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Aside from the obvious solution of parachutes...

Obvious to who? You do know that a parachute big enough to land an entire vehicle and payload safely is large, and requires much more vertical altitude to open than your garden variety base jumping rig. And do you think a parachute is reliable like a doorbell? No, they flap and swirl and have vortexes, occasional line tangles... a parachute is not like a doorbell. You can't reliably predict how much vertical altitude it needs to open. Good luck trusting your life to a parachute at 300 feet and falling fast.

Also, where is your parachute going to land? Are you driving your flying care over buildings, wires, water, trees, busy roads? Is it windy? Dark? Parachute, yah right, that's the ticket to surviving your flying car power outage.

Splat calculator says you have 5 seconds to live.

You seem to misunderstand -- the parachute isn't meant for normal landings, it's a last-ditch effort to save your life in the event your personal helicopter has a catastrophic failure.

Hitting the ground is unavoidable, but having a parachute can make the difference between surviving and not.

It's not like the it's a new idea, some aircraft already have emergency parachutes:

https://www.airspacemag.com/da...

[ a study ]... found a 13-fold decrease in the odds of a fatality when the Cirrus Airframe Parachute System (CAPS, developed with Popov’s company, BRS Aerospace) was deployed in an accident, versus when it was not.

"Satellite Airliner Tracking Over Oceans Goes Global"

Excellent. VERY much needed. Not knowing where an aircraft was when it crashed was weird.

Before: Airplanes can vanish without a trace. Why is effective tracking technology being ignored? (Nov. 2011)

Plane Crash Info

Why, after many, many years, flight recorders are still being destroyed? Both recorders from Boeing 737 recovered but 'partly destroyed', airline official says, as search for bodies continues. (Mar 11, 2019)

Kepler is in a slight earth-trailing orbit. 371 days to orbit the sun once, instead of 365 like the Earth. So the Earth should catch up to it again in some 60 years, but because Kepler's orbit is slightly larger it's unlikely to intersect the Earth as the two pass each other again. The orbit was selected because it required less fuel to attain and maintain than the L2 Lagrangian point/a?, meaning more fuel could be used for observations.

Do we really need Hubble that badly anymore?
Apparently adaptive optics technology is allowing ground-based telescopes to surpass Hubble's capability.
https://www.airspacemag.com/sp...

Rather than firing up an expensive space mission (I remember each shuttle mission was $500M), would it genuinely be better to just take that money and build or retrofit a ground-based telescope with adaptive optics? A telescope that you could easily maintain thereafter?

This doesn't help with wavelengths of light that don't go through Earth's atmosphere, but that's not what Hubble does. Seems like we could do without Hubble nowadays.

--PeterM

Here is the thing about the shuttle program: it was really a military program masquerading as a civilian system, and getting the civilian budget to fund it. All of the costly, dangerous aspects of its design can be traced to military requirements inserted into the program.

The whole purpose of the expensive fragile large space plane configuration were to allow it to put huge reconnaissance satellites from the Space Shuttle launch facility at Vandenburg AFB, and land it back at the base, i.e. operate it as an entirely classified system from a military base. This capability was never used even once. No shuttle was ever launched from Vandenburg. It never went into polar orbit.

None of this was public information at the time. Though the plans for the Vandenburg AFB launch site was no secret (that part could not be kept hidden, any more than the existence of Area 51), the actual development and management program for the shuttle was a black program, with a civilian cover. It could be compared to the Hughes Glomar Explorer project - claimed to be for seabed mining, but was really a CIA operation to recover a Soviet nuclear submarine that sank.

It was a cause of wonder for many years to me (and others) about how the engineers and NASA could be so very wrong about all the things the shuttle was supposed to do: its turn around time, its launch rate, its cost, its development schedule, etc.

By the 1990s the real story came out, and the mysteries evaporated. They weren't wrong about what it was designed to do, they were simply lying ("disinforming") in public about it. The various justifications offered for it in public were cover stories, nothing more.

The public development schedule was a false one as well. The program was famously delayed by a couple of years, but not really. It hit its real (secret) project plan, but the public plan was used to help support congressional funding.

It was known, but nobody knew what it looked like, how it operated, or anything much more about it other than "it exists." I probably built twenty of the F-19 model kit. When the real stealth finally was revealed, it was so different from what the assumptions were about it as to make the model kit laughable.

Reference material

Iridium failed to generate a return on investment and filed for bankruptcy in 1999.

