Slashdot Mirror
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. "
They were helping to repair the station gyros and delivering supplies among other things. Yes, it was a proof to determine the shuttle can still fly, but it did have a purpose. Whether or not that's to show that a better system is needed we have yet to see.
I think that proving the flight capabilities was one of the primary mission objectives. NASA is and always has been a PR driven machine. They need the public to be watching, to believe in them, and to support them since it's the Congress that funds the program. So NASA is run the way a Hollywood studio is run with the exception that instead of trying to appeal to teen-agers buying tickets and popcorn, NASA works to keep members of Congress happy by intriguing their constituents.
Thus, one of the major problems of the shuttle program: very few people give a damn what they are doing up there. It is seen that they are, literally, going round in circles.
The Mars Rovers on the other hand presented a spectacular opportunity (no pun intended) for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to capture the nation's attention and it worked. They will continue to get funding so long as they continue to present summer blockbusters.
This time the shuttle mission was a cliff hanger. "In our last episode, tragedy struck when all of the astronauts were killed on their return from space." (Please excuse the frivolous tone of that sentence.) And so this mission, the first episode of the new season, was all about showing that the show goes on.
NASA needs to pull a new rabbit out of its hat and they know it. That means a new vehicle, a new mission, and new ideas. Now they just have to get their viewers interested enough to want to fund it. All of that is a lot of work and more reason why space exploration ought to be allowed to be privatized.
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
Let's face it, the Shuttle design is inherently too complex to be safe. Only one heatshield tile breakage may cause the complete destruction of the Shuttle, and we are now starting to be aware ("we" as in, outsiders) of how fragile these tiles really are. I know space travel will always be more dangerous than any other kind, but I think the Shuttle is unnecessarily unsafe.
In addition to this, it has proven to be MORE expensive to launch, per payload, compared to previous designs, not cheaper!
The "upgrade" to the Shuttle reminds me a lot of the great push towards Windows NT (and away from UNIX) that went on a few years ago, even in companies where it was clear that such a move would be overall bad in the short and long term.
Sigged!
I suspect they instead did a short blast from the attitude control thrusters. There's no way the Shuttle can "speed away" using those rather gentle thrusters. More like a gentle and slow and stately separation. .... "into the blackness."
More likely this was done with full undiluted sunlight on one side, and rather bright reflection from the earth on the other side. Not exactly "blackness". "They also planned to take down an antenna" "Down?" There's a down up there? A little poetical license may be okay, but when it conflicts with the facts, hmmm......
Imagine if the investment made in these enormoud lemons, was put into improving and updating Apollo technology.
IIRC, Apollo was at the time seen by engineers as mostly a foolish PR-driven detour on the road to a sober and sensible aerospace vehicle, which would look a lot like -- the Space Shuttle! That is, the best general model of orbital access has always been considered to be some kind of rocketplane that would fly to space in controlled, gradually accelerating flight, and be piloted to a landing, and, of course, be re-usable. Hence Dyna-Soar, the X-15 project, and ultimately the Shuttle.
This whole Mercury-Gemini-Apollo interregnum in which monkeys and men were stuck in cans on top of modified ICBMs, the candle was lit, and everyone prayed while hanging on for dear life was widely considered the unfortunate result of an irrational sudden national urgency to get a man in space any way at all following the embarassment of Sputnik and Gagarin.
So, after we "won" the race to the Moon, the idea was that we should return to the unglamorous but sober business of building rocketplanes to orbit. Hence the Shuttle.
By the way, when you speak of "improving" Apollo technology, just what the heck do you have in mind? Updating the OS on the computers? Using composites in the crew capsule skin? Reshaping the windows to improve the view? See, any easily imaginable "improvements" are the merest cosmetic fluff that won't take us one step closer to the real Grail of spaceflight, which is cheap spaceflight.
After all, it's not hard for a major government to get a handful of national heroes to space every year. That isn't the issue at all. The problem is that, if space is ever to be anything more than a curiosity, it has to become easy and economical for your average firm to shoot up your average mid-level exec, a couple of average cubicle dwellers, and a few tons of hardware to support their mission, whatever it is. It's very hard to envision how going back to the Apollo model of 40 years ago is going to bring us significantly closer to that goal.