Posted on 01/29/2016 8:03:15 AM PST by rktman
In the aftermath of Challenger, there was never any doubt about continuing, never the thought of quitting. After the Columbia accident almost seventeen years later, however, the program was wound down over the next eight years. Once construction of the International Space Station was completed, the Shuttles were grounded and the shuttle program ended.
I think that was a mistake. Space Shuttle was and remains the most capable flying machine ever conceived, built and operated. We learned much from the thirty years of Shuttle flights, and in my opinion, we should still be flying them. Shuttle carried a crew of seven, plus nearly sixty thousand pounds of payload to low earth orbit. After transforming from a rocket into an orbital research or construction platform, it entered the atmosphere and landed on a conventional runway at the end of its mission. After around one hundred days of processing, it was ready to fly again.
(Excerpt) Read more at blogs.scientificamerican.com ...
“So, here we are 4 and a half years later paying Putin big buck to send us to ISS. Then we’ll pay him big bucks to buy engines.”
That is disgusting.
When I watch the movie the Right Stuff; I have two emotions. Immense pride in our nation and what we did; and disgust at what we have lost.
In hindsight, the space shuttle program was a disaster by any objective measure. It was ridiculously expensive compared to alternatives like traditional rockets, and the catastrophic failure rate of its vehicles and missions would have doomed any other commercial or scientific endeavor.
Go to Kennedy Space Center and take the tour.
I went through it about 3 years ago and the entire thing was about things we did 40 years ago. It was enough to make you cry.
It was the SpaceHab science double module, which replaced SpaceLab.
Columbia was heavier than the other three shuttles by about two tons and flew very differently (each of the Orbiters had their own quirks, but Columbia was the outlier of the fleet). NASA didn’t fly her that often, and was holding back from using her on ISS missions due to weight restrictions. Although that was going to change with one of the other shuttles (Discovery I think) about to be pulled from the schedule for a major overhaul back at Palmdale.
Depending on Putin to get us into space is sickening beyond belief.
Not that I want a bigger government role in our life; but having a cutting edge capability in space is something we need to have.
If North America didn't have the same oxygen content and water composition that Europe had, it never would have been settled.
We cannot now reproduce or improve on designs from the 1950s and 1960s.
Man learned to fly in 1903. 66 years later, we were on the Moon.
It’s all been downhill since then, for several reasons I don’t care to elaborate here. Many of you know them.
Roger that. No elaboration needed.
“There is something inherently dangerous, unnatural, and of questionable value when mankind explores places whee he is unsuited to survive in his natural state. “
Most of the Earth would not meet your criteria for being survivable if we were restricted our our natural state.
So we develop tools to help us survive. Technologies developed through and for the space programs have greatly improved our lives.
America was settled because it had great resources and a small amount of government.
Outstanding!
Lack of a launch vehicle is a national security issue that should never have been allowed. Maddening
I'm not sure I would agree with that -- at least in terms of the land masses of the world.
America was settled because it had great resources and a small amount of government.
It's kind of comical to read this on a thread about something that was one of the largest government boondoggles in the history of mankind. There's a reason why NASA ran the space program, not Grumman or Boeing.
Exactly.
It should be a campaign issue in this election in my opinion. And past ones.
Thanks. Right, Columbia was heavier than all the other orbiters because it was the first built. It also had a huge payload on that mission.
I was looking it up on Wiki, and a rescue mission would have been possible with Atlantis had management taken the problem seriously.
Had they dumped as much weight as possible and used a special reentry program they may have also landed in Australia where the atmosphere wouldn’t have been as dense.
I’ve also seen speculation that had the orbiter broken up at lower altitude they could have parachuted to safety. I doubt it though.
The problem with the shuttle is it was a low earth orbit vehicle only. You were not going to the moon or mars with it or anywhere else.
If there was going to be a two or three year gap between the shuttle and Orion no problem, but a decades gap? If NASA wants to be relevant they need to make some hard decisions and machete off a ton of bureaucracy and bloat and get serious about testing and making Orion operational. Will there be risk with Orion, absolutely but not as much as the shuttle where we lost a crew during launch and re-entry because of vehicle failure.
The capsule type ships Mercury, Gemini and Apollo worked well and should continue working fine in Orion. That being said private industry should be thinking outside the box about other designs as well.
“I’m not sure I would agree with that — at least in terms of the land masses of the world. “
Depends on your definition of natural state. Clothes, heat, buildings?
All tools created for protection and environmental accommodation. Without those items the population would be limited to a very small strip of land around the equator.
So its really just a matter of whats an acceptable level of accommodation.
The space program was expensive but has had enormous benefits. Hardly a boondoggle.
I have heard it discussed that we are still sending men into space.
It seems that our military satellites need periodic maintenance and that the Air Force Space Command had taken up the slack and is still sending men up.
Anyone else heard about this?
Read the book WHITEY ON THE MOON. The author gives the source of the title in the book. It describes how NASA was converted from a space exploration organization to a politically correct minority outreach program.
Fortunately we have several private firms working on orbital vehicles. At least one of them should be successful.
“A little birdie recently told me that NASA is out there trying to hire FORTRAN programmers.
So perhaps some un-mothballing is in the works.
The problem is by the time you get these things designed, field tested, budgeted, approved, and actually built, they are already long obsolete. Hence the FORTRAN.”
I’ve heard they’re having to do a whole lot of reverse engineering because the lessons learned in the 70’s have been forgotten. Even to the point of going to surplus yards to find left over stainless steel mixing and combustion chambers from the Saturn V engines. If they’re looking for Fortran programmers perhaps they’re trying to resurrect some of the data acquisition software from the period.
Just sent it to my Kindle.
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