However, as the constellation of satellites was already in orbit and functional, they had considerable value. A group of investors bought them from Motorola for $25 million (vs. $5 billion to build and launch), assumption of debt, and indemnity for Motorola. They drastically reduced the scope of the project, slashing costs to the point where fewer customers could keep it profitable, and repurposed the satellites for things other than telephone communications.

NASA wants to set max CO2 levels in the ISS at ~13X what it is on Earth right now. I think they have a bit of an interest in keeping astronauts clear-and-level headed, and apparently levels around 5000ppm are acceptable. Given most navies allow up to 8000ppm long-term in their submarines, it's probably a safe level for critical thinking,

Nothing that is destined to operate much beyond Mars orbit is powered by solar panels.

Well, to be pedantic, Juno is a solar powered orbiter at Jupiter. The average distance to the sun for Mars is 1.5 AU, whereas it is 5.4 AU for Jupiter. But that's pushing the limits of the technology. There's an informative article on the topic from Smithsonian's Air and Space Magazine. You can get a sense of the size of the panels from this video.

If we can build light sails to get to Alpha Centauri or Serius why can we just put up a giant sunshade?

http://www.airspacemag.com/dai...
We would only have to use it during the day as well so it could be half as big.

Fact is, if you want to make big scientific leaps, you gotta do it with a well managed government corporation. If you want to make incremental technical improvements mischaracterised by a brilliant propagandist, you give the job to Musk.

I do have to point out that SpaceX is a government contractor, so it has been doing both the "well managed government corporation" route and the private contractor route. The Falcon-9 was funded by NASA; designed and built under a NASA contract, and had mandatory NASA oversight on key milestones-- at the time they won the NASA contract to design Falcon-9, their success record for launches was one success in four tries.

http://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/the-tale-of-falcon-1-5193845/?

It may be a quantity thing, they want to have the ability to have both the Russians and Commercial be able to dock at the same time, rather than waiting for one spaceship to leave before the next can dock. I don't believe though that the Shuttles used the Russian dock, I thought they had their own as well that is going unused currently.

http://www.airspacemag.com/spa...

It appears that (at least in 2011) there were 5 docking points on the ISS, one being specifically for the shuttle.

How about just a lot of practical reasons.
1. Short range.
2. Low payload.
3. Problems with high wind.
4. Problems with rain.
5. Problems with cold. AKA batteries do not work all that well in cold weather.
Drones are great for some tasks but this is beginning to sound way to much like a Helicopter in every garage fantasies from the the late 40s hear 50s.
http://www.airspacemag.com/his...

I was trying to think of an analogy to use to make the point to the idiots at AP and it occurs the me that the Internet is the most widely known specific internet in the same way the Moon is the most widely know specific moon. If you wanted to be pedantic you could refer to the Moon as the moon in orbit around the Earth (or should that be the earth now?). If you call the Internet just internet how do you specify which internet you want to refer too? What about Internet2, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/..., is that now internet2?

Apparently AP think it is the moon and some people are not happy about that, http://www.airspacemag.com/dai...

Back at Lockheed Martin's Skunk Works, aerodynamicists claimed a breakthrough: computer codes that made it possible to design a supersonic airplane with a much reduced sonic boom. The snag was that the craft could not be very large. It would be a corporate jet. Gulfstream saw a market and teamed with the Skunks.

The only surviving supersonic project is the decade-old Aerion business jet, designed to fly at supersonic speed over water and just-subsonic --- a few knots faster than a Gulfstream --- over land. But it's only a concept. The jet reappeared at a business aviation show in Geneva last May with its billionaire backer and Aerion's chairman, Robert Bass, offering to fund any qualified aircraft manufacturer to build it. Nobody yet has bitten on that offer.

Why We Don't Have An SST. Sukhoi--Gulfstream S-21
The ten passenger S-21 weighing 54,000 lbs empty would have required 58,000 lbs of fuel for a range of 2,700 miles.

I don't know how you plan global business travel around an aircraft that has only forty seats --- can you plan a seat being available or are you spinning the wheel of fortune?

The Space Shuttle did not directly use any military components, but the design was informed by the capabilities of the military-industrial complex.

And looking at the whole shuttle system, not just the launch system, the shuttle's design was driven by military requirements (wouldn't have had the same wing area without them), and there were several classified missions flown. So overall, while it can't be claimed to be a "military product" it wasn't as "civilian" as one might think, instead clearly in the "dual use" category by purpose. (Even though the US Air Force as you say, largely abandoned it after Challenger).

