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Discovery Heading Home
Kailash Nadh wrote to mention an ABC News article discussing Discovery's departure from the space station, heading for Terra Firma. From the article: "Once undocked, Discovery looped around the space station for the first full photographic survey of the orbiting outpost since the last shuttle visit in late 2002, and then sped away into the blackness. Discovery's astronauts awoke Saturday evening for a day of storing away equipment for their upcoming return. They also planned to take down an antenna, which they have used to transmit video images of the mission. "
Americans should remember that America is not a synonym for World.
While I feel that this is just feeding the trolls... The shuttle itself is not inherently flawed as everyone seems to suspect. Losing one tile is not enough to take down the entire orbiter, either. Tiles are lost during re-entry quite regularly, with dozens to hundreds of the small tiles being replaced after every landing. The issue with Columbia was due to a piece of foam clipping a critical wing edge at relatively high speeds, a freak accident the of which falls mostly on the nature of unpredictable air pockets to expand in the foam as the altitude increased rather than poor design on part of the shuttle. This risk can be lowered, but consider the "mortality rate" of the shuttle at present. We've lost a whole two orbiters, one of which was due in no way to the craft, but rather a defect in one of the SRBs shortly after lift-off. Now consider this: We're sending hundreds of tons of metal into space, and we're doing it with a crew of humans squeezed inside of it who miraculously survive the stay for a couple of days one hundred and eighty miles up there and return to the ground safely. Is there any particular reason that this should be inherently safe? Failures happen in this field. You can't predict every outcome, but ou can try to make some contingencies for it. Even commercial air travel, while still pretty safe overall, has its disasters, but does everybody simply abandon flying? Not bloody likely. Space is not safe. Not by any stretch of the imagination, and to suggest that it is in any way, shape, or form is to ignore the obvious. This said, I'm a huge proponent of a next-generation space plane designed around a one-time-use disposable re-entry shield. While the tiles were originally expected to be a good deal cheaper to maintain than a giant heatshield, things turned out quite a bit different in practice, as a more-or-less solid ablative head shield would end up likely being more cost effective in the end and potentially far safer for everything. Don't forget that the nature of the shuttle's re-entry is inherently safer and more efficient in that it's guided, rather than ballistic, and results in *far* lower G-loads and heat during the time spent approaching the ground. On top of this, since the whole shuttle is returning rather than just a control capsule, a reasonable payload can make the return along with the crew.