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Shuttle Makes Rare Night Landing
goG writes "After over 200 orbits around the Earth, space shuttle Endeavour landed safely in Florida on Sunday, ending a 14-day mission to the International Space Station. NASA pressed ahead with the Sunday night landing even though poor weather on both coasts threatened any touchdown attempt. Unusually, rain clouds were expected at both Edwards Air Force base in California and the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The return marked just the 23rd time the space shuttle has landed at night, out of 130 flights."
One in five isn't terribly rare...
No sig today...
Apparently it came in from West to East,
I'd be surprised if it ever came in from any other direction...
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Obama is right. He stopped Nasa wasting it's time/money/effort/brains playing space-trucker (let private business do that - it should NOT be Nasa's job to do mundane Wells Fargo or Fedex chores) and get back to doing serious innovation - like ion drives and other techs that are gonna get us ultimately to Mars, Jupiter and Alpha Centauri - because private enterprise is not ready for that yet.
Are you proud of Nasa playing Fedex, which the Russians, Indians, Chinese, or SpaceX could also do sooner or later, or are you proud that it got from nowhere to the moon in 9 years?
It's like software or many other things. Versions 1 and 2 are highly innovative and lots happens. Then your software becomes business critical to customers and innovation stagnates, new releases only contain fixes or minor changes - goal is only to milk it for all it's worth. Obama is cutting out the stagnation and getting them back to the cutting edge.
The Ares 1 has not had its first test flight. The 1-X had a test flight, which was just the first stage. They don't plan on a full Ares 1 test flight until 2014. Pretty much every modern rocket is based on earlier models which didn't have perfect records. Falcon 1 was designed from the ground up. It would have been a near miracle for the first couple flights to not have problems.