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Space Shuttle Goes Back to Work
dalewj writes "The Discovery rolled over from the Orbiter Processing Facility to the Vehicle
Assembly Building (VAB) at NASA's Kennedy Space Center this morning. May
15th is the scheduled launch for STS-114. I was at NASA last month and got
to see the
payload for the space station thru lots of glass and I have to wonder, how
far behind is the space station at this point?"
But the vast majority of taxpayers don't care about hubble either.
Compare the cost to launch per pound via a rocket vs the Shuttle. The Shuttle has turned in to one of the most wasteful pork projects the US has undertaken. I am all for porkbarrel spending in space such as a moon base or mars mission but this project has got to be killed.
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To be honest, I look forward to this launch. In the past five years we have had terrorist attacks, wasted wars, and sad accidents.. and I really miss watching the launches too. I'm going to enjoy this launch.. and you know, it is good that we're still going up, instead of becoming too scared to tinker and explore.
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Not very far behind...the Russians, whose Soyuz system is "decades behind ours", and have had almost 2,000 successful launches with it, have been very helpful in keeping the ISS going. I have also heard that they (the Russians) have been giving us some technical ideas on how to deal with the complexities of space travel. Of course NASA administrators will not admit this.
>>I have to wonder, how far behind is the space station at this point?
Behind? It doesn't do anything! There hasn't been a single useful scientific thing produced with the billions that have been pumped into that flying white elephant.
Seriously - you should look into it. It's a flying joke but NASA keeps pouring good money after bad for why knows why...
And yet Hubble is going to be dropped into the ocean, monitoring of the Voyageur probes is being cancelled, and we're thinking about sending people to the moon?!? Jesus christ. NASA is such a joke.
Would you walk across the street at 1/50 odds?
The Space Station has taught us a lot, including:
- How to live in space
- How triple component redundancy may not be enough with current technology.
- How we don't have a safe and reusable way to fly there yet
On top of that, the occasional experiment is done there too.Again - if we can't get this right, whats the chance of living on the moon or mars in our lifetime?
The idea that we could go to the moon was considered by some as being too much of a technical challenge, that just too many things could go wrong. I then watched on tv as the first moon landing was made. After that, I assumed that the government would always have enough money to explore space, put up a space station. In the 40's and 50's, the space shuttle in it's present form was not expected, or put forth in the ideas of what the future of space travel would be like. Buck Rogers had a spaceship that looked like a real space ship. I had expected the first powered space ship would go beyond Earth, to at least the Moon. The Apollo craft were shot into space, and guided themselves into place around the moon, using small rockets, with no comparison to the power of the Space Shuttle rocket motors. One would think that the Space Shuttle could go out far beyond the Moon, just for the fun of it, but with nothing there to see or do, then no mission.
Even so, the Space Shuttle is an amazing vehicle, and has had a long and dangerous history, now to continue for a while longer. Fixing the Hubble telescope was one of the good moments, how cool that was. Concerning the Shuttle accidents, I suppose we did always expect space ships to be destroyed, but by enemy alien spacecraft, death rays, or something. The idea of a space ship that would have design flaws, or push the limits of their design, was not commonly entertained. Most of what we kids knew came from comic books, so the idea of orbiting satellites was not even there, or the lumbering space truck that the Space Shuttle seems to resemble, wasn't in comic books either.
Too bad that there is so little of the national budget spend on space exploration, we all wanted "men on mars" by now.
No one needs to take the Shuttle Program for granted, it is one of a kind, and one wonders if funding will be available for something to take it's place.
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It is important to remember when talking about the space station that science and PR are not important. Most important is keeping smart ex-soviet rocket scientists from heading to some evil country (North Korea for example) where they would develop ICBMs in exchange for food. A secondary goal is to bring home the port for the more powerful politicians.
Science is just a handy cover. Every once in a while some is done too, but it isn't the goal and should not be expected, though of course those who care will take what we can get.
As a child of the 80's I feel the same way to some extent. However, space travel is still a very new technology. To compare it to nautical development, the sail was just developed last week, and as yet we haven't even left the harbor..
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Actually, it's been almost 20 years since the Challenger explosion. There's an inherent risk in space travel, all astronauts are aware of that; just like we all know that there are risks in driving a car. These are all calculated risks... stuff happens no matter how much we try to prevent it.