Posted on 03/28/2009 3:39:14 PM PDT by smokingfrog
NASA will showcase the next generation of spacecraft that will return humans to the moon in a day-long public event March 30 on the National Mall in Washington. The full-size mockup of the Orion crew exploration vehicle will be parked on the Mall between 4th and 7th Streets, SW, in front of the National Air and Space Museum. Reporters are invited to attend a briefing by the vehicle at 10 a.m. EDT.
The spacecraft mockup is on its way from water testing at the Naval Surface Warfare Center's Carderock Division in Bethesda to open water testing in the Atlantic off the coast of the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The goal of the operation, dubbed the Post-landing Orion Recovery Test, or PORT, is to determine what kind of motions the astronaut crew can expect after landing, as well as conditions outside for the recovery team.
NASA engineers and personnel will be available all day at the National Mall event to answer questions about the Orion crew module and the Constellation program.
Must be budget season again.
Where’s the Obama logo?
You'll never see it, because he, Reid and Pelosi are going to try and kill the manned program.
Shut NASA down and start over. Too political.
Seems like all we’ve gotten from manned spaceflight is:
1) Bragging rights.
2) Some footprints on the moon.
3) A bunch of dead astronauts.
Can’t we do more with mechanization, without all the life support costs? I’m not sure we’ll develop much more in the way of life support technology than we would through submarine programs anyway.
I won't even get into the technological benefits we enjoy due to their initial R&D for manned flight. You've directly benefited from man being in space, believe me.
That’s exactly what I was thinking!
I certainly didn’t intend to contest the historic benefits; I LIKE my microwave (which could as easily have been designed for nuclear submarines as spacecraft). But my point was that the manned flight R&D is pretty much done to death. We’ve been at it since the 1960’s and it doesn’t appear to have changed fundamentally. Look at all the work we got out of the Mars rovers and orbiters, and then think about the costs of just getting people there alive, let alone supporting them and returning them. We can advance knowledge faster going mechanized. It may be heresy, but I think Astronauts are expensive albatrosses given current propulsion technology. Think of the Predator drones: we can kill the Taliban just as dead without building in anything more than what’s required to get the warhead on their forehead.
I also disagree that colonization would be a panacea for overpopulation’s ills. We either learn to keep population within sustainable levels, or nature (and human nature) will do it for us, no matter where we are. Yes—with appropriate propulsion—Ancient man eventually found new lands. He then bred to the point that people are talking about space colonization as a way out of our resource difficulties. The more things change...
So, invent a propulsion technology that creates a leap similar to that between casting oneself adrift and harnessing the wind and I’ll be back in the manned flight camp post haste (because it is undeniably cool). But you’d serve humanity better by solving the fundamental problem of man being prone to outbreed his environment.
I was thinking more along the lines of asteroid strikes and such.
I was thinking medical telemetry.
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