Astronomy Picture of the Day -- The Last Launch of Space Shuttle Endeavour

NASA ^ | May 18, 2011 | (see photo credit)

[ROCKLOBSTER]

The Last Launch of Space Shuttle EndeavourThe Last Launch of Space Shuttle Endeavour

Oh Boy!

I can't wait to what the "next generation" version of the shuttle looks like.

< /sarc >

[Moonman62]

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.

The Russian orbit ticks me off on what should have been space station Freedom. But are you sure about the payload? I'm pretty sure NASA designed a lighter external tank and upgraded the main engines.

For the single thing that actually was a went-as-designed mission and piece of hardware, there’s Hubble.

What about the mirror problem? It stinks that the Hubble will probably end up being burnt in the atmosphere rather than retrieved and put in a museum.

[Moonman62]

The Endeavour will deliver to the ISS, among other things, an ambitious detector called the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer 2 (AMS),

I hope the AMS does well. It could make up some for us not building a better particle collider, and be the first worthwhile project for the ISS, other than making work for the Shuttle, and sucking up limited funds that could have been put to better use.

[Moonman62]

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.

What I've read is that Nixon hated the space program. He ended Apollo and greatly comprised the Shuttle program with budget cutbacks.

[Moonman62]

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.

The Apollo program started under Eisenhower. JFK gets way too much credit.

This picture was taken in 1960. While those aren't F1's, that is a Saturn booster.

[nascarnation]

JFK gets way too much credit.

The MSM were just as Democrat back then, weren't they?

[SunkenCiv]

/bingo

[Pelham]

I’m voting for you.

[SunkenCiv]

Thanks!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-13411163

[snip] There will, however, be a group of British engineers for whom Monday’s lift-off was a bitter-sweet moment. These are the people whose technology got dropped from AMS in the year before launch. [/snip]

[cripplecreek]

I’m voting for you.

You're the second person to say that today but the first one mumbled something about Robespierre and headed off to hide in their basement for the duration of my reign. LOL

[markman46]

you know that is just plain wrong, the shuttle has not be used for ISS crew transfres in a while now, iss crews are launched on the Soyuz for the last 4 yrs or so

[Jack Hydrazine]

Why would you want to spend $40 million per astronaut to ferry them to the ISS when you could spend a billion? Now that’s the American way!