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Another Leak Delays Final Discovery Launch
vsolepr writes "Today's scheduled launch was scrubbed because of a gaseous hydrogen leak near the spacecraft's external tank. This is the fourth time in the past week that Discovery's launch was delayed due to various leaks and electrical issues. NASA now is aiming for a launch date no earlier than Nov. 30."
and I'm gay.
Blasted WikiLeaks!!!
Once I was a four stone apology. Now I am two separate gorillas.
That shuttle leaks more than:
* Most diapers
* FireFox memory
* [insert government agency name here]
* A guy with an enlarged prostate
Congratulations on your purchase of a brand new nigger! If handled properly, your apeman will give years of valuable, if reluctant, service.
INSTALLING YOUR NIGGER.
You should install your nigger differently according to whether you have purchased the field or house model. Field niggers work best in a serial configuration, i.e. chained together. Chain your nigger to another nigger immediately after unpacking it, and don't even think about taking that chain off, ever. Many niggers start singing as soon as you put a chain on them. This habit can usually be thrashed out of them if nipped in the bud. House niggers work best as standalone units, but should be hobbled or hamstrung to prevent attempts at escape. At this stage, your nigger can also be given a name. Most owners use the same names over and over, since niggers become confused by too much data. Rufus, Rastus, Remus, Toby, Carslisle, Carlton, Hey-You!-Yes-you!, Yeller, Blackstar, and Sambo are all effective names for your new buck nigger. If your nigger is a ho, it should be called Latrelle, L'Tanya, or Jemima. Some owners call their nigger hoes Latrine for a joke. Pearl, Blossom, and Ivory are also righteous names for nigger hoes. These names go straight over your nigger's head, by the way.
CONFIGURING YOUR NIGGER
Owing to a design error, your nigger comes equipped with a tongue and vocal chords. Most niggers can master only a few basic human phrases with this apparatus - "muh dick" being the most popular. However, others make barking, yelping, yapping noises and appear to be in some pain, so you should probably call a vet and have him remove your nigger's tongue. Once de-tongued your nigger will be a lot happier - at least, you won't hear it complaining anywhere near as much. Niggers have nothing interesting to say, anyway. Many owners also castrate their niggers for health reasons (yours, mine, and that of women, not the nigger's). This is strongly recommended, and frankly, it's a mystery why this is not done on the boat
HOUSING YOUR NIGGER.
Your nigger can be accommodated in cages with stout iron bars. Make sure, however, that the bars are wide enough to push pieces of nigger food through. The rule of thumb is, four niggers per square yard of cage. So a fifteen foot by thirty foot nigger cage can accommodate two hundred niggers. You can site a nigger cage anywhere, even on soft ground. Don't worry about your nigger fashioning makeshift shovels out of odd pieces of wood and digging an escape tunnel under the bars of the cage. Niggers never invented the shovel before and they're not about to now. In any case, your nigger is certainly too lazy to attempt escape. As long as the free food holds out, your nigger is living better than it did in Africa, so it will stay put. Buck niggers and hoe niggers can be safely accommodated in the same cage, as bucks never attempt sex with black hoes.
FEEDING YOUR NIGGER.
Your Nigger likes fried chicken, corn bread, and watermelon. You should therefore give it none of these things because its lazy ass almost certainly doesn't deserve it. Instead, feed it on porridge with salt, and creek water. Your nigger will supplement its diet with whatever it finds in the fields, other niggers, etc. Experienced nigger owners sometimes push watermelon slices through the bars of the nigger cage at the end of the day as a treat, but only if all niggers have worked well and nothing has been stolen that day. Mike of the Old Ranch Plantation reports that this last one is a killer, since all niggers steal something almost every single day of their lives. He reports he doesn't have to spend much on free watermelon for his niggers as a result. You should never allow your nigger meal breaks while at work, since if it stops work for more than ten minutes it will need to be retrained. You would be surprised how long it takes to teach a nigger to pick cotton. You really would. Coffee beans? Don't ask. You have no idea.
MAKING YOUR NIGGER WORK.
Niggers are very, very averse to work of any kind. Th
They're gonna launch it by November thirtieth!
My mom is dirty,
But your mom is dirtieth!
