ISS Crew Returns in Soyuz Capsule

physicsnerd writes "According to CNN the Soyuz capsule from the International Space Station has landed in Kazakhstan. This is the first time US Astronauts have ever landed outside of the US."

Comments

Junk the Shuttle -- and ISS while you're at it.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm sure many will disagree, but the cost of the shuttle program is horrendous, and NASA's insistence on using it has led to some cataclysmically stupid decisions. One example: the ISS (which is an utter joke compared to Skylab or Mir) was placed into a rapidly-decaying orbit not because that was a good idea (it isn't) but because the shuttle could get there.

Most of the satellites that are "launched" by the shuttle suffer from the design constraint that they have to fit into the friggin' bay AND have room for the accompanying boosters that will put them into their real orbit once the shuttle lets them out. Again, the shuttle can't go high enough for real deployment.

The idea of capturing and reparing satellites is inherently absurd; most aren't where the shuttle can get 'em and the total cost of the program utterly dwarfs the expense that would have been incurred had they said of the Hubble "Well, we screwed it up...build another one and get it right this time."

The safety record sucks. After Challenger Richard Feynman put the probability of a fatal accident at one in fifty. So far, NASA's on the money and the nature of the shuttle is such that if someone dies, everybody dies.

Lest I be misunderstood, I understand the romantic and scientific appeal of manned space flight, of the visceral sense of satisfaction we can have as a species when we look up to the skies and say "We live there." I'm a strong proponent of that. I also recognize the complaints that the money spent on that is money not spent on (feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, inoculating the sick, fill in your pet cause). The manned space program is hellishly uneconomical and a great deal of that can be laid at the feet of the shuttle program.

It's a white elephant without a mission, a bastard child of a spacecraft and an airplane which like most gadgets that try to do two fundamentally different things does neither well. Its payload capacity compared to heavy-lift rockets is a joke, it's barely capable of crawling out of the atmosphere, it's presented a tremendous constraint to the rest of the space program by forcing many missions to be less than they could have been in order to be shuttle-doable, and it bears repeating that every fifty flights it kills everyone on board.

It's time to ground the shuttle fleet permanently. Space isn't going anywhere. Stop pouring the hundreds of millions of dollars into the shuttle program and pour them into a new design effort. Scrap the silly "space-plane" concept and trinity dies at the end of the matrix reloaded develop a family of lifters and craft that _can_ be used for many things but don't back NASA into a corner that forces them to use it for all missions. Make crew safety an inherent feature (recognizing that there are tradeoffs and that getting out of the gravity well is a fundamentally dangerous activity). Stop throwing good money after bad on that ISS as well, and use the collective resources of the two programs to start over. It's not true that the second design is always better than the first (see again ISS and Mir/Skylab) but you're wise to play those odds.

Let's do it over. And do it right.

Let's try this...plan A, B and C

[madmarcel]

1) Egad! A matrix spoiler! Sneaky f*cker! :)

2) A better design? Ok, what design do you suggest? From what I've seen from those 'space-research' companies that have been mentioned on slashdot over the past few weeks...well...frankly I don't think we should get too excited :o

My (not so original) suggestion:

((Most of this has been discussed here on slashdot before - I'll just rince and repeat and state the obvious :-))

Let's build a space-elevator. Right now we (eh..NASA) are spending VAST amounts of money to get relatively small amounts of material into space. The risks involved in getting this material into space are astronomical.

So build a space-elevator. The initial costs are most certainly incredibly high (no pun intended: astronomical - billions of dollars :^)...but once it is in place everything thereafter is a breeze at relatively 'launch' low cost and minimal/reduced risk.

I think most people will agree with me that ONLY once we have one of these in place that we can seriously begin to explore our solar-system.
(Because we can then build our space-ships as big as want and launching them towards other planets will be a breeze :)

There are some hurdles...we lack some of the technology required to pull this off...(again...a question of applying plenty of moola)...and finding a location for this thing is another kettle of fish altogether.
(E.g. Right on top of Mount Kilamanjaro? I doubt the locals wil let ya)

Rockets are not the way to go. They are a stop-gap..eh..thingy...measure.

Plan B:
Invent an anti-gravity drive, stick it in your favourite rocket and forget everything I mentioned above ;P