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Well, the rest of them need to do something while Steve's out spacewalking. It beats listening to Andy going on yet again about how he can't believe what Americans call beer.

You know, Nasa's subsidiary, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory?

The 11 presentations are at the following location: http://www.nasa.gov/missions/solarsystem/vision_co ncepts.html

totally lame replying to myself, but here is the link to the VSE trade studies:

http://www.nasa.gov/missions/solarsystem/vision_co ncepts.html

some of it is technical, but not beyond the average slashdotter.

kinda OT, but you can view the live coverage of the current mission via nasatv here:

http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

The Saturn V with Apollo capsule was 370 feet tall... the original purpose. Actually there was an even larger rocket design that was planned, so yeah, 500 feet does seem to sound correct.

Indeed, here are the "official" dimensions:
http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/facilities/vab.html

The rooftop is over 525 feet tall. They may have to "cut" a new door frame on the exit in order to accomodate such a large beast, and possibly rework the primary cranes, but it could be done. A large rocket wouldn't force a major redesign of the facility or force a new building to be built.

Well, superior solutions don't mean a lot if they're sitting in your toolbox at home when your car breaks down and you need them. But enough with the analogy.

If we had regular shuttle launches (and I realize we don't), that swiss army knife would come in handy. We're fortunate enough that we haven't had any severe emergencies in orbit yet, but *when* we do, we'll be wishing we had a "swiss army knife" up there *right now*, or at least ready to go, rather than having to assemble, prep and launch a specialized rocket to tackle whatever situation -- a process that can take weeks even in the most dire of situations.

Yes, it's unfortunate that despite being reusable, the shuttle is not the cheapest to-orbit solution. But contrary to popular belief, that's fine. The shuttle does things no other single craft is capable of. And that counts for a lot. Despite the cost, there never was any shortage of cargo willing to pay for space aboard a shuttle launch, and generally for good reasons.

The shuttle is basically first generation technology for reusable spacecraft. There's no reason to believe that new designs couldn't drastically improve on the shuttle in every way. For example, take a look at Russia's Buran Shuttle which is also pretty dated these days. We could do even better than that.

With the release of Google maps, NASA's Worldwind, and MSN's Virtual Earth, I don't expect ESRI's products to continue their dominance in the GIS market. Everyday brings new extensions for Google maps allowing the importing of GI data. At the minimum, I predict they'll lower the price of their products.

I know a couple people who work there and they say that tensions are very high.

Whenever I read one of these NASA "next generation" designs that are just reengineering old technology, I wonder when they are going to bite the bullet and go for nuclear rockets. Experimentation in the 60s produced a crude solid-core reactor engine called NERVA, but it was heavy and underpowered, and would have released a lot of radioactive pollution. There are much more promising designs now. One is called a Gaseous Core Nuclear Reactor, also known as a "nuclear lightbulb."

Basically it's a big quartz bulb containing gaseous uranium such as UF6, confined to the center of the bulb by a buffer gas swirling around the inside. The UF6 cloud heats up to 25000 C, about 7 times the melting temp of any solid core reactor. It emits intense ultraviolet, which passes through the quartz and is absorbed by slightly doped hydrogen flowing over the outside. The hydrogen heats and expands rather than combusting, exiting the nozzle to provide thrust. No need to carry liquid oxygen. The nuclides confined within the bulb do not enter the exhaust stream, and the hydrogen exhaust itself is not radioactive.

Here is a really interesting article that describes a detailed design for a fully reusable GCNR rocket based on the Saturn V form factor, able to lift 1000 tons of payload into orbit (ten times NASA's latest new design) and return intact to a powered landing in the manner of the now defunct Delta Clipper.

GCNR rockets would not only be able to launch entire space hotels in one shot, their enormous lifting capacity would also make Mars missions practical. Proposed 2-year Mars missions using traditional planetary gravity assist trajectories would give the crew fatal radiation doses. A GCNR rocket could carry a fantastically equipped Mars mission with a foot-thick layer of water/ice shielding, on a point-and-shoot trajectory that takes three months each way. But that's another topic all its own.

