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Historic Pairing: Shuttle Docked To the ISS
astroengine writes "It's been imaged in artists' renderings, but never before in actual photos: the sight of a space shuttle berthed at the International Space Station. This view of shuttle Endeavour, taken by Italian astronaut Paulo Nespoli from aboard a Russian Soyuz capsule on May 23, is the culmination of 36 space shuttle missions to build the outpost over the past 12 years. NASA wanted the shot before it retires the shuttle fleet after one final mission in July."
That I actual prefer the artistic imaginings of them.
It doesn't look as cool as I would have expected it. Does look fascinating though.
man, at least be a little original !
This looks shopped. I can tell from some of the pixels and from seeing quite a few shops in my time.
Proverbs 21:19
This one has a much better view. It's the mir station though.
Too bad about the "but never before in actual photos" statement, as this is not actually true.
http://blog.polignostix.com/wp-content/gallery/iss-sun/3.jpg
09-f9-11-02-9* (G^GCA_++{>. RV>>>>+++ NO CARRIER
(And it's Paolo, not Paulo; he's Italian, not Portuguese...)
True enough. But now that the money is spent, shouldn't we at least enjoy the view?
Shot in aperture priority (@ f8, ISO 200) with a Nikon D3X with 24-120mm f3.5-f5.6 zoom. Looks like it was focused at infinity.
Full resolutions photos available via link in article, or here.
Now if someone could just label all the different parts and what they do it would be useful for those of us who think this is cool but don't exactly follow it closely.
For clarity I mean more than 1) Space Shuttle 2) International Space Station. I think I got that part figured out.
I'll meet you at the intersection of "Should be" and "Reality"
And just how do you propose they get the shot without spending extra money? You have to be patient and wait for an opportunity like this to emerge.
Geez, and they got it upside-down. How embarrassing.
I know the article's short, but I kept reading and kept arriving at:
NASA spent 12 years and 36 missions, using space shuttles, to build a space shuttle landing dock.
NASA uses the completed dock and takes a picture just before retiring the fleet.
Isn't that kind of like using a 2-seater to awkwardly haul cement and building materials from Lowes
or HomeDepot to build yourself a driveway, taking forever to do it, and then selling your car once it's
built and taking the (Russian) bus instead?
Oh, and taking a picture of it too.
...who hears the Star Trek - The Motion Picture "Enterprise in Dock Fly-by" music in my head when I look at those pictures?
The Blue Danube would also be an acceptable answer.
DG
Want to learn about race cars? Read my Book
Indeed. Money better spent padding the pockets of Wall Street, bailing out companies that are "too big to (be allowed to) fail", or making and dropping bombs.
This post and it's parent are why I so rarely read Slashdot anymore. It's occupied by a bunch of self-centered elitists who cannot think outside of their own warped sense of reality based on only paying attention to articles they agree with so they don't have to think, they just repeat sound bites heard elsewhere. Please score them both as -20 ... no content worth reading.
Then add this post to the same list.
I rarely read replies, it's my opinion and if you thought about your opinion a little more, I'm OK with that.
These are awesome pictures.
I feel somewhat sad with the thought that such a marvel of human engineering won't fly again. It's a shame that the "disposable" culture has reached even the upper echelons of science research.
It clearly shows why the US can't be a world leader anymore. The space shuttle is an inspiring achievement - when you dump that for a disposable capsule that just falls from the sky while trying to keep the people in there alive... well, you can't lead the world towards an inspiring future anymore.
May Endeavour have a nice and safe last flight back home.
Because the moon landing was faked, as are all those "manned" rocket missions, and satellites, and evolution; and the earth is flat and the sun goes around it, and Noah's Ark was real despite the fact that one pair each of seven types of elephants at the zoo standard of 150 pounds of food a day would have eaten 300 tons of food -- six railroad hopper cars full -- in the ten months and 13 days they stayed in the Ark (see Genesis 8:13), and that's just the elephants, but don't bother me with facts, because my mind's made up!
I say we leave one up there (send it up with minimal crew and let them hitch rides home with the Russians or others). The shuttle still would make for an awesome emergency re-entry vehicle--a classic life boat with some extra kick.
I use irony whenever I can, but my shirts are still wrinkled...
Either the Shuttle is larger than I thought, or the ISS is smaller than I thought.
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
man, at least be a little original !
Since I only get a message that the video is not available in my country (couldn't they at least put the title on the page?): What would I have seen there?
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
I can think of a hundred other things my money is spent on that I think is more of a waste than the Shuttle Program. I'd rather my taxes go to science and furthering human understanding the universe than, say, prosecuting and incarcerating people for possessing the dried out leaves of a plant that grows wild because (horror of horrors) some people like to smoke it and get high.
But I guess we all have to accept a little give and take when it comes to our tax money, right?
You would have been Rick-Rolled. You escaped narrowly thanks to Youtubes country restrictions.
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um that's why most people comment, cause they find the article to align with a self interest (weather positive or negative)
while yes I do think this whole shibang is just money in the shitter, its my right to think that way and if you dont like it, well I am not forcing you to read it, just skip over and move on
sick pervert, normal people would only find the topside and cockpit of the shuttle arousing, but here you are looking at the underbelly and engine bells and getting off. shameful.
Answering your quip seriously, they'd have to be in geostationary orbit to do that (the ISS is in a much lower orbit, in an inclined plane), and then it would be called a space elevator. Lots of unsolved problems, not the least of which is spinning out at least 36,000 km of strong enough material. But yes, it is theoretically possible, and hopefully will revolutionize spaceflight when it is done.
