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Nasa Details Shuttle's Retirement
schliz writes "Nasa has announced that it intends to officially retire the aging space shuttle fleet by 2010, four years before it has a replacement craft ready. The space shuttle fleet will make ten more flights, mainly to add modules to the International Space Station and carry out repairs and upgrades to the Hubble orbital telescope. The retirement will leave the US without orbital capacity for at least four years, until the Ares booster programme is complete. European and Russian launchers will service the space station in the meantime."
Come on, folks! It's News for Nerds, you should know better!
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
(or, National Acronym Society of America) In either case, not Nasa.
Life is short: void the warranty.
From what I could find, Obama only plans to cut the Constellaton program, which is Bush's plan to send people to Mars (I guess to search for oil or terrorists). He has stated he supports funding other programs (see spacepolitics.com for examples).
The space program became too costly. The shuttle was announced as a cost-saving project, a reusable space craft. The problem is that they should have tried to crawl before they tried to walk.
There were projects in the late 1950s, the X-15 and the Dyna-Soar, to develop reusable "space planes", but not much came of them. The logical progression would have been to improve and expand these, but instead they chose to try to adapt existing disposable rockets into a reusable spacecraft.
Okay, government tried and ultimately failed, now private enterprise has started from where the X-15 and X-20 stopped. Let's see how it goes.
Roofers alone are #3 in Wikipedia's list.
Yeah! If by #3 you mean fifth. Pilots, miners, highrise steel workers, and pilots all rank above roofers.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
If a spy sattelite (or any other sattelite) needs to go up, heavy boosters such as the Delta or Atlas will be used. If its an old one that needs to be dealt with, they would probably just shoot it out of the sky like they did last time.
Sorry, you've been misinformed. The Constellation program is the program to build the Ares I and Ares V launch vehicles, along with the Orion crew capsule and Altair lander module. The roadmap of the Constellation program includes an eventual flight to Mars. However, no funding has been allocated for that leg of the program, nor has any planning in earnest been done.
If Obama kills the Constellation program, the United States will be left without a manned space program. Period. End of story.
Javascript + Nintendo DSi = DSiCade
No, we worried about our buildings being melted into heaps of slag by having 100 megaton H-bombs
No you didn't. There never was a 100 megaton H-bomb. The USSR designed one, Tzar I think, but it was more of a dick size experiment. The thing was the size of a locomotive. Way to big to be of any practical value. Hell, even they where afraid of the thing. When they tested it, they tested it at half yield, 52 Megatons.
Most US weapons where and remain in the 30-100+ KT range. The US does have some larger warheads in the megaton range but none above 10. Most of them, the B-83 I believe, 1.2 megatons. The Soviets did field more weapons in the megaton range than the US but most of those were under 5 MT.
The reason the US fields such smaller weapons that the USSR is accuracy. It has been said you can place a quarter in Red Square and the US could drop a warhead within 10 feet of it from anywhere in the world. Soviet weapons where not that accurate so the did use larger class warhead.
Once you get above a certain size nuclear weapons don't scale very well. While that 100 megaton weapon may look awesome on paper, truthfully it won't do much more damage than a 5 megaton hit. With that being said it makes more sense to blanket a area with several "small" nukes that hit with one big one. You would hit the target in a staggered overlapping pattern so that if one weapon failed its area would still be in the blast area of several others.
Don't ask me how I know all this.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification