Historic Shuttle Spacesuits to Meet Fiery End

collectSPACE writes "While some museums bid for retired space shuttle orbiters, the real prize may be the spacewalking spacesuits, at least if NASA's plans for them hold true. The now-reusable extravehicular mobility units (EMUs) are soon to become disposable, allowed to disintegrate as they reenter the Earth's atmosphere inside spent cargo ships."

Comments

Re:Hey! Tax money paid for those

[mikelieman]

I think that perfectly summarizes NASAs problems.

Their heads are so far stuck up their asses that they've forgotten what their Mission is.

Develop access to space.

And if they can't even BRING BACK THEIR STUFF, then they've failed completely.

And another thing. These suits suck. Hamilton Standard needs to lose their lock on it, so we can get some innovation and development.

And another thing. For less than we've spent on the Iraq war, we *could have had* a constellation of space solar power satellites, and the lifting infrastructure to ensure access to space.

Fucking Oil Junkies.

Re:Have you read why this is?

[couchslug]

If we want to advance instead of grandstand, we need a faster technology development cycle. We can't have that because of the safety issues associated with putting Meat in space. If we skip (government funded) manned missions for say, fifty years, we could have far more capable unmanned systems.
We have as much time as we care to take.

If we can study and manipulate the things in space we need to study and manipulate without human attendants, we can get far more bang for our investment. Terrestrial exploration was carried out by humans when these were relatively expendable. Astronauts may be willing to take risks, but the public snivels when they die (unlike the risk acceptance in the heydays of test pilots...) and their life support systems impact mission duration.