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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. :)
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.
"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.
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
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"?
The tiles are delicate, literally flying thru hail or rain could destroy them while they're red hot. That would be a shame if it happened on flight #1. That is no great loss if it happens on the last flight, or second to last, or whatever it is. Just put some bondo and spray paint on that dude before setting up the Smithsonian exhibit, or whatever.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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.
The shuttle was allowed to land despite the threat of bad weather?
Maybe they wanted to be back in time for tea.
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.