Slashdot Mirror
Space Shuttle to re-launch in May
Goeland86 writes "CNN reports that NASA is on it's way to prepare for a shuttle launch in may. Considering the damage caused by the Hurricanes this season, I think it's quite impressive that they're even thinking of a launch next year altogether."
They need to launch in May before hurricane season starts again.
The biggest problem we have with making a space elevator, is making a cable/ribbon capable of supporting the massive weight of the cable.
For that, we need carbon nano-tubes
Once we can make carbon nanotubes of suffecient strength, length and quantity, then you will see the price per pound (the cost of getting 1 pound of matter into orbit) plummet. And that will open up space to many more viable uses.
"It's the smell! If there is such a thing." Agent Smith - The Matrix
Rutan's ship didn't go into orbit, it simply went into space and just barely at that.
If I remember correctly, his ship never went into orbit and went about 1/7th the height. It also never gets to the shuttles 17,000+ mph speed and thus doesn't have to deal with all that heat slowing down. It also has a small fraction of the amount of fuel. I'd rather they take their time and avoid burning men because they decided they had to hurry.
SpaceShipOne was nowhere near going into orbit. Orbit requires horizontal speed, not vertical height, and - more importantly - a way to safely bleed off that speed on re-entry without burning or breaking up.
SpaceShipOne is not capable of going into orbit, and never will be - it has neither the power to reach the Mach 25+ speeds required for orbital velocity, nor the ability to withstand the heating required to lose those speeds on reentry.
It's the equivalent of the early Mercury-Redstone flights from 1961(Freedom 7 and Liberty Bell 7) - short sub-orbital hops. The difference is that with a new booster (the Atlas) Mercury was capable of re-entry from orbital speeds.
Burt Rutan got his ship back into space. He did not go into any kind of orbit. Orbit requires way more energy than spaceship one could ever produce.
Get a free ipod.
Mod parent as Troll - and dont visit that site if you're at work.
Bush Lies On the Record.
Except that the early Mercury capsules only carried one, and they flew much higher than SS1 and led directly to an orbital craft. SS1 is essentially a stretch X-15, which was supposed to lead to the Air Force's Dyna-Soar, which was cancelled in favor of a civilian space program.
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
-- Colonel Adolphus Busch
Then you have no idea how the space elevator works.
It's not anchored (structually) to the surface of the Earth. It's connected, but that's only to keep the lower end from moving around do to the effect of the atmosphere (wind)
The anchor is a point in geo-synch orbit, the midpoint of the full length of the elevator. The lower terminus is at Earth's surface, but its upper end is as far away from the midpoint as the lower end is (think equal mass). The whole thing actually orbits the Earth just like a geo-sync satellite.
I'm not crazy,I'm actively irresponsible.
No no no. If you were around at the time, you'd have known that it was "Need Another Seven Astronauts". Bad taste perhaps, but it's still one of my favourite jokes of all time.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
The shuttle was a good idea. To get into space cheap you need a reusable space craft. Think how "cheap" your german smart car is if you have to replace it after every trip to the store.
e aly there should have been two programs one low risk maybe expendable launch vehicle and one high technical risk shuttle that pushed the state of the art.
The Shuttle should have been an experiment. We should have been working on it's replacement the day it first flew. The improved shuttle should have flown in 1992 and another improved shuttle in 2002. The shuttle was GROSSLY under funded from day one. The Goverment traded lower development costs for higher operating costs. Here are some of the concepts that where turned down due to cost of development http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4221/p219.htm
If you want to learn what the Shuttle might have been take a look at this
http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4221/ch8.htm
Id
We are not going to get anywhere with Big Dumb Boosters. But we are also not going to get anywhere with the goverment cheaping out on development at the cost of operation expence like it did with the Shuttle.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
With the exception that the X-15 was able to do more and broke far more new ground.
> I assure NASA's manned space program nothing
8 59 -1&q=site%3Anasa.gov+novel&btnG=Search
... back. :)
... was deceptive concerning what was actually accomplished. SS1 is a manned sounding rocket. That's it. It didn't even go that much higher than the V2 did, for YHVH's sake (and had a lower payload even when you add in the ss1's weight of the pressurized cabin).
> innovative to help the next breed
You assure wrong. NASA has done a *huge* amount of R&D in the last decade - in fact, they're the biggest space R&D spender in the world. They've developed dozens of kinds of ion/plasma propulsion systems (and are working on getting a better power/mass ratio). They've developed dozens of new fuels, lightweight alloys, and new structural materials. Heck, even without changing the shuttle's basic design, they've notably upped its payload even while adding in more safety features due to their advances. They've lowered the cost of shuttle maintinance (although its still very expensive, because - cue the "they don't do enough safety work!" people - they go so far as to dismantle the SSMEs each time for inspection, and SSMEs are very complex beasts). Just last month I was reading about a new method they developed for using CVD to deposit a liner on the engine nozzles so that there's no clear surface break for it to erode at.
Here - here's a google search for NASA's site just for the word "novel" (it occurs a lot in publications):
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=ISO-8
Note the 9,980 results for this search alone. NASA does a *TON* of research, on all aspects of space.
> they get paid pretty much the same whether the
> do anything or not
Apparently you've never heard of something called "budget cuts". Or "change of administrators", for that matter.
> Burt Rutan
Please excuse me while I go outside to laugh...
Please tell me you were kidding in your suggestion that someone who built an unscalable craft out of epoxy and didn't even make his own engine has accomplished much of anything toward getting craft to orbit and back. Please address the issues of delta-V, reentry heating, and manufacturing of the materials involved.
> "Black Sky"
POTUS Witch Hunt tracker: 75 charges filed against 19 witches, 4 witches cooperating and 5 witches have pled guilty.
Mod parent up....
I heard it straight from the horse's mouth. I attended two talks in the last week presented by Allan McDonald (although there were MANY engineers who initially called for the halting of Challenger, Allan was the head of these). The facts are:
Allan and his company at the time, ATK Thiokol, had actually given the "no go" for launch due to many concerns... cold weather affecting o-rings, high wind shear forcasted, and the SRB retrieval team was leaving their post due to high sea swells. What did the management do? They called a midnight meeting between the engineering heads and the Mission Management Team. They then would not accept "no" as an answer, and finally got a "go" after an anonymous vote among Thiokol engineers (note: anonymous meant any one individual could not be blamed). Anyone see a major problem here? The bigwigs wanted to launch at all costs. Similar problems occurred right before Columbia.
Face it people, NASA has become a "Prove that it fails or we will launch" rather than a "prove it will work or we won't launch" organization. Slight difference in wording, but huge gap in meaning.
The Russians seem to have started building their Kliper lifting body space craft.