The Space Shuttle did not directly use any military components, but the design was informed by the capabilities of the military-industrial complex.

And looking at the whole shuttle system, not just the launch system, the shuttle's design was driven by military requirements (wouldn't have had the same wing area without them), and there were several classified missions flown. So overall, while it can't be claimed to be a "military product" it wasn't as "civilian" as one might think, instead clearly in the "dual use" category by purpose. (Even though the US Air Force as you say, largely abandoned it after Challenger).

As careysub already posted with a different link, no, it doesn't. In fact, it appears to rise up and coat things that are left on the lunar surface, darkening them.

One of the source articles for the Wikipedia entry above talks about this in more detail, but also points out that lunar soil appears to sinter really, really easily when microwaved. It seems like this could be an effective and (via plentiful electricity from sunlight) economical way to "dust-proof" limited regions of the lunar surface. That, coupled with a fairly simple static-charged chicken-wire fence to divert or intercept laterally-propelled dust, might well make the problem manageable.

The fix was in for the Space Shuttle. It was intended from the beginning to be a military program, but operating under the cover (and appropriating the budget) of the civilian space program. The payload specs (weight, bay size), the whole winged flight thing (turning it into a deadly dangerous system for the crew), the overall system specs to make it capable of a polar launch from Vandenburg (never used), all of these were military requirements, not driven by any civilian needs.

All that stuff about cutting launch costs by having a system that could launch once a week? The original claimed development schedule and budget (both greatly exceeded)? How could the engineers have been so wrong?

They weren't wrong. The shuttle capabilities, budget and schedule all met the real, secret, objectives. All the other stuff were made up cover stories to maintain Congressional support.

There was no way the shuttle was not going to get approved. The military got what the military wanted. In the end, for all that 200 billion in program costs, they only used it 11 times.

Actually Defcon 1 is peace, and Defcon 5 is war. War Games got that wrong along with most other cold war films.

Nope, DEFCON1 is imminent war, while DEFCON 5 is peacetime readiness: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

From http://www.airspacemag.com/mil...

What’s “high”? Screenwriters often get the scale wrong, so begin with this fact: the lower the number, the higher the worry. DEFCON 5 is peacetime, while DEFCON 1 is imminent war.

There are a couple of locations on the rims of craters on the lunar poles that receive sunlight nearly all of the time.

http://www.airspacemag.com/dai...

Yes, but scientists would like to be able to explore the other 99.99% of the moon's surface which, unfortunately, has a night that lasts for 2 weeks. They need a way to keep the lander's electronics warm through those times.

There are a couple of locations on the rims of craters on the lunar poles that receive sunlight nearly all of the time.

http://www.airspacemag.com/dai...

I would prefer the backwards-facing seats due to safety:

Yet they also cite a 1958 accident involving an airliner in Munich, Germany, which crashed on takeoff with the Manchester United soccer team on board. Those in forward-facing seats were killed, and those in aft-facing seats were saved.

Because:

Passengers in Navy transport planes have ten-fold better chances of coming out of crashes alive, thanks to backward-facing seats which are being installed in all new planes.The Navy has decided to install the seats after five years of development and testing showed they gave passengers much more protection for the entire back, neck, head and parts of the arms and legs in sudden stoppages. The human body can absorb more shock by the back than by the chest and abdomen, flight surgeons say.

For that reason, I'd actually prefer backwards-facing seats in all forms of transportation. This is one reason I want self-driving cars; it would mean every person in the vehicle could be rear-facing, so that even in the (rare) event of a crash, the survival rate should be much higher.

Hey I wanna see people go to Mars as much as anyone here. But let's get realistic: Mars is way harder to get to than the moon. WAY harder.

And since Mars has an atmosphere deorbitting is essentially free.

Not even close. Landing a heavy craft on Mars is difficult. In fact the top scientists in the world (including NASA) aren't even sure how we're gonna do it exactly. Smithsonian mag has a lengthy and highly informative article on this.

So
Earth -> Moon: 15.58
Earth -> Mars: 16.65
Difference: 6.9%

Yes but that doesn't include the time to get there. Moon = 3 days. Mars = 9 to 12 months. If you're sending a robotic probe then no problem. But if you're sending humans, compare the weight in supplies (food water etc) that you need for a 3 day journey vs. a 10 month journey. That's a gigantic weight difference. And that's not even counting the shielding you will need for a Mars journey.

