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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. "
Oh come ON! I mean, we're going to MARS! G.W. promised that, how much more exciting can this get?!?
Yeah, perhaps you're right...
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
http://www.heavens-above.com/countries.asp
Better be quick though. It's getting prety light here on the east coast.
--
Fairfax Underground: Fairfax County message board and chat
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.
Good Luck and God Speed Discovery.
"I was already looking forward to hundreds of ill-informed posters asking "Why won't they just let it all burn up in the atmosphere?!?!?!"."
Explain to me why that's ill-informed ? Seems sensible to me.. attach a small disposable rocket to it, aim it at the earth and fire away..
It worked on the simpsons with Bart's meteor....
Well, that's what they have been doing. Trouble is, they have more junk than will fit on one of the progress vehicles. Also, a lot of the stuff the shuttle is bringing back isn't necessarily garbage per se, but old experiments and what not that are no longer needed on the station and need to be returned to Earth.
Sleep is futile.
... that this will likely be the last Shuttle into space and more than likely the last non-commercial manned mission into space (because I'm convinced that Virigin Galactic will get there before NASA does again) I think we should all pause and think what has been achieved by NASA in the past years. The global impact of men on the moon, satellites providing worldwide telecoms, fun with gyroscopes, all those cool sci-fi movies, their rather long software development guides, Richard Feynman's star turn at the shuttle inqury ... it's been fun.
Without manned missions NASA will probably shrink rapidly in the public mind and return to its military roots. Thanks for the memories!
Oh come ON! I mean, we're going to MARS! G.W. promised that, how much more exciting can this get?!?
Perhaps. But I personally think we won't get there unless there's another 9/11 report.
Yes, it was a proof to determine the shuttle can still fly
:-/
A very shaky at that.
Or maybe they were just overcautious, but that's not what the impression of the public will be thanks to the media attention anyway.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Okay, so they say taht the shuttle will be fine for this re-entry, and I don't know about everyone else, but I want the astonauts to come back safely. Seems to me that having to fill even more positions may make the little tykes with visions of their futures really take a look at being a doctor or a teacher, so they don't go up (or down) in flame. Well, that, and being glorified refuse handlers.
Knowing their generosity when it comes to be able to land something on other peoples heads, I would say: YES! You are the lucky winner of a crashing ISS.
My wife's sketchblog Blob[p]: Gastrono-me
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 wish the astronauts a safe return however, once they are on the ground, these questions must be asked and answers obtained from the NASA bureaucracy:
1: How can the USA spend close to 2 billion dollars and have so little to show for it? The shuttle underwent so many upgrades but all in the industry were surprised that stuff was falling of the shuttle.
2: Would it be a better idea to let those who can do much with so little (read Russians), do our space work since they can do precisely that? After all, a good number of our industrial base is being out-sourced.
Indeed. When the shuttle that burned up was about to launch, I was waiting. CNN and Headline News and Foxnews and MSNBC all let me know before hand. I didn't have NASA TV. So I waited. And waited. Finally, One of the channels had Columbia, a minute or two after launch. It was a little dot. Well thank you very much Mr. Apathetic retard "Liberal Media" guys. Fuck you very much for letting me watch the space shuttle blast off. I guess it was more important to talk about whatever the hell you were talking about. You couldn't spare 5 fucking minutes of your fucking programming time to showing the space shuttle blast off, for one of the last times, likely, hopefully. Well, I came home from work a week or 2 later and you assholes all had the space shuttle on tv, disintegrating over Texas :P
What exactly is stopping people from privatizing space now?
I see really nothing in the way. Except that its an investment of hundreds of millions of dollars, and the return value is more of a scientific return instead of a profit return which is what any rich person investing money really wants. Scientific stuff coming back is essentially unsellable. In that regard it will be in the hands of government for a long time, and hell more money should be spent on it and other things that go towards the good of the people.
If what you are reading sounds funny, or sarcastic, lame, or stupid
it is because it is supposed to be. just laugh
Granted, but what's the purpose of the ISS? It almost seems like it's to give the shuttle something to do. That's not to say that shuttle astronauts haven't done really great things with the repair of the Hubble being the most spectacular, but I can't help but think that the space program has been going down the wrong path for many years.
Politics--specifically, the Nixon administration and Congress--didn't help matters.
So cool.... two little star like dots drifting across the sky in the twilight...
(i'm in Houston)
Best NASA site for tracking:
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/
The last time I watched the shuttle past to the north of my house it was entering the atmosphere( a few years ago). The most cool group of air and space craft I have ever seen. One shuttle two helocopters, one jumbo jet and a small plain; all in my view at the same time. So Cool...
The local news is saying that NASA will not renter over land anymore?
So sad that I we will never see it renter over land again. What is NASA afraid of? Another rain of bodies? Not likely. NASA please reconsider; rentry is such a sight to see.
Thank You NASA; May darwinism not shine on you today.
If GOD then: Godspeed.
If not then: Best wishes!
I don't want a pickle; I just want a Motor-Cycle! A four foot cop arrived with a five foot gun!
Give it time...
I'll see your Constitution and raise you a Queen.
Dear Sir.
I must congratulate you on managing, in just three sentences none the less, to go from critizing the shuttle program to making an uninformed stab at the current administration. This is slashdot-poetry at it's best. It is because of insights as yours that I still visit this website.
