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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. :)
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.
It has had some great successes, such as the HST repairs (I don't know how else those would have been feasible)
No, that was a miserable financial failure, not a success. You probably have no idea of the staggering expense of a "reusable" vehicle like the shuttle.
The HST was planned to cost $400M to build and launch. It ended up costing about $2500M because it takes a lot of expensive screwing around to launch on the shuttle. I don't know if the $2500M cost includes the $1500M cost of a shuttle launch.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope
JWST is going to "cost" about $4500M, but that's a R and D jobs program not a production program. It could be made to cost anything between maybe $1000M and $100000000000000M depending on how many grants they want to farm out (empire building, etc). I also have no idea what they'll use for a launcher based on all the American launcher cancellations. Probably either a Space-X product, or hang the thumb out like a hitchhiker and hope the ESA will bail us out.
Herschel cost about 1100M euros. I don't know if the 1100M euro cost includes the cost of a dirt cheap Ariane 5.
An Ariane 5 only costs about 120M euro, or about one twelfth of a shuttle launch. Or, rephrased, you can launch 12 scopes on an Ariane for the cost of launching 1 scope on the shuttle. Or rephrased, a shuttle launch, with an empty payload bay, costs more than the entire Herschel program, but an Ariane launch is a pretty small line item on any scope launch.
http://www.spaceandtech.com/spacedata/elvs/ariane5_specs.shtml
A shuttle launch costs about $1500M
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle
Generally speaking, "partially rebuilding" a space telescope costs about as much as launching a new scope on a launcher thats not a joke.
A partially broken down scope seems like a waste, but if it would cost more to fix than to launch a new one... Of course, if we had a freaking assembly line of space telescopes, sort of like a place that Meade has for earthbound scopes, we could probably launch something like a HST or a Herschel for maybe $250M each, plus about $150M for an Ariane5 launch, which would otherwise only pay for about 1/4 of a shuttle repair mission.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
Well, if history is any indication, it'll never happen without a manned space program. Nations that don't have a manned space program (e.g. the EU) also spend less on unmanned missions, and the greatest unmanned US missions were initiated and funded during the Apollo era, when spendings for manned space exploration were also the highest. Manned space exploration inspires the public. Even STS does. Without such a program, the giant funds for unmanned missions that are supposed to be freed because of all the saved money will never materialize.
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.