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Shuttle Discovery Lifts Off
An anonymous reader writes "CNN is reporting that the Space Shuttle Discovery has lifted off, marking the United States' returned to manned space flight for the first time since the Columbia disaster in February 2003"
"There are large vultures circling the launch tower, we've got to ask ourselves if they know something that we don't". Jackass.
Where?
Here's hoping to United States' returned to proper grammar and editorial spellchecking.
What was fascinating about this launch were the number of cameras catching the action. Watching the orbiter separate from the main tank from the tank itself was fantastic.
Successfully condensing fact from the vapor of nuance since 1998.
That was incredible, sitting in my chair at Australia watching the live NASA TV really gave me goose-bumps. God speed to the crew, and a few rounds of applaud to the people at Nasa.
The footage on Nasa TV was the best I've ever seen, keep it up Nasa - Fantastic work!
Takeoffs are optional, landings are mandatory. Let's hope they have a successful mission and a safe return.
/. spaztech
The Beeb has also an article (ofcourse)
Kudos to all the Nasa engineers!
Repeat after me: We are all individuals
or any landing where all seven astronauts walk away from it.
I saw the live feed from NASA.. I must say congrats.. but I'll give the conspiracy theorists something to ponder.. from the t-minus 30 minutes that I caught it, there was no switch to internal cameras to show the crew on-board.. this was not the case on the feed from the scrapped launch weeks ago. plenty of live shots on the crew that time. hmmmmm.. perhaps this mission is humanless??? hmmmmmmmmm???
or perhaps they're sending te backstreet boys, cause they needed funding.
RIAA FUNDS NASA!!
hehe
** "It's not my job to stand between the people talking to me, and the ones listening to me." -- Pego the Jerk
I propose a toast:
To Apollo One!
To Challenger!
To Columbia!
To all those we have lost in the pursuit of human understanding and knowledge!
Long live exploration!
Long live science!
Long live Earth!
LONG LIVE.... DISCOVERY!
The missing link: Spaceflight Now's Mission Status Center (text version).
... spent four months living aboard the Russian space station Mir in 1998." So he's got experience patching up balky tin cans in space...
Darned Dallas newspaper printed the 10:39 time as though it were local, so I missed it. The Mission Status Center is the next best thing. Interesting tidbit: "Mission specialist No. 3 Andy Thomas
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
I got to watch the liftoff while at work, at a place where many of the parts of the shuttle were built. It was pretty cool watching it next to guys who had helped build it! All their explanations definitely made the launch even more exciting. God speed to the crew and lets hope they have a successful mission and a safe return!
I wonder if the amount of $$ being spent on running the current space shuttle program is worth it.. or if that money would be better spent in not going to space for the next 5 to 10 years and developing something to replace the current shuttle program.
Even after all the precautions, there were still NASA employees crying foul at today's launch date - which raises the question, "What will it take to convince all NASA employees so the general public can be then convinced to fully back this program?"
Best of luck to the current crew. Hope they fly high and land safely.
_Vishal www.squad9.com
Miles O'Brien's Launch Blog
Shuttle Details
Return to Flight
do.what.promptcmds
They were lives lost to managerial short-sightedness and corner-cutting.
It's one thing to take a calculated risk when you understand the odds. To take your fate in your own hands. It's totally different to put your fate in the hands of others, who then don't treat the situation with the diligence it deserves.
You wanna try your luck with the Russian space program?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
Eileen Collins, James Kelly, Charles Camarda, Wendy Lawrence, Soichi Noguchi, Steve Robinson, and Andrew Thomas.
Good luck and come back safe.
By loading up X-Plane and flying the Space Shuttle to a nice successful landing.
Pity X-Plane won't simulate the launch... or the ISS, but oh well.
From the Mission Briefing
As much as I wish they were putting money into something other than the ISS, it's fantastic to see that the shuttle is fully operational again.fsh
From Spaceflight Now:
1512 GMT (11:12 a.m. EDT)
T+plus 33 minutes. A few seconds after solid rocket booster separation, a large chunk of something broke free from the external fuel tank. The onboard video camera mounted on the tank showed the object flying away from the vehicle without striking Discovery.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
They still haven't circularized the orbit yet: if they don't circularize they are ballistic (IE: they come down. hard.)
-everphilski-
T+plus 33 minutes. A few seconds after solid rocket booster separation, a large chunk of something broke free from the external fuel tank. The onboard video camera mounted on the tank showed the object flying away from the vehicle without striking Discovery.
Want to bet that chunk of film is going to be looked at rather closely?