Sure, anything nuclear creates a big PR problem, but NASA is supposed to be all about public education as well as putting things into space. I had hoped for more guts from their new leadership.
We've been mucking around in earth orbit for decades. It's time we built real spaceships that can handle really significant cargo.

Skylab was essentially a shuttle fuel tank that they didn't jettison on the way down and was modified afterwards as a space station.

Um, no. Skylab predates the shuttle by about a decade. I believe the station was built from a modified Saturn V third stage shell.

http://www-pao.ksc.nasa.gov/kscpao/history/skylab/ skylab-station.htm

Here you go:

Delta Clipper Experiment
Wikipedia

If you want to see what happened here's the video

IMHO, I don't think the strut failure was due to malice. I think it was simply a mistake/stupidity.

I got to watch several DC-X flights. I got to see it hover, move laterally, land, and the infamous 'dip & swoop' manuever.

I'm still dumbfounded that DC-X lost NASA's Reusable Launch Vehicle competition to the VentureStar design. Lockheed had an obviously bogus blue-sky design. McD had a working 1/3 scale proof-of-principle prototype.

A lot more design and testing would have been required to get to the full Delta Clipper orbital vehicle, but it still remains one of the better SSTO design ideas out there.

At least I got to see a rocket dance once. It was simply Incredible.

-I.V.

Yeah, it's on today's APOD as well.

As an aside: have a look at the high-res version of the picture showing the gap filler protruding from the belly. It seems that the digital camera they used to take that picture has loads and loads of dead pixels (all the red, white, grey, blueish dots, vague vertical stripes across those dots, etc). I wonder... is this the result of using a non radiation-hardened device in orbit? And if so, what radiation levels is the crew in the ISS exposed to?

Of course, the fanatical believers

Ad hominem

in manned space flight would never even consider that this shows the monstrous demerits and grotesque waste

Our species is trying to figure out how to do this. It's hard. It takes time and costs lives and great treasure. Fifty years from now some nameless mech will be strapped to the side of a cracked hull trying to patch a hole with a Shuttle derived glue gun.

Take the long view. It's easier on the blood pressure.

of manned flight versus unmanned.

There is no versus. Cassini is filling basements full of storage devices with Saturn and its moons. Deep Impact's primary objective was fulfilled only one month ago. In 2003, WMAP (and COBE before it) nailed the age of the universe to within a couple hundred million years. CLOVER and the Planck Surveyor will improve on this. Gravity Probe B is concluding its mission in August. NOAA-N launched in May. Spitzer (2003) and Chandra (1999) are both functioning well. Here is a page full of on-going unmanned missions you probably can't even identify.

GOES-N launches in 3 days. Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is launching in 6 days. CALIPSO goes up next month. STEREO, ST5, GOES-O, AIM, THEMIS, Pluto New Horizons and Dawn are all launching in 2006. Phoenix launches in 2007.

There is no verses. We do BOTH. We have the means and we're using it, regardless of what fools like you think you know.

You can actually see the cloth protruding in this hi-res pic of Discovery's nose, just to the right and behind the nose wheel bay.

The danger is that tugging and pulling at the cloth just might loosen some vital piece (e.g. a tile) of the spacecraft.

Okay but they don't seem too concerned
from nasa.gov
"Mission managers decided to remove two gap fillers that are protruding from areas between heat-shielding tile on the Shuttle's underbelly. It is a relatively simple process that can be accomplished as an add-on task to Wednesday's spacewalk."

Ya know, he shouldn't really have to. You should just go to the NASA web site and read about the research they are doing on the ISS. Of course, the next thing you'll say is that none of this research is necessary.. or that it could be done better with instruments. Unfortunately, you're probably right.

Interesting. But how come, in the past five years, this decision has not been rolled back? It looks like the current head of NASA was appointed by the current administration. Shouldn't he have either grounded the flight himself, or passed on information in the reports to someone higher in the government foodchain who could end this or overrule the EPA decision?

It's NASA not Nasa. And it's not Ohuk, it's OHUK.