The military and corporate planes have had rear facing passenger seats for ages. It certainly doesn't affect babies being carried in rear facing car seats. There's all kinds of safety reasons why this is a good idea, but I can't find anything substantial to back up your claim.

http://www.airspacemag.com/nee...
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/tra...

The military never left. Remember the Air Force only Shuttle launches?

Also, the astronaut corps still recruits a lot from the military. The last group had 6/8 active military.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Astronaut_Group_21

The previous group had 6 military and 1 CIA out of 9 American candidates and 3 out of 6 military among the international candidates.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Astronaut_Group_20

The military never left. Remember the Air Force only Shuttle launches?

Wasn't the HL-10 the spacecraft that Steve Austin crashed in?

no, that was the M2-F2.

Spectacular video of the crash, though.

http://www.airspacemag.com/ist...

One of my favorite treeware magazines is Air & Space Magazine published by the Smithsonian. They have a frequent series of articles on the theme, "Some ideas will never fly." Definitely a much more creative and well reasoned critique of a number of airplane ideas that, well, will never fly.

Several of the planes singled out by the BBC article really weren't all that bad when they were initially in service (Brewster Buffalo, Douglas TBD Devestator, Fairey Battle). They were just kept in service long after they should have been retired and their pilots and crews paid the price. That's not a fault of the airplane; it's a fault of the politicians who decided to spend the money to modenize elsewhere.

Cheers,
Dave

Here's a very interesting account of the launch disaster at Xichang: http://www.airspacemag.com/his...

Let us not forget that the Soviets had their Germans scientists as well. And the Soviets didn't give them a choice, they arrested and moved thousands of them long after the war.

The Rest of the Rocket Scientists - Some went west. This is the story of the ones who went east.

More

From what I've heard the sidewinder while a goodmissile wasn't perfect. Many of them failed in Vietnam because high humidity. This lead to a need for dog fighting and practice of firing multiple missile at time hoping the one of them wasn't a dud.

... SpaceX has completely rocked the space industry upside down, and A LOT of naysayers need to eat crow now. As recently as 2012 (see this article), managers at NASA were poo-pooing Elon saying rockets are hard and noobs shouldn't try.

Fwiw, the stock for his Tesla company has been slowly declining since the fire; going from $185.00 down to a hovering $120.00--until today. Interestingly enough, it went from $124.00 to $144.00; indicating ... people like to buy on good news. (HhHeh, couldn't resist.) It also means: Some think, if they can do this, they can solve mechanical issues with an earthly chariot.

that existing space providers are in big trouble.

Even the Chinese are quaking in their boots, as they can't do it as cheaply as SpaceX. And EADS is frantically redesigning their new Ariane 6 to try to be more cost competitive with the Falcon.

SpaceX has completely rocked the space industry upside down, and A LOT of naysayers need to eat crow now. As recently as 2012 (see this article), managers at NASA were poo-pooing Elon saying rockets are hard and noobs shouldn't try.

The Skunk Works has been working with Aerojet Rocketdyne for the past seven years to develop a method to integrate an off-the-shelf turbine with a scramjet to power the aircraft from standstill to Mach 6 plus

From Nov 2:

the SR-72. Using a new hypersonic engine design that combines turbines and ramjets the company says that the unmanned SR-72 will be twice as fast as its predecessor with a cruising speed of Mach 6.

Three days ago they needed a scramjet to hit mach 6 cruise. Then they were able to do it with a ramjet by the next day. A scramjet is a variant of a ramjet. But where a ramjet slows the air below supersonic for combustion, a scramjet does not. So it's a pretty important distinction. However mach 6 is also around the max speed was for an aircraft using a standard ramjet, not the cruising speed.

I wonder how bad or frequent an unstart will be with a mach 6 aircraft. It's probably good that it will be unmanned as a pilot many not be able to remain conscious, or even survive one at hypersonic speeds. I'm sure with all of the advances in computing speeds this would be trivial to do on an SR-71 at mach 3 today. But I have to wonder how far mach 6 will push things.

The October issue of Air & Space Magazine had an interesting article on an earlier attempt to get John Q.Public flying instead of driving. Hint: the problem isn't the cost of the vehicle.

