Lol!
I'd ride that rocket on a 50/50 chance too!
Orbiting 1,075 miles above the Earth, a 250 foot wide, inflated, reinforced nylon "wheel"...Looks more like Bigelow than NASA!
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Posted on 09/02/2006 5:39:43 PM PDT by saganite
I have to agree with Jaysun on the waste. Where is the big wheel with cintrepital gravity allowing for coninuous habitation? Where are the Lunar colonies? These things could be done. These would be real steps into space. What we have is an outrageously expensive low-Earth-orbit program reduced to bragging about zero G high school science fair projects.
I have watched the Shuttle take off, and I have had the fortune to see it come in over West Texas pre-dawn. Spectacular, the latter more so than the launch. Compared to a Saturn V launch...well, ya had to be there.
More than any other factor, the Saturn V was still on the optimistic, we are going there curve. The Shuttle is now on the "let's hold on to our jobs" curve. None of the Apollo astronauts would have believed me if I had told them then that 35 years later we would never have gone to the moon again. I will always remember where I was when Armstrong (sliightly) flubbed his lines. Can you remember with that vivedness any shuttle cruise that did not result in death?
The Shuttle program has racked up a one in fifty fatality rate. We would regard this as unacceptable for fighter pilots on combat missions, I believe the rate there is 2 orders of magnitude better.
I will say this: if I were offered a chance to go up and told my chance of returning alive was 50/50, it would require physical restraint to keep me off that flying bomb.
It is sad. Celebrities and crotch topics are more important than American ingenuity!
The module Bigelow put up was based on NASA research on composite materials with the aim of building modules like the one up there now. They abandoned the program but let Bigelow have access to all their research and patents and even consulted with Bigelow on the project. The lead engineer at Bigelow ran the NASA program until they cancelled it then he went with Bigelow. The major advantage Bigelow has over NASA is the ability to control costs and cut the red tape.
The original module has performed so well that Bigelow announced there will be a major course correction in the program early next year. They had planned to launch several of these small test articles but I'm betting he's going to announce they will move on to the next stage and cancel the intervening tests.
NASA has become welfare for engineers and managers.
Disband it, use the money for prizes (like in the early days of aviation) for demonstrated accomplishment by private groups.
Interesting...Private enterprise can do it cheaper!
Interesting woman. She emigrated from Iran to the US after the Iranian Revolution because they wouldn't let woman study science and engineering. Eventually with her husband she forms a couple of extremely successful companies. Later she and her husband invest in the X-Prize and other space related companies. It is amazing what a woman can do if you don't put a burka on her!
Oh, and the obligatory photo:
Hmmmmmm.......
Must be the lights.
Separated at birth? :)
> Lockheed Martin winning a $4 billion (£2.1 billion) contract from Nasa...
Nasa? Who or what the hell is Nasa? Or do they mean *NASA*?
Friggen ignorant Europeans...
Both women are (or in Counselor Troi's case were) attractive, and wealthy enough to be able to marry for love instead of money.
Anyhow, on a different subject, might anyone here know whether Iraq's democratically elected president is closely aligned with those asinine mullahs? Iranian acquaintances here in the states tell me the mullahs are what keep the elected government there from doing what the voters want. The Iranian president is visiting the USA perhaps this week and maybe there's more common ground than some think. Or perhaps he's a flaming nutcase like some have told me. I admit to my ignorance as I've focused on a different country's political chaos lately (Mexico).
Great picture. Might there be any neat discoveries awaiting us on the Moon that are even remotely as interesting as that [Tyco?] monolith? It could be that artifacts (even merely an alien ship's thruster) survived up there while our planet's wet climate caused similar ones to corrode and vanish with time. Or maybe the ocean covered 'em. The universe is pretty vast though. Seems kind of unlikely that they'd have stopped by unless they've got literally out-of-this-world transportation technology. Rant rant rant :-)
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