See this NASA site for more details:
http://www.nasa.gov/worldbook/comet_worldbook.html

See this NASA site for more details:
http://www.nasa.gov/worldbook/comet_worldbook.html

From the NASA press release:

Brown, Trujillo and Rabinowitz first photographed the new planet with the 48-inch Samuel Oschin Telescope on October 31, 2003. However, the object was so far away that its motion was not detected until they reanalyzed the data in January of this year. In the last seven months, the scientists have been studying the planet to better estimate its size and its motions.

They first suspected they had a planet in January of this year. In October 2003, all they had was a star-like object in a photographic image. If they'd announced that as a possible planet, we'd be getting about 100,000 such announcements per day from astronomers.

Hey, anyone remember the last bunch of people to mess with the calendar?"

There were plenty of them since Julius Caesar. For example:

At the behest of the Council of Trent, Pope Pius V introduced a new Breviary in 1568 and Missal in 1570, both of which included adjustments to the lunar tables and the leap-year system. Pope Gregory XIII, who succeeded Pope Pius in 1572, soon convened a commission to consider reform of the calendar, since he considered his predecessor's measures inadequate.

The recommendations of Pope Gregory's calendar commission were instituted by the papal bull "Inter Gravissimus," signed on 1582 February 24. Ten days were deleted from the calendar, so that 1582 October 4 was followed by 1582 October 15, thereby causing the vernal equinox of 1583 and subsequent years to occur about March 21.
http://sunearth.gsfc.nasa.gov/eclipse/SEhelp/calen dars.html

Just when you thought that this couldn't be bigger news, Ron Baalke at JPL has pointed out that another object, 2003 UB313, resides at 96 AU and has a diameter from 4400 km to 9900 km, assuming its albedo is between 0.05 and 0.25. Though the inclination is a bit weird (44 degrees), this may be considered planet-sized.

http://cfa-www.harvard.edu/mpec/K05/K05O41.html

http://neo.jpl.nasa.gov/orbits/2003ub313.html

We've seen this whole thing before when NASA & JPL announced Quaoar. (See previous /. posting) OH! And lets not forget Sedna! Are they just trying to keep recycling "new planet" headlines to give themselves more attention?

It was also damn close to Neptune in the latter part of the 19th Century, particularly 1869 and 1891, and inside the orbit of Neptune in the 1870s & 80s.

Was originally an Astronomy Picture Of the Day. (http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap050720.html) This is a good site or backgrounds!

P.S. For other good/neat pics goto http://epod.usra.edu/archive.php3 (Earth Science Picture Of the Day)

They mean an absolute magnitude of 17. So dimmer than a 2km asteroid? But of course this must be a different "absolute magnitude" to the one used for stars. No wonder these figures make no sense.

Only difference is that the happy pink floating martian elephants didn't leave there foot prints unfortunately.

However there is strong evidence of water on Mars at one time and when you talking geologically time, millions of years is a good assumption. Look at some of the images and you can see tributaries whose structures are only known to form via a fluid based erosion.



burn baby burn

Not a joke, still from the Astronomy Picture of the Day site, is this picture, which according to the page text, was actually taken back in February, and reported in the June 2005 issue of Nature. So while it's news, it's not new news.

Here's the photo: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap050401.html

;) It's humour! Laugh!

Essentially, European astronomers have found something they call 2003 EL61 and what American astronomers call K40506A.

There are questions on how reflective the object is, which means we don't have that much information on how big it is or how far away it is. The guesses by astronomers, at this point, are pretty speculative, according to the BBC, which is tracking this breaking story.

NASA has published a wild guess as to the orbit, in Java.

The other known super-large (1000Km or bigger) Kuiper Belt objects are:

• Sedna (Diameter unknown, less than 1500 Km)
  
• 2004 DW (Diameter probably about 1500 Km)
  
• Quaoar (Diameter of 1200 Km, +/- 200 Km)
  
• Ixion (Diameter 1065 Km, +/- 165 Km)
  

no astronomy discussion would be complete without reference to the death star and the eerie resemblance of saturn's moon, Mimas?

I agree

I thought the main thrust for lift-off came from the booster tank's engines? Like this. I figure a redesigned booster could make up for the lack of the shuttle's engines on lift-off.

