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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, because the boom made me jump out of my chair and scared my poor cats witless.
They should warn a guy. :)
Just a guess here, I'm no expert on the subject, but with federal funding, I'm sure the for _profit_ outfits might find reason to invest more into R&D.
Hang a big suitcase full of money in front of a business with the capability of making what you want and I can guarantee you if there is enough in that case, they will give you what you want.
nice clean steam/heat vents everywhere (much cleaner than the increasing random eruptions). we'd be back to having an atmosphere before we realize ours is kaput? no money in it? may as well blow up then.
I appreciate the pull of private industry to space.
But big suitcases of money from the government is not real cash, and you know it. Business works truly on real dollars from real funding. What the government calls funding, I call "venture capital."
And we all know what's happened before when people make bright ideas out of nothing from a business standpoint: The 2001 "dotcom" stock crash happened for a reason.
The point I'm making is to keep a space presence in place until it's replacement shows up. I almost don't care who makes it, as long as it's affordable and reliable and not the Russians (good space people in their own right, but we shouldn't be able to go to space on their behalf).
No president has ever cut the jugular to the space program like this. Some might argue that it's time had come. But, in so many ways, the current president lacks critical vision that risks the sight of what good comes from investing in the future, rather than merely concentrating on the (equally important) social issues. If the president had vision, he'd realize that the offshoots of the space program (such as mobile computers) have helped the poor as a result become less poor.
Vos teneo officium eram periculosus ut vos recipero is.
part of the 'newclear' power those freaks have been ranting about for all these years?
some of us would do almost anything to make them stop/delete themselves, no?
gnu online dating; sheesh
With all due respect, your anti-Obama rhetoric is making your political stance quite obvious and I wonder if part of your hatred of the move to private industry is clouded.
The fact of the matter is we do have backups in place right now. Commercial businesses are already launching satellites, let alone other nations. So if we need a satellite launched, we have options.
On the idea of "And let's not worry about the big frickin' rocks that occasionally could pummel us, and the space tech needed to even consider an option to stop that.", I'm quite certain that all we would need to do is get the top competitors into a room (read: people that have skill launching things) and tell them that whoever saves the earth gets 3 Billion dollars, we'll see some results.
Personally, what I find most odd about your posts is that you seem to hold NASA up on a pedestal. Really, they've killed a bunch of astronauts and they do so at a huge, HUGE, cost to the public. Yes, they have been moderately successful over the years, but beyond building a station that they seem content to decommission asap and landing men on the moon decades ago, they really haven't done anything private enterprise isn't doing already. Well, besides sending humans up to turn screws on ailing satellites.
From what I understand (and I am not too well informed on the subject), the counter argument is; the cost is too great to justify the benefits. The priority now is to restore the economy so that long term investments like these become possible once again. Increasing the demand by supporting the economy and funding private companies to make manned space travel economically viable will likely get you into space faster than waiting for NASA to do it.
"Enjoy" is exactly it -- manned space flight is cool. The STS pictures are amazing. It is not cost effective. I want us (humans) to have a strong committent to space exploration, real science, and for thirty years have noticed that it is a rare scientist who will speak well of the Shuttle program. It has had some great successes, such as the HST repairs (I don't know how else those would have been feasible) but the more common story I've heard is that NASA would delay launches to try to force them to go on the Shuttle, and that funding for basic research probes, with which we have seen stunning successes, was eviscerated.
So, before questioning the end of the multi-billion-dollar Shuttle program that killed two crews, be sure of what we really want next. Myself, I want to see the money spent, and spent efficiently. I'm happy enough if not a human but a robot boldly goes where no human|robot has gone before, and I suspect the robot will do a better job, cost one fifth as much, and happen twenty years sooner.
What the heck would the aliens be "debarking," our dogs? Why do they care if our dogs make noise? I think you meant "disembarking"...
SIG FAULT: Post index out of bounds.
"Hilarious boondoggle ends. Cuts off access to sister boondoggle."
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
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.
Hate to be the one to tell you, but it's not like Constellation was going to be flying any time soon (2017-2018 based on latest estimates). SpaceX is likely to be flying sooner than that, same with an Orion-lite on a EELV, and at a cost substantally less than the 40 billion dollars that Ares-1 was going to cost. Plus I'm not sure exactly how they managed to do it, but the proposed replacement was going to cost even more than the Shuttle to operate, while doing substantially less.
BTW Constellation (and Orion) was as much a replacement for STS as a Yugo is for a Ferrari.
