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Or God forbid we asked the help of the Russians to safely return out astronauts for us. I'd personally much rather reenter our atmostphere in a Soyuz, from what I hear, than a flimsy shuttle. Even if something goes wrong you'd still have a good chance of surviving.

This one?

Oh, give me a locus where the gravitons focus
Where the three-body problem is solved,
Where the microwaves play down at three degrees K,
And the cold virus never evolved.

(chorus)

We eat algea pie, our vacuum is high,
Our ball bearings are perfectly round.
Our horizon is curved, our warheads are MIRVed,
And a kilogram weighs half a pound.

(chorus)

If we run out of space for our burgeoning race
No more Lebensraum left for the Mensch
When we're ready to start, we can take Mars apart,
If we just find a big enough wrench.

(chorus)

I'm sick of this place, it's just McDonald's in space,
And living up here is a bore.
Tell the shiggies, "Don't cry," they can kiss me goodbye
'Cause I'm moving next week to L4!

(chorus)

CHORUS: Home, home on LaGrange,
Where the space debris always collects,
We possess, so it seems, two of Man's greatest dreams:
Solar power and zero-gee sex.

--Home on Lagrange (The L5 Song)
(C) 1978 by William S. Higgins and Barry D. Gehm

There is inherent risk in space flight

And it's made much greater by operating a vehicle with razor-thin margins. Take a look at this amazing story about the reentry of Soyuz 5. One of the things that struck me was how robust soviet space hardware is. The shuttle, by comparison, is extremely fragile. It couldn't possibly take one percent of the punishment that Volynov's capsule took.

And yet Boris Volynov is alive to tell the story.

Rick Husband, William McCool, Michael Anderson, David Brown, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Blair and Ilan Ramon are not.

The Russian space program had its share of lethal accidents - but it also had several major accidents where the crew survived. With the shuttle the abort modes are mostly theoretical. In practice any serious accident means loss of the entire crew.

Oh, give me a locus where the gravitons focus
Where the three-body problem is solved,
Where the microwaves play down at three degrees K,
And the cold virus never evolved.

(chorus)

We eat algea pie, our vacuum is high,
Our ball bearings are perfectly round.
Our horizon is curved, our warheads are MIRVed,
And a kilogram weighs half a pound.

(chorus)

If we run out of space for our burgeoning race
No more Lebensraum left for the Mensch
When we're ready to start, we can take Mars apart,
If we just find a big enough wrench.

(chorus)

I'm sick of this place, it's just McDonald's in space,
And living up here is a bore.
Tell the shiggies, "Don't cry," they can kiss me goodbye
'Cause I'm moving next week to L4!

(chorus)

CHORUS:
Home, home on LaGrange,
Where the space debris always collects,
We possess, so it seems, two of Man's greatest dreams:
Solar power and zero-gee sex.

--Home on Lagrange (The L5 Song)
© 1978 by William S. Higgins and Barry D. Gehm

http://www.jamesoberg.com/humor.html
(from very bottom of page)

Damn. I meant Andes.

What was not known to the Americans was in the early 1960's during a series of tests to develop Soviet manned space vehicles a fire broke out in a test space capsule design with a cosmonaut in it when it was filled with pure O2--the cosmonaut burned to death.

You mean, this cosmonaut?

Such sick evilmen might attack commucinations satellites and bring down the whole internet in no time.

According to the article, dozens of countries are capable of firing this 21st century flak.

More can be found at the authors site.

Apparently the first expedition to reach ground zero and leave any records was twenty years late. Perhaps this explains it?

James Oberg, Tunguska Echoes Donning Press, 1982, Chapter Seven, pp. 132-145

There's a great article on the myths surrounding Tunguska at http://www.jamesoberg.com/ufo/tungus.html. A Russian scientist in the sixties used a model with matchsticks for trees to compute the height and angle of the explosion from the pattern of damage of the trees. From the website:

''Aerodynamics experts in Moscow conducted an experiment about twenty years ago in an effort to simulate Tunguska's blast patterns. The scientists used a charge of explosives suspended over a board covered with miniature "trees" represented by matchsticks. In addition to the single blast point a string of smaller charges were added to reproduce the hypersonic shock wave of the object's ballistic passage through the upper atmosphere.

When the explosives were triggered, a blast pattern strikingly similar to the "butterfly" pattern of the actual Tunguska site was created in the matchstick forest. Although this experiment conclusively demonstrated that the strange pattern was due entirely to a large object that exploded naturally, the experiment's results were still being misinterpreted or misquoted years afterward.''

James Oberg

I've never heard of a death on the Mir. James Oberg has cataloged what is known about the several deaths of Russian cosmonauts here, and Mir isn't mentioned once.

It is a money problem, since both would require a tremendous amount of fuel, probably more than Russia had money for (both getting the fuel and getting it up there). Check Jim Oberg's site about the impracticability of launching things into the sun.

This week's Talk of the Nation: Science Friday on NPR (hosted by Ira Flatow -- does anyone else remember Ira as host of the great kid's science program Newton's Apple?) had a great retrospective on Mir in their first hour's segment. Among the guests were astronaut Norman Thagard (who did a stint aboard Mir), Russian space expert James Oberg and Brian Burrough, author of Dragonfly: NASA and the Crisis Aboard Mir.

I highly recommend listening to this program for anyone interested in Mir, it's history and contribution to space science.

Actually, this is the only movie I can think of that got it right. See James Oberg's page on space myths and scroll down to "Blow Up."