If not, I'll grant you it is the stupidest idea of all time. But hey, this is the reason I don't work for NASA. Smarter minds than me are on this problem! ;)

Acutally NASA was first to come out with this as a part of their World Wind / Land Sat. Open Source application (http://worldwind.arc.nasa.gov/). World Wind is much more advanced than googlemaps (don't get me wrong I love googlemaps) as it uses many different datasources. Some features of World Wind include a 3D Engine, Blue Marble,Landsat 7,SRTM, MODIS,Globe and Landmark set. And if you don't like how World Wind works - well then download the source and change it.

Check this link. There's a plenty of cool pictures available for free, just not on a CD. (hey, that rhymes :-)

In fact, the EPA actually offered a waiver for NASA/Space Shuttle Program.

You can see a letter from NASA in response to the EPA firmly stating they *need* to continue to use CFCs for the Space Shuttle Program, specifically.

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/45329main_hcfc4_001.pdf

>>Dont know about you guys but a 1 in 113 chance of a massive catastrophy sounds pretty high to me.

Yet you have a 1 in 100 chance of being killed in a car crash. Does that stop anyone from getting into their cars in the morning to get to work?

>>Is it really that hard not to have things fall of it. (?)

Well, yes. Take anything, and attach some controlled explosives, get it light and send it hurtling at the sky, while making it obtain 2,000 mph extra per minute of launch. You're going to get objects falling off of it. Foam is light, but at speed its the problem.

As for those that say the foam came from the mounting section, you're actually wrong. http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/123612main_s114 e5002_high.jpg shows quite clearly that the foam came from further along the Ext. Tank. (See http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/123628main_hh_u mb_no_annotation1_5002.jpg if you're having trouble spotting it.)

NeoThermic

>>Dont know about you guys but a 1 in 113 chance of a massive catastrophy sounds pretty high to me.

Yet you have a 1 in 100 chance of being killed in a car crash. Does that stop anyone from getting into their cars in the morning to get to work?

>>Is it really that hard not to have things fall of it. (?)

Well, yes. Take anything, and attach some controlled explosives, get it light and send it hurtling at the sky, while making it obtain 2,000 mph extra per minute of launch. You're going to get objects falling off of it. Foam is light, but at speed its the problem.

As for those that say the foam came from the mounting section, you're actually wrong. http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/123612main_s114 e5002_high.jpg shows quite clearly that the foam came from further along the Ext. Tank. (See http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/123628main_hh_u mb_no_annotation1_5002.jpg if you're having trouble spotting it.)

NeoThermic

Here's a partial list of books that I've read on the matter. I've got some more that I need to add to the site that I've read recently. I've also poured over several web sites, my favorite being the Apollo Lunar Surface Journal. I don't have cable or satellite TV and don't watch the Discovery Channel.

Loss of power in spacecraft [Apollo 12] due to lightning strike

Do you know what "SCE to AUX" means? If not then I'd suggest that you know nothing of the story and that you should go look it up on Google. You could argue that the launch shouldn't have happened with thunderstorms in the area, and I don't disagree. I guess that Kurt DeBus had more confidence in the craft than he should have.

Reading the abovementioned dense thick books, one thing that struck me was the sheer number of diving catches and near misses that characterized the Mercury/Gemini/Apollo era. Once you grasp that, the origins of the Shuttle era attitudes become abundantly clear.

The thick, dense books will also tell you that they did nothing by accident. A brute force dock with the LEM wasn't a diving catch or a near miss. It was a calculated risk that still fell within mission rules. The difference between the Apollo era mission rules and the Shuttle era mission rules are that the Shuttle rules are insanely tight. The launch of Discovery yesterday proved it. They had four fuel sensors in the tank of which two were backups. If you watched the news conference on Monday you would have heard them say something like, "We'll still launch if the fourth sensor is bad". If that's the case then why even have the extra sensor?

The Apollo spacecraft was *far* from debugged.

