Posted on 05/22/2009 7:49:41 PM PDT by KevinDavis
Right now my fear is that China will overtake us in space..
Exactly.
Kevin, I’m glad to see that one other person on the planet actually realizes the significance of them doing so.
Has nobody in government these days ever heard of the high ground?
Issue after issues after issue, and our leaders haven’t a clue.
“I think we will be on Mars in the 2020’s..”
hahahahahahahah.
It’s been almost 40 years since we were on the moon but we will be on Mars in 20?
Death wish.
Not anymore.. A lot of people on the right and the left no longer looks ahead in what we do now will effect us 10 or 20 years down the road. We pound on our chest say this nation is number 1, but it takes more then chest pounding it takes work to do it..
I'll be content if Free Americans (you know, the guys Kennedy asked to get us to the moon) are on Earth in the 2020's.
I don’t think we’ll get to Mars for at least another fifty years. But when we do I think it should be a manned mission. And I’ve never bought the argument that those dollars could be better spent. As W. David Woods wrote in his How Apollo Flew To The Moon: “It is not in the nature of our species to resolve every problem before doing something creative, otherwise we would never have had impressionist art, theories of relativity or Egyptian pyramids.” Just so. And you know, I still marvel at Apollo. It strains credulity to think we’ve actually put twelve men on the moon. This is staggering. I was reading about the first stage of the Saturn V moon rocket. Its combined five F-1 engines consumed fifteen tons (yes, 30,000 lbs.) of propellants per second! From 0 to 6,000 mph in under three minutes. Imagine it.
The landing will probably take place at Edwards AFB at 10:47am ET or 12:25pm ET. There is no rain in the forecast for Edwards.
Thanks, that is the obvious question when viewing this thread... looking at live NASA on the tv, I can’t stop looking at her hair... ain’t zero gravity great?
Landing ground tracks. Possible sonic booms for the south central US.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/shuttlemissions/sts125/news/landing.html
Humans superior... 
to us bots?
What are you... 
smoking, Kevin?
Though I do have to admit I could not do my job in space... 
without Leela, Fry and the Professor.
They buy... 
the beer!
What is next... 
on your anti-bot agenda?
You'll be saying humans dance... 
better than us robos???
Kevin, psst? Don't tell Bendy... 
but I agree with you!
just delete “live” from my last post. Duh.
Amen, brother!
I agree, but getting them there and then back alive is the hard part, and expensive too.
There is definitely a place and purpose for unmanned spacecraft and unmanned space exploration.
We may be totally broke in 5 months.
Entirely new vehicles and propulsion systems would be required to get man to Mars AND back. The scale-up factor will be immense.
I’m not saying it cant be done, just that there is nothing currently on the drawing board thats technologically achievable. So on that basis I doubt that man will be on Mars 20 years from now.
I am not sure if we will be on Mars by 2020, but I am nearly certain that the Chinese will be. I am not sure if any of you remember this, but when the Apollo project was at its peak, the tentative plans called for the first manned Mars trip to occur around 2000. That was the schedule they used making 2001 A Space odyssey, with regularly scheduled trips to a lunar colony, plans for a mars trip, with the capability to travel to the orbit of Jupiter, when plot reasons required it. At the time no one thought that this schedule was unrealistic, only the monolith part of the story was considered fantastic. Although the self aware computer was rather a bridge too far.
My family thinks I am crazy.... like “that crazy old man who gets up at 4:30 to watch a space shuttle landing”. Of course, I think it is insane to stay up until midnight to watch the latest tivo’ed (is that a word) episode of “Desperate Housewives”, so it balances out.
I see the first landing has been waved off. I am assuming the 2nd is at KSC also. Sure I will hear on NASA TV soon.
Saw a schedule y-day that said the landings scheduled for tomorrow are at Edwards and White Sands Missile Range. I was at WSMR and out on Northrup Strip when John Young last brought a shuttle to WSMR. Trying to remember when that was without researching it, seem to remember 1980 or so. Now I have to look it up....LOL
Noticed that the orbit of Atlantis is a tight one, the northern extreme being not much higher than Tennessee or so. I am used the the big sweeping orbits going from Greenland to Australia.
Enjoying the discussion on robots Vs. Humans in space. Where robots excel (IMHO) is in patience. I can not imagine a human spending a week examining and studying a pebble on Mars, but the Mars rover Spirit did exactly that a couple of years ago.
.....Bob
nor veeger.
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