justifies some small part of it. Maybe also the lousy level of engineer-based systems that the sucky Shuttle program decayed to is itself helpful, as it created a internal-to-government bureaucracy socio-technology vacuum block, a gap, for a generation. In other words it blocked the government from doing something better, but not as good as private biz will do.
It must be remembered that Shuttle payload and optimum flight profile were not built around where the ISS is orbiting. Bad Bill clinton had his own Russian Outreach Program that put the ISS in a waaay northern orbit that cut Shuttle payload by something like 1/3 to 1/2. Typical dumbass Bill clinton diplomacy.
For the single thing that actually was a went-as-designed mission and piece of hardware, there’s Hubble.
I wish now that NASA just got their bureaucratic butts out of the way and let SpaceX and the rest of them at the skies.
with an eye on a permanent lunar base.
Think about it, we (the US) had men wandering about on the Moon forty years ago, and we don't yet have a station on the Moon? To me this is one of the most graphic illustrations of the collapse of our supposedly US human intellectual society.
Whether it is through private enterprise or government sponsored, it is a graphic comment. Just in the excitement and curiosity and enterprise and imagination that just that endeavor would incite, in our youth and even in our elderly, is a tragic fall.
But NOOOO, we have lawyers for Congressmen, women as the only politicians who have a modicum of courage, truly corrupt power greedy egomaniacs in the WhiteHouse, and Barbara Boxer as a Senator. Sick!
How obvious is it?
Johnny Suntrade
I found this old video footage today and thought I would share it. I have never seen a video quite like this one.
This was filmed 13 March 1989, and documents the actual reentry and burnup of Discovery’s external fuel tank from STS 29...
A prophecy ?
Latest has NASA interested in some “strike evidence” on the shuttle tiles. >PS
Bumpity bump bump!
YouTube has pretty neat vids of the separation and early reentry of the SRBs, very cool. And totally silent, which makes it even cooler.
/bingo
;’)
One of the Apollo astronauts said in interview that maybe the lunar landings were fifty years too early. They are a startling accomplishment when viewed through the subsequent stagnation of the space program. Having a moon base would be nice, but ultimately it would now be excoriated as a dead-end waste of 40 years of effort, just as the Shuttle is excoriated for being merely an orbital vehicle.
But the STS is an amazing piece of machinery, and very likely will remain the recordholder for reused orbital vehicles until such time as some future brainiacs devise propulsion systems that aren’t based on chemical propellants. It’s not likely that reusability will reach that level in subsequent conventional rocket-powered vehicles. Ever.
The scene in “Apollo 13” where someone asks Hanks (playing Jim Lovell) why the Apollo program continued to be funded after the US had beaten the Russians to the Moon is out of the whole cloth of the time. And LBJ’s both-feet-blindfolded jump into Vietnam led to outright hostility (particularly among the beneficiaries of the so-called Great Society programs) toward not just Vietnam, but also programs like Apollo. Probably a web search would turn up Ralph Abernathy’s anti-US remarks made right after he’d witnessed one of the Apollo launches.
There was just one reason that the US beat everyone to the Moon — Werner von Braun. The F-1 engine that powered the Saturn V was his baby, and developed for the Defense Dep’t, which believed it needed a million+ lb thrust engine in order to deliver the H-bomb. But Teller’s boxcar-sized H-bomb design (while it did work) wasn’t the only one, and the much smaller design(s?) were used instead. Teller’s bomb test also resulted in the B-52, which was proposed and designed to carry just one of Teller’s huge H-bombs.
Under Eisenhower, the DoD dropped the F-1 as superfluous, but von Braun was developing it for a future moonshot, and took it with him to NACA, which became NASA. Big booster designs using one, two, three, four, and five F-1 engines were drafted by and/or for von Braun to pitch, and when JFK got pissed off about the seeming superiority of the Soviet space program, von Braun took his F-1 right to the head of the class.
Korolev, head of the (or rather, one of the) Russian space program (s) kept abreast of von Braun’s ideas by reading stuff in our free press. He scorned von Braun’s suggestion that the upper stages of a lunar vehicle would be 100% cryo-fueled, saying that the problems were too great to be solved. A little over a year later, von Braun had his 100% cryo-fueled engine on the test stand, and Korolev realized the race was lost. He died as a consequence of heart surgery in 1966. His ridiculous 30+ engine N1 booster wasn’t delivered to the launch site until after his death. The only actual flight (the first try exploded and burned on the pad) of an N1 ended in a low-altitude massive explosion.
Oh yeah...there are a couple of very cool vids out there from liftoff to splashdown of the SRBs, including sound. Neat stuff...
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