Absolutely. And so is the shuttle. Don't get me wrong, the shuttle is a great system, but if I had to put my ass on the line then I'd fly on Apollo any day. The reason why is simple - There's an old story (yes, I wax nostalgic) about Werner Von Braun personally man-rating a system so that they could get it out the door. I don't know about you, but it says a lot to me that instead of sending an expendible flunky to do the job, Von Braun did it himself. The fact that a director of an entire flight center is willing to trust his engineers enough to put his own butt on the line tells me he was confident.

Loss of landing radar nearly leading to landing abort (Apollo 14 again)

This one is new to me, although I wouldn't claim to be the foremost expert on Apollo. Could you have confused this with the 1201 and 1202 program alarms during the final stages of landing on Apollo 11? The reason that I bring this up is that this was one of NASA's finest hours. The landing, sure, but before that in how they handled the alarm. About a week prior to the launch of Apollo 11, someone in the test group noticed that they had not done a very good job of simulating the program alarms, so they ran a some simulations. When the actual program alarms happened, they knew immediately what they meant and how to handle them, which ultimately saved the mission.

Zonds they shot to space in late 60s went around the moon and landed at Indian ocean in one piece. Zonds were identical to Soyuz crafts but unmanned. Conspiracy theorists claimed that they were actually manned Soyuz crafts but cosmonauts had expired on the way. See here or just google zond and moon.

Alternatively, a cruise usually lasts 1-2 weeks . Which is a better use of your money?

Since they decided to make the Shuttle reusable, and land like a plane, it has a very heavy heat shield, wings and airframe - a lot more mass to carry up than for Saturn V. It would be hard to get enough thrust to lift all that with liquid hydrogen/oxygen engines. 80% of the thrust on launch comes from the SRBs - the three main engines together give about 1 million pounds of thrust, whereas the two SRBs together give about 5 million pounds of thrust (equivalent to the thrust from 15 main engines).

Since they decided to make the Shuttle reusable, and land like a plane, it has a very heavy heat shield, wings and airframe - a lot more mass to carry up than for Saturn V. It would be hard to get enough thrust to lift all that with liquid hydrogen/oxygen engines. 80% of the thrust on launch comes from the SRBs - the three main engines together give about 1 million pounds of thrust, whereas the two SRBs together give about 5 million pounds of thrust (equivalent to the thrust from 15 main engines).

There may certainly have been "Debris Seen Hitting Shuttle During Launch".. But this should be no surprise since NASA scientists and engineers have stated that debris always falls, and it is 'impossible' to prevent. That's why, should you look at the shuttle time line, you will see that they are taking many more preventative measures than have ever been taken in the past. However, this begs the question.. Why weren't these steps taken before?

26 Jul - Takeoff - Wednesday - A large amount of camera and recording equipment are used to monitor the body of the aircraft during liftoff.

27 Jul - A 100 Foot Robotic Arm will inspect the shuttle's shield areas.

28 Jul - The shuttle will backflip approx 600 feet from the space station, allowing it's underside to be photographed with high-resolution cameras on the space station.

29 Jul - 3 Aug - Three 6.5 hour spacewalks have been scheduled to test and repair any heat shield damage.

Source: http://www.nasa.gov/

It's been years since I saw one, but it was impressive. At first, it's just a little dot in the sky, kind tough to find. Then, as I was starting to feel diappointed at how tiny it was, my eyes started playing tricks. Something in the back of my head noticed the depth perception, realized it was further away than any plane I'd ever seen. Only then, when I began to understand the scale of the distances, did I start to get a real feel for how fast the thing was moving.

A very cool sight, much of which is lost on a video screen. It really is best seen firsthand.

Not hard at all, in a world without Republicans. Check out the history of the Triana mission. Among many other things it would have provided just the HDTV image you mentioned. It was killed for essentially political reasons.

SpaceflightNow's status page has nothing, Space.com's coverage has nothing, and NASA's official Return to Flight page has nothing, whether in coverage or in the videos. So I'm calling shens.

BTW, I just heard on talk radio that Stephen King was found dead in his Maine home today. Truly an American icon.

Science@Nasa Shuttle Tracking. very slick link. Also check out the J-Track 3D for most every unclassified item up there in realtime 3D.