My regards, from a crazy old european liberal(*)
(*) as in Bastiat
I know not what course others may take; but as for me, give me liberty or give me death!
Enormously expensive, horribly unreliable, ill conceived. OBSOLETE. Far to big and stupid to fly. NASA's spruce goose The way forward is incremental improvement. The Chinese are using updated, but tried and true Russian technology. Imagine if the investment made in these enormoud lemons, was put into improving and updating Apollo technology. But now at the begining of the 3rd Millieum, the US is still throwing good billions after bad. Look at what NASA can achieve for the cost of just one of these useless shuttle flights. (Restocking the ISS is useless, as it's only there so the shuttle has somewhere to go) IANAA (American), so it's not my money being directly thrown away, but I was born the same year as Neil put his Footprints on the moon, and a probally older than most of you reading this, I find the lack of useful progress in Human Spaceflight astonishing. It's like watching someone spend three times the value of a new car, repairing some horrible rustbucket, and even after the money is spent, it will have a fraction of the safety features of a new vehicle. Why cannot we rid ourselves of this Lemon ?
This is NOT a signature.
Yes and add: Nuclear Weapons Pollution Dodgy countries as long as Indonesia doesn't count Terrorists (apart from Bali)
As for who is stopping it, I'm not positive, but I think that the US has pretty strict regulations about building ballistic rockets and with whom you're allowed to share that kind of technology.
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
Strict Regulations meaning: A. Safety, and B. Not allowing rockets to fall into hands that can use them for some nefarious purpose, like holding the moon for ransom.
We have a large amateur rocket community so obviously there isn't anyone stopping them. And seriously if you wanted to really build rockets it would be probably cheaper to not do it in the US anyhow. Hell its cheaper to launch them from the equator too...
The thing is... No company wants to invest money because the cost outways the benefits to stockholders. Does that mean we shouldn't spend government money on it? No, because it benefits humanity and society, which the government is there to serve to, in theory anyway, in practice is a different story.
If what you are reading sounds funny, or sarcastic, lame, or stupid
it is because it is supposed to be. just laugh
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......
I landed a 5000lb rocket on the moon! Deliver the cash or I'll blow it up!
There is an Aurora in the Southern Hemisphere - its called the Aurora Australis.
Of course you have to be further south than Aussie to see it, try the Siuth Island of NZ, or souther Chile or Argentina.
No one seems to remember this flight was specifically called out as a TEST FLIGHT. They made major modifications to the external tank and oberserved the improvement. And its looking like this flight shed 80% less debris.
That is a remarkable improvement. Zero foam loss was never stated as a goal, and nor does it need to be. There was one major anomaly and guess what. Its going to be fixed.
Forget South America, the auroral oval never reaches Cape Horn's latitude:
Some images of the auroral oval from NOAA.
So, my suggestion is New Zealand for the Aurora Australis (of course antartic bases are ideal)
Anyway, if you visit souther Chile or Argentina in january or february you can see Noctilucent clouds. Southern noctilucent clouds are far less known than Northern noct. clouds... but also are very beautiful
Take a look at one:
Southern NLC, maybe the only picture on the net...
How do I know that? Well, I'm from here!
As has been said a few times during this mission, checking the underside of the shuttle during flight has never been done before, let alone going EVA to fix problems. For all we know, filler extruding from between the tiles could be a very common occurance, and it has always just fixed itself during reentry. I'd say that staged is a bit too harsh of an accusation, but accusing the media (and possibly NASA itself) of oversensationalizing is definently in order.
NASA should just say that as long as the crew wants to fly, the shuttle should fly and everybody else should shut up.
I'm sure that the flight crew is perfectly able to judge the risks for themselves. This time they found lots of minor problems because they LOOKED harder than normal. Every single flight may have had similar problems that only someone who read the post flight technical reports knew about -- if then.
Does the US really want to be paying China rent on a spacestation when they decide to go back into space after wimping out?
Note to self:
@ORBIT
------
* check filler extruding from between the tiles
You know, I have been wondering if maybe all the "problems" with the shuttle are just a PR attempt. I mean, in a system as complex as the shuttle, you'll see lots of (minor) problems every launch. In the 90s, most shuttle launches barely made it onto the news. This launch, with it being the first in a few years and having a spacewalk to repair something, seems to have had a lot more coverage. I don't actually know that they exaggerated the dangers of this stuff, but it seems possible.
That being said, I think it unlikely that they'd choose to accentuate the dangers of spaceflight. That's the kind of thing that tends to get them grounded.
(Yeah, I usually contradict myself. Nothing new here.)
Have you ever wondered How to Take Over
Yeah, It seems that way. I mean, it's not like we're really exploring anyway. Exploring to me means to venture into previously unknown territory, like Lewis and Clark or Columbus. All we're doing in space is going to places we've known were there for centuries, but couldn't get to before. It's not like we're going to send out a manned spacecraft that discovers new planets.
Sleep is futile.
It isn't my comic. Nice try though.
Hey, just to be ultra-nerdy, here's the Realvideo server info from NASA-TV's Realvideo streams:
Server: Helix Server Version 9.0.3.916 (linux-2.2-libc6-i686-server)
Thought you might like that, you Linux-loving OS bigots. ;)