NASA Looking for Bandwidth Sponsorship

Neil Halelamien writes "A news release and MSNBC's Cosmic Log report that NASA has a web sponsorship opportunity for companies in return for providing bandwidth support for the two upcoming Space Shuttle missions of Discovery and Atlantis. The missions, scheduled for this summer, are expected to cause 20 to 30 million web site visits each and up to a half million streaming video feeds. The alternative is for NASA to cap the number of visitors. Sponsorship proposals are being accepted through April 13."

Comments

Re:Why so many?

[Rei]

Won't people stop with this? A 2% failure rate on a rocket with a statistically significant number of launches under its belt is a very impressive rate for orbital rockets - not just for the US, but worldwide. We may not like this fact, but that's the reality of space travel: it's *dangerous*. You get into a craft for which most of its mass is some of the most eager-to-react chemicals we can produce, made of thin, flimsy materials (because it has to stay incredibly light), has millions of components (the complexity of a real, high performance rocket engine that can take you to orbit makes million dollar jet engines look like child's toys), these materials undergo high vibrational loads and G forces, the engine materials are often exposed to temperatures hotter than the boiling point of iron in extremely corrosive environments, the turbopumps have to spin at tens of thousands of rpms. You're often handing cryogenic materials that can make things that are normally sturdy snap like twigs; cryogenic hydrogen is especially bad, as it also embrittles metals. When you get to orbit, you're constantly bombarded with particles moving at tens of thousands of miles an hour, along with radiation and severe temperature extremes that are eager to freeze up your hydraulics, cause expansion problems, and basically mess up anything that they can. On reentry, you're exposed to ridiculous amounts of heat as you try and burn off all of that energy that you spent accelerating using your proportionally tiny orbital craft.

Honestly, it's amazing that these craft ever survive.