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The Search for Secret Shuttle Parts
Slashdot readers have been submitting this story about the search
for secret shuttle parts with all sorts of insane conspiracy theories attached to their cut & paste of the URL. It's apparently just the box that handled encryption for messages, so of course Uncle Sam wants it back. Quite the needle in a haystack tho.
The box is most likely an Identify Friend Or Foe box. Any encryption of actual data would be handled by the applications sending it.
IFOF boxes are standard on all military vehicles. The shuttle is a military vehicle as defined by the relevant treaties as it has been used to launch military satelites. It would carry an IFOF box in any case as a matter of course since there is a sizable probability it might end up comming down in non-US airspace.
One of the alleged features of IFOF is the ability to identify itself to other 'friendly' airborne objects and avoid an attack. For example a passing stinger missile obtained from Uncle Sam by way of the Taleban.
It is unlikely such a box would have an amazingly complex crypto system. After all you don't want your stinger missile to be doing DH calculations before deciding whether to explode. So there could be some real importance there.
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Since the loss of Challenger, the shuttle has not carried any commercial payloads. It's all military and other government agencies, so they'd want to use secure comms to get those things set up.
Also, they'd want to be able to restrict who has access to the remote telemetry feeds and possibly even any kind of remote control systems they have. The last thing NASA wants is for a l33t hax0r to deploy the landing gear while still in orbit! Good encrytion will play a large part in this.
I noticed at the time that the news agencies were making a big deal of the toxins and that people shouldn't touch anything. Then a few days later it was followed up by reports of people in hospital, in a very "we told you so" attitude.
The chances are though, while there were some pretty nasty chemicals on board, all they wanted to do was to keep the parts in as good a condition as possible. They will be rebuilding and analysing the parts to get as much information on what happened. Let's face it, the main objective of investigations will be to prevent a similar disaster happening again. Good luck to them, I hope they figure it out.
Sometimes I think people need to realize that even with all the "straight-talk" and analyzation ther were seven people burned alive that didn't do anything wrong except want to explore the unknown and make strives for science. These seven people were family members, friends, teachers, and of a rare breed of astronaut who had joined the handful before them to enter space. Many have been lost in the name of science and discovery, but to assume that maybe they're lives were lost in vain would be to me one of the worst things ever.
Take a step back, realize what's being said and move on, they're collecting the wreckage because someone or a whole lot of someones are going to be losing their jobs because of this. NASA does everything right, and this was something done wrong. For every scientist in NASA there are thousands at the door ready to take their place and for every astronaut there are thousands ready to take their place. NASA is the home of the eleet and the best of the best, failure or mistakes are not taken lightly.
Ignore the "p2p is theft" trolls, they're just uninformed
While it is a crash investigation and it is illegal to withhold what you know, if this top secret piece of decryption hardware fell on your lawn, you legal own it as it is on your property and you have salvaged it.
Uh, no. You are totally wrong. It's either your property or it isn't -- it's irrelevent if something happens to land on your lawn. If I accidently drop my hedging shears over the fence to my neighbor, it doesn't automatically belong to my neighbor.
Also note that it's NOT necessarily legal for you to keep something that you find that someone else lost. It's particularly illegal for you to keep stolen goods (like bank robber drops the bag of money and you grab it).
Also contrary to popular belief, if a package is misdelivered to you, you are NOT entitled to keep it. On the other hand, if someone sends you something without your authorization and then bills you, then generally you are allowed to keep it.
Local details may vary, of course.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
The notion of creating cheaper, safer ways to get into orbit is, of course, a no-brainer. Would you want to create more expensive, dangerous paths to orbit?
If I understand correctly, a few factors made the shuttle look like a good idea when the program was intiated:
In principle, this seems reasonable, as you don't have to throw away the investment made in building the craft. In hindsight, we know that the added complexity and maintenance requirements overwhelmed this advantage, but this wasn't necessarily obvious going into the project. People evidently still believe that the goal is attainable, as proposals for reusable craft are regularly floated.
The cost of the support facilities for the shuttle are amortized over the shuttle launches taking place. At the original proposed launch frequency - on the order of once a week or more, if I recall correctly - the impact on payload cost of paying for the launch and maintenance facilities would have been much lower.
Unfortunately, this required a craft reliable and easily maintained enough to launch on a weekly basis, and enough people willing to pay for shuttle payloads to launch at that frequency.
I've heard allegations that this was originally supposed to be the shuttle's only job. It's a craft that can go just about anywhere in low orbit, match courses with stations or satellites, transfer crew, perform repairs, retrieve malfunctioning satellintes, and so forth. As a cargo vehicle, it's horrible, but in other respects it's a very flexible and potentially useful craft.
Of course, its usefulness assumes that there are enough satellites and space stations to require regular shuttle service.
In the political climate of the time, this was important and could be argued to have enough political effect to make it worthwhile to pursue regardless of other merits.
In short, I think the shuttle falls into the "it seemed like a good idea at the time" category. Assumptions that were made turned out not to hold, and costs turned out to be much higher than expected. Thus, the craft we're now stuck with.
Space travel is about going someplace. Someone needs to pick a destination for NASA.
I'm not sure about this. The goal of the manned space program also involves establishing human presence in space. This goal is best accomplished by building more facilities in the areas we can reach easily and know a lot about, as opposed to sending humans to every object we can find. Exploration is a goal too; however, it's not the only goal, and manned expeditions are arguably less useful for this aspect.
Anything science-related is most efficiently performed by unmanned devices. If we're sending people into space, it's for other reasons than science ("because we think it's cool" is, in my opinion, a valid reason).