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Houston, We have a Space Station!
This submission just came in:
flufffy writes: "Another module, the Russian Zvezda ("Star"), has just joined the two existing ISS modules up in orbit. The station is now plenty big enough to be seen from the Earth's surface. But where exactly should you look? NASA's SkyWatch, available here, shows you. After you've download the small 300k app., it asks you for your Lat/Long and the satellite you're interested in (including shuttle re-entries), before calculating when and where you can see it next. You can print out the data as a sky chart, with constellations marked! As the ISS seems to be around the equator at the moment, it's low in the southern sky for U.S. skywatchers. Still, the program showed me where to look to the south of Sagitarrius, at about 1 a.m. on the morning of July 26th. This is really cool, and will only get more fun as the ISS gets larger and more visible."
BAH! I subscribe to the "Independence Day" scenario.
It all feeds into a manufactured perception that the DOD is incompetent. That way everyone (including the foreign powers) underestimates them.
Hell the mob has been doing it for years. Do you really think the little Italian restaurant really needs to replace all their platess every 6 months.
They'll be basically 6 kinds of replies to this story:
1) I still don't know why we're wasting money on {tech} when people in {place} are {mode of suffering agreed to be bad}. We should be worrying about solving our problems here on Earth!
2) This is the coolest thing ever! The most magnificent achievement since {primitive yet crucial tech}. It's the first step towards {cosmic achievement}, just like {author} predicted.
3) Imagine a Beowolf cluster of these!
4) I shrug. I am so underwhelmed. Millions and millions of {currency} wasted so we could put more trash in space. It will last less than {hyperbole of brevity} and be as useless as {hyperbole of futility}.
5) Look up these links here. Yeah, I need the karma.
6) Not bad for a Pizza Hut flight.
Fill in the {blanks} and permute at will. Add Microsoft bashing, MPAA/RIAA cursing, RMS, ESR, OpenSource zealotry. Simmer to a boil. Watch if we don't get 400 comments on this one.
THS
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THS
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"Poor girl looks as confused as a blind lesbian in a fish market." - Simon R. Green
Great! Where do I sign up!
IIRC, applications for the astronaut training program are reviewed every two years in July; the next screening takes place approximately a year from now. You can find out more information and download application forms at NASA's astronaut selection website. Generally speaking, for admittance as a mission specialist you need to possess an advanced scientific, technical, or medical degree (PhDs and MDs are preferred) as well as demonstrate leadership in your particular field. (Most if not all of the pilots have prior military training, so a civilian's best shot into the program is as a mission specialist). Becoming a NASA astronaut is highly competitive and grueling, as I'm sure you can imagine, but since it is hands down the coolest job imaginable, it won't stop me from sending my application in.
Can you name one substantial scientific benefit gained in the last 10 years of manned space flight? The last 20?
In the last 10 years Shuttle flights have been responsible for the Hubble Space Telescope - giving us a much clearer understanding of our universe and how we fit into it. The Hubble needed human servicing to have ever completed its mission.
We've been able to study the effects of spaceflight on the human body, which mimic many of the changes in the aging process. If we're going into space, we need that kind of information.
We've been able to monitor and observe earth-bound phenomena to an extent that has never before been possible, and would not have been possible with robotic craft.
We've given people something to hope for. Sure, robotic missions are great and they bring us loads of scientific data at no human risk, but they lack something that the human imagination needs. No robotic explorer will ever overshadow Neil Armstrong first setting his foot down on a foreign body in space. Who cares about the Russian Luna and American Surveyor probes after that? The world's attention was focused on space because that was a human being out there.
How about taking a close look at Pluto, which we still know almost nothing about? How about a closer look at Europa, an excellent candidate for the presence of life? How about trying to land a probe on Venus capable of surviving more than a few hours?
Isn't the Pluto Express mission set for a launch date in a few years?
There are already plans to revisit Europa, with a craft that can get below the ice and actually settle the life issue.
A probe to Venus would be very difficult to lift out of Earths gravity well. We'd almost have to build something that heavy in space - where could that take place? Why a space station, of course?
Granted, the ISS isn't that big a leap, but it is a leap. The ISS is a worthwhile project, and will continue to advance humanity's progress to the stars.
- Infoart - my favorite;
- Multilex - slower but larger.
Do not slashdot them - I need 'em for my work. Do not try to enter transliterations of russian words (like Zvezda from Çâåçäà) there - this would not work. You can try english words however.Here's some translations:
If you want to see russian graphics in this message, ensure you read it in Cyrillic Windows-1251 encoding so what Xx looks like Õõ. (If you've got correct fonts.)
Every secretary using MSWord wastes enough resources
Just because you fail to see the benefits of the space program, doesn't mean that thousands of Russian scientists who put their hearts and souls into the program don't see why it's necessary.
You think those guys are just sitting around in mission control going "well gee, duh, this space stuff sure is fun... Lets eat raw potato while we flink stuff around in space"?
I don't think so. They, along with thousands and thousands of support personnel in the space and aviation industry, understand the importance of the space program to the expansion of human science.
There is so much for the future of Russian economy to be gained from the space program, its not even funny. Space manufacturing, medicine, electronics - all of these human endeavours stand to benefit from research to be done on the ISS over the next few years, and the Russians know this just as well as any corporate bigwig at McDonnall/Douglas or Boeing.
Space is probably about the only thing the Russians are good at, as an industrialized nation, right now, and so it follows that they are putting their heart and soul into continuing to lead and participate in human exploration of space. Russian pursuits of space programs are *vital* to the future economic stability of the Russian system, since it's among the few truly exportable industries that Russia has right now, having lost a great deal of her productive power due to Communist misguidance.
That you cannot see this, or are unwilling to be able to even *think* that scientists and great minds of this ilk have an accute awareness of the benefits for what they're doing, belies your pop-culture, spoon-fed, MTV instant fix upbringing.
The hard working souls behind every nations space program are doing it for humanity, and for the benefits it will bring to humanity in the coming years - and while it may not seem too accessible to the plebian uneducated masses such as yourself right now, you (or, god help us if you breed, your children) will most certainly stand to benefit from it in the future.
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
I'm sick of seeing this "$200 for a doorknob, $435 for a hammer" crap people spout about the government.
This is where those numbers really come from:
The government often pays for things to be beuilt by contract. Instead of listing every item and price on invoices or work orders or whatever the hell they are, they take the price of the entire contract and divide it by however many items there are. Thus, though a computer system on an F-16 may cost $10,000 and the special gold tempered cockpit glass may cost $50,000 per bubble, a hammer used by Lockheed Martin or General Dynamics (aren't they the same company now or something?) still only costs $15 or $20.
So, in other words, while we're paying $435 for a hammer, we're also paying $435 for the highly special radar scanning tip in the nose of the aircraft.
The Space Station User's Guide is a terrific resource on the entire space station (written and assembled by one of the engineers who worked on it BTW), including the live NASA TV broadcast of the docking.
And yes, I submitted this link this morning to Slashdot but it got rejected in favour of the Space.com link in this story - go figure.
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid