Posted on 07/02/2011 3:19:42 PM PDT by The Magical Mischief Tour
CAPE CANAVERAL — The last shuttle, Atlantis, sits on Pad 39A, ready for its valedictory flight.
It is the nature of a shuttle to look kind of lonely out there on the pad, kept at a safe remove from the control room, the hangars, the observation platforms. The pad is not far from the beach, one of the last stretches of Florida coastline unblemished by hotels and condos. Beach houses were torn down years ago when the federal government showed up with rockets. Old-timers talk of 11 graveyards and an old schoolhouse lurking somewhere out there, the remnants of the era before the coming of the spaceport.
Now the U.S. space program itself is middle-aged, facing a painful transition. Atlantis will blast off, if all goes as planned, at 11:26 a.m. July 8 for a 12-day mission to the international space station. And then . . . what?
Then a lot of uncertainty. The only sure bet is that thousands of people here will be out of a job.
NASA’s critics say the human spaceflight program is in a shambles. They see arm-waving and paperwork rather than a carefully defined mission going forward. NASA has lots of plans, but it has no new rocket ready to launch, no specific destination selected, and no means in the near term to get American astronauts into space other than by buying a seat on one of Russia’s aging Soyuz spacecraft.
The space agency’s leaders say everything’s on track, that the private sector will soon launch astronauts into orbit and let NASA focus on the hard work of deep-space exploration.
(Excerpt) Read more at washingtonpost.com ...
I give up. Who is it?
No, we can’t. They destroyed the tooling and something like 90+% of the plans. Most of the engineers are dead and didn’t keep their own notes.
NASA is taking the remaining ones apart to try to reverse engineer them. If we were told that we had to make one within a year, we couldn’t.
ping
No false assumptions here. I agree he's intentionally destroying the US.
NObody has a lower opinion of sub-Zero than I do.
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Just a question, dumb one I know.
I mean I realise that satelites for communications, and weather satelites can be sent up commercially, but what does the private sector care abour putting people in space. Where is the profit. If there is no profit the private sector is not going to go there.
Whjy would the private sector want to put a man in the space station. IMO we just gave the space station to the Russians.Perhaps before long to the Chinese. It’s a great place to build a space weapon.If Russia refuses to grant us passage there would be nothing we could do about it.
“The sad fact remains that due to stupidity we no longer have the capability to build a Saturn V.”
We breed Idiots nowadays.
And elect them to high office, and allow them to run the bureaus.
Space tourism and research are two things that can and do generate money (the Russians keep their programs going with the occasional space tourist).
Also, there are plans to put hotels in orbit - and they won’t take any decades to build, either.
On top of that, there’s other commercial opportunities in space, plus a suborbital transport network could seriously cut travel times in half.
The reason the space private sector is so underdeveloped right now is because NASA spent the last 20+ years systematically destroying anything that looked like it could threaten the monopoly on manned flight they had with the shuttle. In fact, they went ahead and destroyed any in-house program that didn’t have the space vehicle returning to Earth with wings. Stupid, stupid, stupid. DC-X proved you don’t need wings to land.
Why are we trying to reverse engineer a Saturn V?
It has been a year or so since we took the JSC tour, but I did not notice any major pieces of that one missing.
One of the people on the tour actually asked that question and they said yes they had the plans but I have little doubt the tooling is gone.
Yes all of the engineers that I knew and hunted with for years, and the ones my dad worked with are either long retired or gone.
Why are we trying to reverse engineer the Saturn V? Because the Ares V has been cancelled and we no longer have true heavy lift capability in the US.
The heaviest thing we have now is the Delta IV Heavy, and it can only carry 22,560 kg (49,470lbs) to LEO and 12,980kg (28,620lbs) to geostationary orbit. It’s also much more expensive per pound than any of the other commercial launch solutions.
By comparison, the Saturn V could lift 119,000kg or 262,000 pounds to low earth orbit. Literally more than five times more - and it could get 45,000kg or 100,000lbs into lunar orbit.
Most importantly, we know the things *work* and don’t explode.
Yup.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wv9n9Casp1o
A rocket lifting off, flying down range and landing tail first, like God and Robert Heinlein intended. Single Stage To Orbit proof of concept. Cheap, fast access to space with a 24 hour vehicle turnaround.
And deliberately killed off by NASA.
And before someone mentions the Atlas V - the Atlas V relies on *Russian* engines for the first stage.
>>> Why does NASA NOT have a ready missile AND mission and warhead - or other device of ANY kind - to detect, track, target, launch, and destroy/move an inbound deadly asteroid?
Cause that will cost several times more then a manned Mars mission. To do anything meaningful with an asteroid you have to intercept it VERY far from Earth past the Mars orbit. That tech is a very long way off.
and btw, warheads aren’t the answer anyway. Robert Duval movies aside, breaking up an asteroid doesn’t stop it from hitting Earth. The same mass just hits in smaller pieces like a shotgun blast. The target rock must be diverted.
Our space program is a mess. From the moon in 1969 to low earth orbit ever since the Apollo program ended, the manned space program has been going nowhere. A shame.
Our space program is a mess. From the moon in 1969 to low earth orbit ever since the Apollo program ended, the manned space program has been going nowhere. A shame.
I'm sure NASA would love to have that, but they're not funded for it. Socialistic healthcare plans and free pills for old people are more important to Congress and the prez.
Don’t forget the NASA “outreach” program to Muslims.
Yeah, I’ve heard that it’s better to explode a nuclear weapon at a location that will nudge the asteroid from its path so that it will miss Earth. Since we’re talking interplanetary distances, the asteroid would have to be nudged less than 1 degree to get a clean miss of the Earth (or so I’ve heard, but I don’t claim to be any kind of expert here).
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