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Shuttle Endeavour Blasts Off For Space Station
Gwmaw writes "The space shuttle Endeavour bolted off its seaside launch pad on Monday on a voyage to install the last two main pieces of the International Space Station. The 4:14 a.m. EST (0914 GMT) blastoff from the Kennedy Space Center shattered the predawn tranquility with a deafening roar and a brilliant tower of flames that momentarily turned the dark Florida sky as bright as day." HD video of launch attached.
Now that the return to the moon has been cancelled, I wonder if NASA will extend Shuttle missions beyond this year? They have already hinted they may extend the life of the ISS, but are they going to rely on the Russians for the next ten years?
And, considering the bleak future of the shuttle program, the ISS, and manned spaceflight in general, wouldn't a more appropriate headline be "NASA puts another $700 million on the national credit card for our grandkids to pay off"?
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Try thinking of it as a wake for the US manned spaceflight program.
It saddens me to see the US lose it's manned spaceflight capability.
I have a unusual vision problem which the NHS has failed to diagnose. Can you help? More at failedbythenhs.blogspot.com
Those factories have been mothballed and the employees reassigned or laid off. There might be enough spare parts for an extra science mission Bush canceled a few years ago.
It was a glorious morning when my alarm beeped at 4:10am. I awoke, turned on the TV to the pre-set NASA channel, checked to make sure the launch was still 'a Go'. I then donned a bathrobe over my birthday suit, watched the last 10 seconds on TV until I heard "We have Liftoff" and stepped out on my back porch. I looked to the east and the tree line was shadowed in a orange glow that was beautiful during the pre-dawn hours. The sky was clear and the air was crisp and the sight of the flames was facinating even at 50 miles away. I watched at the shuttle began to head in a northward direction. It was around 6.5 minutes later that the sound waves rumbled through the still night air. It was more of a low rumble, but it was distinctly felt and heard. At aroun 7.5 mintues, between my screen porch, the trajectory and my poor vision I could no longer see the bright spec of light that was the shuttle that was now a couple hundred miles away. I stepped back inside watched NASA TV until about the 9.5 minute mark during the last separation, and knew our astronauts doing ok. I hung up the robe, climbed back into bed, turned off the TV and went back to sleep.
What a beautiful way to wake up in the pre-dawn hours. And to think, /sniffle that was the last manned night launch we'll see for quite some time. Oh how I wish everyon could have seen this first hand.
Life takes interesting turns, but the most interest is when you're off the beaten path.
I was watching on NasaTV and knew when to look. I didn't really expect much, if anything.
It was Awesome! At least as bright as Jupiter, and it rocketed (heehee) right past an airplane that was on the same line of sight. I saw from about six minutes after launch to cutoff, apparently at twice the height of the houses around mine.
Awesome - I saw a real spaceship launch. I DO believe!
On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough. Seth
I just had a random thought, would it be useful to just decommission shuttles in space, meaning just leave them up there, possibly integrate them into the ISS?
I was up taking care of my infant daughter, looking out my sliding glass windows I could see it like a blue diamond in the sky rising.
Totally amazing.
Yes Francis, the world has gone crazy.
Many people talking at the same time can be confusing, they probably can talk at the same time but don't to keep the confusion to a minimum.
There is of course a better solution: they should give up voice altogether and start using IRC.
The ISS uses thrust to adjust it's orbit already. It won't 'ruin' anything. The Zvezda module already has two main engines used for orbital adjustments.
The station loses speed continuously due to atmospheric drag (yes there is still a tenuous atmosphere up there). Using thrusters is part of it's existence.
Many people talking at the same time can be confusing, they probably can talk at the same time but don't to keep the confusion to a minimum.
I've taken a tours of both Kennedy's Control Room and Houston's Mission Control. There are several voice loops that NASA uses and they can be individually enabled or disabled at a headset. There are only a couple of people of people listening to more than a few loops at any one time during launch. The majority of the staff is focused on the particular system or sub-system assigned to them, and therefore only listening to the applicable voice loop(s).
There is of course a better solution: they should give up voice altogether and start using IRC.
I almost literally cut my teeth on MSDOS 2.0 (Dad gave me his old Eagle 81 computer when I was 5), so I have no fear of scrolling text. However, I don't think that would be net gain for NASA to drop the voice loops in favor of IRC. Remember that most of the people working in the control rooms are monitoring more than one screen already. The switch to IRC would require split their visual focus to yet another batch of visual information. Also, most people can listen to someone talk while watching something simultaneously without much difficulty because audio and visual information are processed in different parts of the brain. Thus using an audio feed is complementary rather than competing sensory input.
Those thrusters operate for short periods of time at great intervals. Considerable effort is expended to set up the schedule such that usage of those thrusters, docking and undocking visiting ships, station attitude changes and other such events occur in clusters with lengthy intervals between them in order to provide the maximum time of 'uncontaminated' micro gee. (There's even a vibration isolation system on some experimental racks to minimize disturbance in between those events for experiments that require an even higher level of micro gee.)
So yes, continuous usage of an ion thruster will ruin the micro gee environment, and yes this will be a great disruption to experiments onboard.
The original poster specified an ion engine, which must operate continuously or nearly so in order to have any significant effect on the station's orbit.
Now, you could use normal thrusters (preferably from an external source to conserve Zvezda's fuel) to raise the orbit, but you cannot raise it significantly without affecting the ability of other servicing craft (Soyuz, Progress, ATV, HTV, Dragon) to utilize their full design capacity. (The higher the orbit, the lower the delivery capacity.) You can't raise it high enough to significantly reduce atmospheric drag without getting into the region where those craft, at best, no longer have a useful cargo capacity or may not be able to reach it at all.
As usual the NASA TV channel (well, the stream since that's all I can get from it here in Australia) provided me with the last three days and will provide me in the coming days with untouched unhyped `just the facts' 24x7 reality TV. Just the way I love it :-)
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