Cheers,
Dave

Yes, that's the one. However, I don't think you can scale up the costs by a simple price per pound ratio. It is entirely possible to build an airplane for less than $10,000:

href=http://www.airspacemag.com/flight-today/ten_grand.html

If you don't have to put a pilot inside, and using more mass-production techniques, you could probably get the cost down even further. My cousin built a plane in his garage for less that $30,000 that can easily carry 500 pounds (assuming no people on board). It was designed for aerobatics so it traded speed and maneuverability for range, but the concept is the same. The biggest road block to doing something like this before now is the prohibitive cost and complexity of building an autonomous guidance system. That part is getting cheaper and easier all the time.

Heck, this guy: Bruce Simpson built a cruise missile with off the shelf components for $5000, though I think it is too small to carry a reasonable payload.

I suppose getting to orbit and docking and stuff took some time, so the Dragon was attached to the space station for about 14 - 15 days?

What was it doing up there for 2 weeks? O_o Sightseeing?

Even with union labor it should take no more than a day to unload a thousand pounds of cargo. Russians don't even have a union actually... so if you make the cosmonauts do the work, they could probably get it done in a couple of hours.

Ok joking aside, this is a fantastic achievement for SpaceX, kudos -- their first paying gig! Yeah cue the naysayers and their "NASA did similar shit in the mid 60's with Gemini, blah blah". Well the fantastic achievement is not getting to orbit with cargo, it's how cheaply it can be done now. SpaceX is pioneering a whole new paradigm in the space industry, designing a launch system from the ground up with a laser focus on getting it done simply and CHEAPLY.

Back to the 18-day mission. Right now the launches are still few and far between, and there's no hurry, so I say why not leave it docked with the ISS for a couple months? It can serve as a backup lifeboat in the event of a disaster on the ISS. I know it's not man-rated yet but if the choice is between breathing vacuum and using the Dragon, I'd jump into the Dragon in a heartbeat.

Do you have any records of gliders damaged by snatch pickup? An overused towline would, on rare occasion, snap while the glider was still on the ground, and go through the plexiglass windscreen, making the pilot duck. Only in the Dec '48 Greenland rescue did this happen to an airborne glider for an exciting return into the snow. http://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/Stranded.html

While it may make people cosy and warm to think that the space race was about moving science forwards, the truth of the matter is that it was all about prestige and military dominance.

You think that the US would have managed to have so few casualties in the recent wars it has fought if it didn't have control of space.

As for the feeding the world thing. Well if the richest country has 15% of its own people living in poverty, it is probably because it wants it that way.

FYI 11 of the space shuttle flights were miltary.

He has a Star Trek face to boot.

He looks just like Chekov! Take a look for yourself:

http://www.airspacemag.com/space-exploration/Visionary-Launchers-Employees.html

My favorite unusual aerodynamic effect on rotary wing aircraft is called "retreating blade stall"- the faster the rotor disk moves in forward flight, the slower the retreating blade passes through the air, eventually resulting in significant reduction in lift that can't be compensated for by angle of attack. Only way out is to slow down. http://blogs.airspacemag.com/daily-planet/2012/01/high-speed-helicopters-come-of-age//. Somewhat off topic but interesting.

...that's the only thing I want, now. Not more legroom, not a selection of entertainment, not boarding priority. I want to be able to wear a goddamn parachute. Just in case. Or, alternately, have a parachute attached to my seat. Or hell, a whole airplane parachute system that would allow a broken fuselage to gently drop from the sky; they already have these for small planes. http://www.airspacemag.com/flight-today/How-Things-Work-Whole-Airplane-Parachute.html

I am still wowed by flying, I spend most of my time in flight glued to the window. And most of the rest of the time I spend imagining how many thousands of variables need to operate properly for our flying vehicle not to plummet down 30,000 feet and crash.

We have seatbelts, oxygen masks, floatation devices, but no backup safety device for the obvious risk of traveling at 30k+ feet: plummeting from the sky.

An innovation specifically referenced was a major advance in the PICA-X heat shield on Dragon which should allow hundreds of reentries without needing to be replaced. Good article here where I read it.

Except we are. SpaceX is doing some wonderful work, bringing launch costs down by significant percentages and they are funding themselves with a mix of private and government launches so they aren't completely at the mercy of Congress and the POTUS which NASA's launchers are. They are also keenly focused on manned missions to Mars eventually which is the one manned mission that would be really exciting.

Excellent article on the cool stuff they are doing here.

