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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.
Why not? Current commies (China) make almost all our clothes, our toys, our machines....
A lot of people don't seem to realize that NASA is a research organization, not a space cargo organization. Most of their budget generally goes to new research. Even a sizable chunk of the shuttle's budget (from which that 13k$-15k$ per kilogram number comes from, compared to 10k$ for Ariane-5 and 7k$ for Proton and Long March (although they get the benefit of cheap labor)) goes to research on how to lower maintenance costs and improve performance of reusable craft. The shuttle itself was really a research craft; you might have noticed that most of NASA's manned space program craft have been designed to try and push the envelope. If you want a cargo workhorse, use a Delta or Atlas, or go overseas.
As an example of how much research NASA does, just take a look at how many papers there are on NASA's site that just contain the word "novel".
Rutan doesn't do research. He doesn't have the budget for it. His budget was about right for what he did: a completely unscalable joyride craft.
If a tree falls in the forest and no engineer observes it, does it have a drag coefficient?
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