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
Perhaps, Tokyo should consider using Japan's arsensal high-performance computers to advance the state of the art in fighter aircraft and space vehicles. Designing these devices requires intensive numerical simulations which are ideally suited to such high-performance computers, which have been relegated to more mundane tasks like terrestrial simulations (e.g. weather simulation). Building the precursor to a starship seems to be a tad more interesting than terrestrial simulations.
or if that money would be better spent in not going to space for the next 5 to 10 years
That was the original rationale for the space shuttle program. There was a 7 year flight hiatus. What good did it do? We really need a more incremental program. This is something we should learn from the Russians. The new NASA administrator is behind the idea. I think you will see a new Crew Exploration Vehicle launched by a shuttle-derived booster, sooner rather than later.
an ill wind that blows no good
Here's to a successful mission AND an equally successful landing.
Digressing...
I can still vividly recall the Challenger disaster vividly. I was in highschool in NH. Not the one Christa McAuliffe was from, but then NH is a small state so everybody was psyched. A friend told me he heard about the explosion on the radio. We listened for a little while before going to the cafeteria for lunch. One of the women serving lunch asked if I was ok (I guess I looked really pale) and I told her what had happened. She chuckled & said I must be joking. I snapped back at her, and I still remember it clearly: "Do you have a radio in here? Then turn it on!", then left. When I came back for more food a little while later they did have a radio on and she was incredibly apologetic. That's one of those days I'll probably remember for the rest of my life.
Sky News (UK) have clearly shown an object falling onto the tail of the shuttle as it left the launch pad. The tail knocks the object with enough force to push the object upwards. Question is, is it the same type of object that was shown falling away at booster seperation?Hopefully no damage to the shuttle tail.
O'WONDERWe're working on it.
Spaceflight now has an image from the external tank video that shows a piece of debris falling off from the external tank, just after the solid boosters separated. It doesn't seem to fall in the shuttles direction.
That's the speed at which 4.5 billion years passes in 7 days. (6 days working plus one of rest).
This sig seemed like a good idea at the time....
SpaceflightNow reporting
- An image from the external tank video shows the chunk of debris breaking away from the tank just after the solid boosters separated.
See the image here
- Sh!t
Okay. It's kinda on topic.
Bart: Go, Dad, go!
Lisa: "How doth the hero strong and brave,
A celestial path in the heavens pave."
Everyone: Huh?
Lisa: [quiet] Go, Dad, go.
Quote from Simpson's episode titled
Deep Space Homer
Anybody have any links to the TankCam of the SRB and/or ET sep?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
I for one would go out and finally buy an HD TV and subscribe to a channel that consisted solely of Earth views from an HD-capable camera placed in orbit permanently. Or you could just bolt this on to the side of the ISS. How hard could this be? And you could use the footage for MSN Maps (ka-dunk!)
I have a small pile of "Earth View" tapes from early shuttle missions that NASA used to sell for cheap. Good viewing, slap in a tape and put your favorite space music on the CD player. Not very HD but an excellent use of my tax dollars.
Give a man a fish and you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish, and he'll say "WHERE'S MY FISH, YOU IDIOT?"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Sure: The speed at which God would be moving that would result in 13.8 billion years passing in 6 days is 0.99999999999999999999999929053887c. All things considered, 0.9999999999999999999999993 is good enough for sig. figs. I used the Lorentz transformation and solved for v/c. I needed to know the ratio of the two time periods. 13.8 billion *365/6 gives you the ratio of days. I'm ignoring leap years, but it's insignificant. Now, that's a large number, and you take the reciprocal, square it, and then subtract it from one. The square root of that should give you v/c.
This sig seemed like a good idea at the time....
No way is it an even bet if humans can compete with the Earth's systems for extinction events.
History shows that the planet is WAY better at it than we could ever hope to be.
Even if we popped all the nukes on Earth, it'd not register on the list of extinction events.
Perhaps, Tokyo should consider using Japan's arsensal high-performance computers to advance the state of the art in fighter aircraft and space vehicles. Designing these devices requires intensive numerical simulations which are ideally suited to such high-performance computers, which have been relegated to more mundane tasks like terrestrial simulations (e.g. weather simulation).
I always hear people saying stuff like, "more powerful computers will allow us to build better aircraft and conquer cancer!!!!!"
The truth is that a faster computer doesn't really give you much more capability, it just delivers that same capability to you faster. It's still people who need to feed the computers the information, and we are limited by our ideas.
If we gave people in the 1940's a supercomputer, it wouldn't really have made their aircraft much different because they didn't even come up with many of the formulas yet. They didn't yet know what breaking the speed of sound would do, or what effect it would have on the plane's control surfaces. They need to discover the principles first, made formulas out of it next, and only then can you feed the formulas into a computer.
Obviously this wouldn't apply if you were comparing a computer that was *so* slow that it couldn't perform the calulations in any decent amount of time, but that doesn't seem to be the case here.
There is only so much that computer calculations can do. They only solve problems that we create.