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Discovery Docks At International Space Station
tewl writes: "Saw this on CNN.
For all of those interested in the space program: 'The space shuttle Discovery gently latched onto the docking port of the International Space Station Friday afternoon (1:45 p.m. EDT) as the two spacecraft hurtled at 250 miles above Kazakhstan at a rate of 50 miles a second.
"Houston, Discovery, we have capture," radioed one crew member.
It was the fourth shuttle docking at the fledgling station. NASA is planning another 35 shuttle visits over the next five years to build the station, estimated to cost between $60 billion-$100 billion. When complete, in 2006, the 16-nation project will have the interior volume of a 747 jumbo jet and stretch the length of a football field.'"
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
as the two spacecraft hurtled at 250 miles above Kazakhstan at a rate of 50 miles a second
Not to pick nits (ok, yes to pick nits), orbital velocity is actually about 5 miles per second. Someone added an extra zero here.
For those of you who would like to see the Shuttle & ISS activities in Real Audio, the link on NASA's site points to: http://198.116.66.254:8080/ramge n/e ncoder/live.rm
I guess now that DS9's been cancelled, Miles O'Brien found himself a cushy job as space correspondent for CNN.
All NASA would have to do to open up space for humanity is guarantee to award $500/lb for anything that anyone puts into orbit up to $50 billion dollars. That would, with commercial participation, put 100 million pounds of stuff in orbit and spawn a competitive launch industry that has costs below $500/lb to LEO.
Jerry Pournelle and friends tried to get NASA to do that back in the early 80s when Reagan's folks pretended like they cared about space (due to Gen. Graham's promotion of SDI), but they failed to make inroads at that time.
Strange how Dan Goldin was able to convince Jerry that Jerry had input on NASA policy recently when, in fact, Goldin was not about to pursue anything akin to the launch incentives envisioned by Jerry's crew. Goldin even broke the Launch Services Purchase Act of 1990 that a bunch of us grassroots guys got passed when he launched the Advanced Communications Technology Satellite on the Shuttle, as well as failing to pursue the launch vouchers program we also got passed, so it is pretty clear Goldin doesn't give a rats ass about the law, let alone making space accessible.
But what happened to Jerry when Goldin had him running around thinking he was having input on NASA policy? Why didn't Jerry just rub Goldin's nose in NASA's failure to set up simple, dumb, launch incentives?
Why bother to do anything else?
Seastead this.
Back in September, a shuttle crew installed a treadmill to deal with this very problem (link to story on cnn.com). A super-fancy one too, lying in some sort of weird spring/harness thing so it doesn't affect the mocrigravity experiments going on up there.
As to your second point, I don't believe they're growing their own food. Virtually all the room on the space station is taken up by equipment, laboratories, etc. I read somewhere (also cnn.com, just don't have the exact page in front of me) that the previous three or four shuttle missions were basically supply runs, so I'd imagine they just hauled a whole bunch of dehydrated food up on one of the missions.
the coolest club on
ISS is slowed down and thus loses altitude by atmospheric drag. It needs to be "reboosted" to a higher orbit every few months (which will ususally be done by visiting spacecraft). This is normal and it was designed that way. The upper limit of 400km altitude is due to the limited range of the visiting spacecraft (range depending on payload mass). The lower limit is due to the requirement that the ISS must not sink to a dangerously low orbit even if one reboost cycle is missed.
As they each describe directory paths, it's clear they're using Windows based machines. It also seems like they're using a human (on the ground) doing single-file-at-a-time transfer for e-mail rather than a proper MTA, and this can't happen when the machine is being used "in certain ways".
Bill McArthur has been spending a lot of time fighting with the systems so far, and this isn't the first time software problems have cropped up during flights -- a few back a software program refused to write log files until someone figured out the directory limit for files had been reached.
I have to wonder -- why the hell are they flying with such flaky systems? And why are all the systems running Windows? I'm not suggesting everything suddenly switch to Linux, but it would seem to make sense that the servers (at least) run something more stable than the ones currently flying have demonstrated themselves to be.
I don't know if this has been caused by the loss of the Ku-band (high-bandwidth), but regardless, perhaps it's time to form an Open Source project for space-flight software?
Why not just get a 747 and slap some huge rockets onto it and put it into orbit.
Then eveyone would have comfy seats too.
-- That which does not kill us has made its last mistake.
Er, I knew I shoulda stayed away from those oysters at the work party last night. =P
Free music from Jack Merlot.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Some of the development systems for this experiment run Debian.
Check out the rest of the album. I found the emergency escape drills and the "spacesuits" worn while fueling the satellite with hazardous chemicals most interesting, after pictures of people I know :-) .
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
For those around the world who would like to actually see the ISS in the night sky, as it soars past high above:
ISS Naked-Eye Visiblity Data
It isn't very bright yet, but will be in the future. Perhaps the docked shuttle will add to it as well.
- Also Sprach Doktor Merkwurdigliebe