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Astronauts Face Bleak Odds For Spaceflight
Abhishek writes "According to a Space.com report, Astronauts at NASA fear that they won't be able to fly until 2015 and that, for some, would be too late. The space shuttles that NASA have are almost at the end of their lifetimes and any shuttle can take years to be built. Though almost everybody is involved in some way or another in looking after a shuttle, only a lucky few actually gets the chance for a ride."
Hey NASA, I suggest you contact this guy named Burt Rutan. Apparently he's pretty good at putting together elegant solutions for a relatively low cost.
WURD!!
It's amazing how far we've come in the past 36 years. We were once going to the moon, now we can't even go to space! We need to get up there, no matter how we get there. Be it spaceshipone, or the shuttles, or something new. What NASA really needs to do is stop canceling all the good ideas for vehicles. They'll let the planning and testing go on for 8+ years and then nothing comes out of it.
It's our money they spend, and it's not meant for their personal pleasure.
My cousin got offered a place is the Space Program. He choose to design satelittes rather than the astronaut position. (Better money, and he later went to the private sector. Obviously he is not a geek... :)
These are highly trained and educated individuals, I am sure they being employed gainfully...
...is that there isn't much need for Astronauts in our new service-based economy, so they're gonna have a hell of a time finding a new job
Well, then there hasn't been a need ever, if that's how you look at it. But try this instead: these are some of the smartest, most physically and intellectually hardy, well-rounded people on the planet. Every one of them is better equipped to teach than most teachers, better able to fly than most pilots, better able to handle stress than most soldiers/firefighters/police, better able to understand and work with complex systems than most engineers... somehow I think that someone with those skills is hardly going to be working at, well, Disney's Space Mountain ride. There are plenty of systems engineers I know making six figures that would love to have one of these folks as a boss. Just the aerospace defense area alone could gobble up the entire astronaut-trained team in any one month's hiring cycle.
Now... does holding analysis review meetings quite measure up to flying to the moon? No. Does grading orbital mechanics term papers have quite the same panache as shrieking into LEO with a billion dollar payload? No. Is my job boring? Most of the time. They'll deal with it just fine.
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
Why not? Current commies (China) make almost all our clothes, our toys, our machines....
I'm a much bigger fanboy for robotic space exploration, and not much of an advocate of the shuttle program. (Nixon basically pimped the shuttle by exaggerating how cost effective it could be, in a spectacular example of how much government largesse the 'Publicans are capable of when the military industrial complex stands to benefit. IMHO, of course.) That doesn't keep me from sympathizing with astronauts who are, by all accounts, pretty impressive people.
Putting yourself in other people's shoes isn't a weakness.
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
a) I actually doubt they could build another, like the Saturn V rockets
b) Much of the cost of building something like this is figuring how to build the parts to spec, and chances are, they don't have the tooling in place anymore
c) The only thing the current shuttles have problem is that it is too complex and too costly to send on missions.
While politically impossible, it would be far cheaper to buy launches from the Russians to put these guys into space.
If Rutan had NASA's budget, the question would not be ``Will they get into orbit?'', but ``Which planet will they orbit next?''.
See what I've been reading.
Yes, I'm sure you'd be saying "Thank God for space debris" if you were one of the family members of the crew who died. It certainly was convenient for them to die to save you some money.
Oh, wait, did it save you money? Let's look at this... $600,000,000 to launch (I'll take your number because I'm too lazy to look it up). There are about 100,000,000 taxpayers in this country, so assuming two launches per year, you have saved yourself $12/year. Go buy that new car you've been lusting over with that. 12 fucking dollars, man, and you are bitching! Maybe buying two subs from Subway is more important than a bunch of scientific research, but we won't debate that. The annual budget of NASA is 16 billion, which comes out to $160/year/taxpayer for EVERYTHING they do (satellites, mars missions, aerodynamics research, plasma physics, etc). The WEEKLY budget of the Iraq war is 5 billion, and that is just the Iraq war not all of the defense dept.
Even if you'd rather save the $12/year to not launch, did you even think what it costs to research the failure and fix the issues? The return to flight costs were around 1.2 billion (that included all the research into the accident and all the new testing and procedure development). They haven't launched in two years and only had three launches planned in that time, so you saved all of $3/year. Woooooo!
And astronauts have real jobs when they aren't flying. Some are doctors, some are plasma physicists, some are just normal engineers doing research. They aren't always training for a new mission; they are using their single paycheck to do a normal engineering job until it is time to train and fly.
IANAL, but I play one on