The Space Shuttle is done, the decision to wind down the program was made years ago and there are only so many long lead items such as external tanks left. It would take years (and billions) to ramp the production lines back up. Even one of the pads at Kennedy can no longer support Shuttle launches (it was modified for Ares-1X). As much as I love the Shuttle, it is too little too late to save her
they really haven't done anything private enterprise isn't doing already
Many NGOs with rovers on Mars?
Perhaps they are werewolf aliens that need to howl at the moon?
The shuttle was allowed to land despite the threat of bad weather? Whats the new motto at NASA; "Safety last"?
My web domain.
It would have ended before 2011 anyway, and not come back for a decade. Well, unless you believe NASA would finish on time, which every objective review said they wouldn't.
Private spaceflight will be ready before constellation would have been.
SpaceX will have its Dragon module docking with the ISS 4 years before Ares I/Orion's first test flight, and manned missions 2-3 years before Orion. While I agree that it's bad for NASA to stop manned spaceflight before the replacement is available, THAT part was not Obama's plan. Bush decided that in 2004. Obama just wants to cancel the Constellation program, which seems like it's already behind what commercial systems like SpaceX have available.
$60 per person per year is a "huge, HUGE cost to the public"?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Budget
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States
Taking from the 2010 proposed budget and the 2010 population estimate, $18,700 million / 308.732 million = $60.57.
"I'm not sure I like the fugnutish tone you used in your post!" -RogL (608926)-
A black guy that doesn't like Obama?! Is that even possible? Good grief that gives you a lot of credibility!
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Not only has the Ares 1 already had it first test flight. I am here saying, on record, that the Dragon will not fly until at least 2020, if ever.
SpaceX is a joke of a company.
Do you know how simple the falcon 1 is? And they only have a 2/5 record with it. While most modern rocket systems, which have far greater abilities, designed in the last 20 years have perfect records.
The Flacon 9 is much more complex, SpaceX will take a decade to get it right.
Asking SpaceX to get a man to LEO is like asking the Wright Brothers to fly you across the Atlantic.
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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.
Yes, it is damned hard. Well, perhaps not hard, but really, really expensive. In order to have just one or two flights per years you basically need to have the same infrastructure that you would have for a dozen flights per year. that infrastructure isn't just the facilities, it's also the thousands of people that build, maintain, and operate the shuttles and their components, the launch facility in Florida, mission control in Houston, alternate or emergency landing sites in California and Africa, and a global communications network. These are not trivial or cheap things, and you need it all to do even a single shuttle launch. Since Columbia, they need to have a flight-ready backup shuttle that can be launched in short order.
And what would you do with this infrastructure the rest of the time? It's pretty specialized, and can't be used for much else except launching shuttles. In order for it to be ready, it needs to be funded and running all the time. This totals a couple billion dollars per year in operating expenses, plus hundreds of millions or billions of dollars per launch. You either have a full shuttle program or none at all. Because NASA's budget is finite and has been mostly stagnant for a long time, having a full shuttle program constrained the ability to do anything else in the realm of manned spaceflight.
"The fact of the matter is we do have backups in place right now. Commercial businesses are already launching satellites, let alone other nations. So if we need a satellite launched, we have options."
There is no other space vehicle with the carrying capacity of the shuttle. There are satellites in orbit that couldn't have been placed there by any other spacecraft currently in existence, or under development.
"Really, they've killed a bunch of astronauts and they do so at a huge, HUGE, cost to the public."
The shuttle is considered a military aircraft. With 130 missions, less than a 2% failure rate is pretty good, not even counting the insane complexity of the vehicle systems.
"...they really haven't done anything private enterprise isn't doing already. "
Ranger, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Voyager, Mariner, SOHO, Spirit, Opportunity, Mars Global Surveyor, Cassini, Huygens...do I really need to go on? Where is private industry on landing stuff on the Moon, Venus, or Mars, or orbiting Saturn and Titan? Or even in sending a craft out of the solar system? What rock have you lived under your whole life?
With the Ares program falling behind schedule and Obama whittling away at funds, I fear this to be the case. This doesnt even take the Tea Party in account which considers federal space program the #1 wasteful program to eliminate. Private industry might eventually do manned orbital, but not in a long while.
NASA is on my pedestal because people with short-sighted visions have given us *only* NASA to put there. Plenty of other presidents (both GOP and Democrat) could've started a stronger private industry initiative decades ago with a long-term vision of private space launches. They haven't.
I don't understand, why should the government push private industry? If space launches are profitable private industry will provide if they are not private industry will not.
Why is it bad to push private health insurance but good to incentivise private space launches?