So, how much is this costing us to duct tape this 1970's clunker back together for 1 last hoo-ra and for what scientific gain?
Oh to attach a storage room to the IIS
well fuck me
"Another Dalek Lays Final Discovery Launch"
I think I'd be shaking in my boots if I was a Discovery bound astronaut. Although, I think it's a good thing their exhaustive checkout is finding more issues, it's a real drag to see NASA struggling to get one last launch of the Discovery and having such showstopper flaws. I understand that no amount of engineering or preparation can substitute the small amount of pure luck it is to have a successful space launch with all things considered, but you can't help but wonder if there wasn't such drastic funding cutbacks for NASA in space exploration and aeronautics if we'd be seeing a different, more positive outcome from the same reporting.
maybe they made a few mistakes to get some last bit of overtime
It always puzzles me why folks imagine saying a given piece of tech is old is axiomatically equivalent to saying it's been mightily improved upon since then.
Has the pencil been improved on yet? How about the wheel? Are we still burning gasoline in cylinders with pistons to power cars, like we started doing in the 1880s? Do we still use propellors to make boats move? Et cetera.
I'm not suggesting it's not possible to improve the Shuttle -- but that case has to be made in detail, not tossed off with an assumption that because it was designed in the 60s and built in the 70s there must be a far better idea. After all, the biggest advances since the 70s have mostly been in stuff like electronics or avionics, and besides the fact that this doesn't do squat for things like thermal protection and reliability of very high energy rocket systems under very heavy load (the two weaknesses that killed Columbia and Challenger, respectively) the best of these advances in electronics have in many cases been retrofitted into the Shuttle anyway.
Point me to a genuine major advance in airframe materials, thermal protection systems, or rocket engine design since the 1970s and maybe this contempt might be better supported by actual evidence.
Even I start to leak more as I get older.
Levar Burton has offered his assistance to NASA:
http://twitter.com/levarburton/status/541379696533505
This was the last external tank made at Michoud. As it rolled down the assembly line, everyone who worked on it did their particular task and then was laid off as soon as they were done.
And people are shocked it's not particularly well made? Frankly, I think the astronauts taking this tank into orbit have to be nuts.
The vehicles are getting too old to fly, despite the overhauls they get after every mission. Even the disposable parts (like the tank) because of attrition in the skilled workforce that built them.
Not that we haven't known this was coming for longer than it took to go from a standing start to men walking on the Moon, but too many managers have been more concerned with protecting their turf than ensuring continued manned access to space.
-- Alastair
Just take one look at the thing. Great big rockets strapped onto the SIDE. That was the highly undesirable outcome of having to meet a variety of constraints that were not there when the original plans were made. They could have built a far better shuttle for specific tasks in the 1970s, but the compromises produced what we have. It shows how amazing the NASA guys are that it managed to work at all.
The main factors that made it like this were a requirement to be able to get into orbits that require a lot of fuel if you are going from Florida and the problems associated with making the thing taller than it is to have enough fuel to get into those orbits. I don't know how many missions it was used for that actually needed that, they were apparently classified military missions but it's not as if you can hide the thing up there so some astronomers would known how many times it went into polar orbits. I can't say if the compromise was worth it and the seven lives lost due to a chain that started with the compromise, only somebody that knows the worth of the polar orbit missions and if they really had to be manned anyway could say.
A shuttle designed to get to equatorial orbits would look very different and have better lifting capacity than rockets that have to handle great bit weights strapped to the side and the extra mass required to make it strong enough to do so.
Personally I think it was wasted sometimes on "space truck" missions that didn't need to be manned in the first place and could just have been done with a larger conventional rocket than our current satellite launchers, but every mission probably did something useful since there's a few crew working on things even if the primary goal is just to deliver stuff.
Here we have yet another example of the Eloi hate of the greasy Moorlocks that actually do stuff other than lounge around in a garden waiting to be eaten. Have you considered that the workers in question would actually be proud of their work and watch the launch with the joy of seeing the results of a job well done?
Come on, people, this isn't brain surgery...
I listen to both RIAA and non-RIAA stuff if I like the music, tangential business/politics nonwithstanding.
Looks like the old jalopy is well and truly falling apart!