Not true, here's a couple of other photos:
http://www.spaceweather.com/swpod2011/18may11/Maximilian-Teodorescu3_strip.jpg
http://legault.perso.sfr.fr/iss_atlantis_transit2_2010.html
It's photographed FROM OUTSIDE. And that's the only shuttle NASA has.
So, unless the aliens took that photo, it was clearly shopped.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I know this is obvious, but from the photographer's perspective and humans needing to perceive up from down .. how he chose his up from down to take the photo.
Somebody make a Descent map of the ISS already. (if 15 years late)
He gets at least a +1 Funny mods!
(But metamods always get the comments "mod up parent")
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
Weird.
I was wondering if it were not a good idea to leave the shuttle paired to the ISS? Is the shuttle that old that it cannot be used even as a spare room? Alternatively there may be other interesting uses that could benefit ISS.
It looked like these two are mating/having sex. :P
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Russian capsules, Italian photo-taking astronauts (as if...)...
Clearly the simpler solution is that it was shopped. William of Ockham says so.
And you can't fight him. Not just cause he packs a blade, but also cause he's been dead for a very long time.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
"The party and the Krikkit warship looked, in their writhings, a little like two ducks, one of which is trying to make a third duck inside the second duck, while the second duck is trying very hard to explain that it doesn't feel ready for a third duck right now, is uncertain that it would want any putative third duck to be made by this particular first duck anyway, and certainly not while it, the second duck, was busy flying."
http://goo.gl/mfJhi
How about investing it in more productive space exploration programs? Just because I see poor bang for the buck by the Shuttle and ISS doesn't mean I am against research funding in general or space exploration in particular. Even if you narrow it to manned space exploration, SpaceX is progressing rapidly for the amount of money spent.
Scientists compete against each other for money all the time - it's inherent in the process. So arguing against one research path in favor of another isn't anti-science, not even remotely.
...can't they just lower some ropes and chains and pull up materials? We do it all the time in my treehouse. Seems easier than launching these dangerous shuttles.
Sure you can! If you can speed up whatever you want to bring to the space station to 17,500 mph, then they'll bring it up on a rope for you, because that's how fast they're going :) It's deceptive when you watch a launch because the shuttle looks like it's going thousands of miles into space, but it's really only going a few hundred miles up. Most of the fuel is spent on horizontal change in velocity so that it can reach a speed necessary to continuously "fall off the edge of the earth". The ISS is going so fast that it orbits the earth every 90 minutes. Compare that with how long it takes for a flight from California to New York (several hours) and you'll see just how amazing the ISS and Shuttle are :)
NASA has 4 Space Shuttles. Only one of them actually flies any more.
Enterprise never flew to space and has been in a museum for a long time now.
Discovery got decommissioned earlier this year and is on its way to a museum.
Endeavour is in the process of decommissioning.
Atlantis is the only remaining Shuttle that is actually operational.
Oh and... My original post was a joke. You know... Ha-ha, LOL, +1 Funny and all that...
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
The geotag on those photos puts them in Studio City, California. Somewhere on the Warner Bros. back lot to be exact.
Have gnu, will travel.
You are not going to lose a few kilometers per second in velocity at survivable deceleration with a parachute before you run out of air braking and hit ground. Some more rigid structure that can stand a bit of heat or some whopping great big rockets pointed in the direction where you want to lose the velocity have been the favourites so far. A slow spiral with plenty of time to catch air in the parachute is just not going to happen since there isn't a lot of depth of air to spiral through. Apollo used a skip trajectory to get around the problem of not having much depth of air to slow down in - that required rockets to go from one skip to the next.
If the ISS were to explode, just jump off it? Deploy parachutes once you hit atmosphere. I don't see why you need a craft, people jump out of planes all the time.
Sure. And as a side bonus, people on the surface would get to make a wish on a shooting star.
The first, and probably the last
My ism, it's full of beliefs.
What you've expressed is not rocket science but instead an expectation of magic where rocket science is required instead. Terminal velocity is not a magic speed limit but simply the velocity where the acceleration due to gravity is in equilibrium with the air resistance. It's just the stable speed you could fall at forever if the air pressure and gravity was constant all the way down forever. You can slow down to it from above just as you can speed up to it. Long before the time a small object has slowed down from several kilometers per second to a stable terminal velocity it will have run out of air and hit ground.
Consider meteorites as an example. Air friction shaves a bit off their velocity but they are moving so fast to start with that they do not slow down to a stable terminal velocity.
Consider that with jumping off the ISS you are talking about a slowdown of about 17,000mph (27,000km/h) to 122 mph. Now do you understand? It's a different scale to parachuting from a plane - the speed never gets that low unless there is something else at work to slow things down.
n/t
They should have folded up the robotic arm for the shot. The arm is extended it that position to check the tiles underneath the spacecraft, this has been done on every flight since Colombia was lost. Now everyone who sees these photos will be reminded of the Colombia disaster, when the thoughts should instead be centered on what an achievement is the docking of a space station and a reusable spacecraft.
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
Last week a beautiful sight passed over my house, visible to the naked eye - a bright yellow dot, followed about half a degree by a much smaller, white dot.
Moving in perfect unison.
My memory of that spectacle is not going to fade any time soon, though sadly not so for any chance of my beholding it again.
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The wikipedia page details which ATVs are connected and where. Then I had to figure out what the heck Poisk and Pirs were and that was in the Poisk page.
Semantics is the gravity of abstraction