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Discovery Prepares for Return
Kailash Nadh writes "Discovery's astronauts packed up their stuff on Friday as they prepared to undock from the international space station now that NASA has cleared the shuttle to return to Earth next week.
Their most difficult task before leaving the station was the maneuvering of a huge cargo container filled with 2 1/2 years worth of trash into the shuttle's payload bay. Once back on Earth, the items would either be disposed of or returned to researchers."
I find it interesting that Aldrin is critical of the shuttle program. I know there are a lot of people unhappy with it, but it seems a name as big as Aldrin being critical has quite a bit of meaning. Hopefully this is a sign of a new approach to space travel in the future.
"... So we went out there with our shovels and rakes and implements of destruction, and we loaded all that trash into the back of a Boeing orbiter, went back inside the space station, and had a Thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat."
www.eFax.com are spammers
Come home safe travellers.
Well they're going home anyway, it's not like they're doing the trip just to take the rubbish back
It's probably useful to know what happens when you keep rubbish in space for several years anyway
Prepare for the flood of "why don't they just drop the garbage into the atmosphere and let it burn up" questions.
Patrick Doyle
I mod down every jackass who puts his moderation policy in his sig. Oh, wait a sec....
NASA is going to freeze the Shuttle program, but I wonder, Shuttle can fly without anyone on-board, so isn't it possible to do that? Just use the damn thing as a cargo vehicle without people on board. Or have one pilot on it who will take it up, and then if the thing is damaged, have it fly back automagically, and let the pilot stay on the space station and go down with a Soyuz crew.
You can't handle the truth.
It is very possible that what we consider waste and what NASA does could differ. Remnants of experiments, minilabs that belong to schools, old journals, outdated equipment, failed equipment... I think a big part of the reason to take it all back is so the engineers can find out failure points, reuse or sell older equipment, for NASA historians and archivists to keep any documentation, and to give loaned items back to their respective owners.
what, are you picturing a stack of black plastic garbage bags piled up in the cargo bay?
no, they have a multi-purpose module that they carry up into space that holds all the supplies they were bringing.
While docked, they lift the module out of the cargo bay and dock it to the space station. The crew can then transfer the contents to and from the ISS (what, you thought they loaded everything through the shuttle's airlock?)
Before undocking, they move the module back into the cargo bay so they can take it back to earth and use it again (what, are they supposed to "send it into the sun" and make a new one for the next trip?)
Why the hell wouldn't they transfer refuse from the station back into the module since it's going back anyway.
Where did you get the stupid idea that this added any risk to the mission or that it was desirable or even possible to eject this crap into space and have it burn up in the sun.
go fuck yourself, dumbass
Next time, get ahold of Richard Benjamin, Tim Thomerson, Richard Kelton, Tricia Barnstable, Cyb Barnstable and Conrad Janis.
There's a Starman, waiting in the sky / He'd like to come and meet us, but he hasn't got the time.
"hurl this stuff into the sun"
Yeah. Calculate how much energy that would take. It's actually pretty hard to hit the sun from here.
Bringing it down in the shuttle is actually far and away the easiest way to get rid of it. Getting it up there was expensive. Once the shuttle is there, and the bay's empty anyway, bringing anything back is not that big a deal. Some extra mass in the deorbit calculations.
Why would we spend the time and money to build and attach and pilot a remote deorbit pack when we have the shuttle coming back anyway?
The Enterprise had 400-odd people on it. I guarantee they had some pretty extensive waste recycling systems. But they had matter transmutation, so they didn't actually have to deal with disposal, they could just feed mass in, and get food/water/gold/clothing/whatever they needed back out again. If you think about it, people in a society with that technology would soon come to view looking at actual trash as very disgusting.
Their most difficult task before leaving the station was the maneuvering of a huge cargo container filled with 2 1/2 years worth of trash into the shuttle's payload bay.
When, at the age of seven, I sat enthralled by the Apollo XI landing in 1969, I would never have believed that our most sophisticated space vehicle in 2005 would be an aging garbage truck traveling a couple of hundred miles from Earth to visit a space station with no purpose.
I can't even think about this for too long; I start shaking with the force of my anger and disappointment.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.