I recall a recent story that NASA was so taken back by how low SpaceX's R&D costs were for a new launcher compared to NASA's, NASA sent in a team to study their economics. I think one key point was SpaceX does a lot of their work in house instead of contracting parts out to companies that gouge. There is a mention of this in the article linked above. SpaceX asked an outside company for a quote on a part, it was astronomical, so they built it in house instead for a fraction of the price, and when the salesmen called back they rubbed his nose in it.

P.S.

Anyone who thought they could fly the Shuttle as a commercial program and come anywhere close to break even was purely delusional. The Shuttle program was an extravagent jobs program masquerading as a space program at least as far back the Challenger accident which completely crippled everything it was supposed to do.

23,000 pounds of payload into LEO (13,000 pounds if you don't count Dragon capsule itself)

That's damn cheap!

Wow, thanks for that article link. It's the best damn thing I've read on here in a long time (the original Slashdot article is PR crap btw, I'm talking about the Air & Space one)

Sure worth repeating: http://www.airspacemag.com/space-exploration/Visionary-Launchers-Employees.html

P.S. Elon looks a lot like Pavel Chekov!

If America is going to get humans to Mars SpaceX is your best bet, not NASA. NASA is completely indifferent to actually building a new launcher. NASA's only goal is to keep Senators Shelby, Nelson, Hatch and Hutchinson happy with perpetual jobs programs in their states so their money keeps flowing. That's why they keep proposing launchers that are always 10 years away from ever launching.

The beauty of SpaceX is they get some money from Congress but they can probably support themselves on commercial and military launch contracts and ride out the sheer stupidity of America's political system.

Here is an excellent article on SpaceX in Air and Space Mag.

Elon Musk's goal is almost entirely aiming towards colonize Mars and disrupting launcher design so thoroughly that we can actually afford to get big things in to LEO and beyond.

Article has excellent stuff on the really innovative stuff they are doing, like their heat shield. They aren't patenting anything because they don't want to give China a HOWTO so they can rip off all the cool stuff they are doing. They also give the finger to all the existing aerospace companies that try to gouge them on parts. If the price isn't reasonable they build their own and often improve on existing designs. They are probably going to undercut China's Long March on LEO launch cost which is impressive with their plant being in very expensive California and having a relatively expensive American work force. They are beating China on cost using innovation.

A really compelling part in the article is an engineer at one of their competitors rooting for them to succeed. They are almost the only shot America has of recapturing the Apollo magic and beating China in the new space race.

I agree with reading about it on the Internet. I like RSS, but I've found it homogenizes my content so that things don't jump out at me and the really interesting stories get buried with all the mediocre ones. So I keep the following list of bookmarks to check on a weekly basis:

ABC (Australia) Science, ABC (US) Science, Air & Space Magazine, ARKive, Ars Technica, BBC SciTech News, CBS Sci-Tech News, Chet Raymo, Cosmos News, Current: Science, Discover, Discovery News, Edge, Economist Science, EurekAlert!, Flyp media, Futurity, h+, Inkling Magazine, LiveScience, Massimo Pigliucci, Mother Jones Environment, MSNBC Science News, National Geographic News, National Public Radio (US), Natural History Magazine, New Scientist, New York Times Science, New Yorker Science, Newsweek Science, Orion, PhysOrg, Popular Mechanics, Popular Science, R&D Magazine, Ripley's Believe It or Not!, Science Daily, Scientific American, Seed Magazine, Science Cheerleader, Science News, Schrodinger's Kitten, Slashdot Science, Smithsonian, Space.com, The Technium, Time Magazine Science, USA Today Science, US News & World Report Science, Wired News, World Changing

Woah- back it up a little there.

Yes it was designed in the 70's. In fact, it was first proposed before Apollo was completed.

However just like every other airframe out there, it has undergone significant change over the years to keep it state of the art.
Check out the write up in this months "Air and Space". Evolution of the Space Shuttle.

Then look at the alternative - The Soyuz. When was that developed? And again undergone continual evolution.

This "Public / Private Partnership" has to be the next step in Space Exploration. As governments have less to prove out in space, spending will be cut. This means private industries will take up the slack and find commercial opportunities. What they will bring to the table are commercial imperatives which drive operating costs down, and profit margins up. I for one believe that in order for us to start colonizing the solar system, we need to demonstrate commercial viability.

The Safety issue? - Yes it's important and we need to make sure cost cutting does not increase the risk to human life.