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CmdrTaco at Kennedy Space Center
Matthew Travis from the
Ares Institute Inc helped me get a press pass for the STS-135 Launch. so I'm crossing my fingers and hoping for no scrub. I'm tweeting as @cmdrtaco from the launch if you are into that sort of thing. I'll have more later, but for now you'll have to make do with a photo I took, as well as a brief video clip I took of Atlantis on the pad at night.
It's betting scrubbed.
Only a 30% chance of acceptable launch weather tomorrow.
I envy you, I've unfortunately never been within 1,000 miles of the cape for a launch. This Christmas break there's a chance I'll be in Florida for a planned Delta I V Heavy launch, if so I'll definitely be taking the family.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I was there, for the STS-132 Tweetup, and it is absolutely incredible.
Nearly 2700 press were badged for this launch; the record was 2707 for STS-1, and they might find they've beaten it when all is said and done.
Shame the press paid no attention to the 100 or so in the middle; perhaps the public would have raised more fuss with its legislators about NASA's miserable budget.
Hey, we should be so lucky! Over on Fark, Drew Curtis still can't find his way from the pub to the launch complex!
Slashdot started as a personal blog of CmdrTaco after all.
Looking forward to live twitpics Cmdr! :) Saw third to last launch in person, it was spectacular. Wish I could make this last one. Fingers crossed for no scrub!
o_O
This put a smile on my face... I wanted to go but never got the time + money to do it. CmdrTaco being there and posting updates about it will have to do. Now, we all have a pair of eyes on the ground, our Nerd in Cape Canaveral.
The English word fart is one of the oldest words in the English vocabulary.
Just for you, Lt. Burrito:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyfLER3Z0-Q
(mod me down if you must. that's funny.)
I only post comments when someone on the internet is wrong.
At least this qualifies as news for nerds.
Congrats, dude. My best friend was at the launch last year. I hear it's damn cool.
First no Concorde, now no Shuttle. Can't help but feel civilisation is slipping a little.
Jeremy Lee | Orinoco
That's like saying no offense, but you're ugly and I can smell you from here.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
I may have seen you. We're here as well. We were in a 3-bus procession... as we passed another bus parked in the "observation grass" (among the mosquitos)... saw a younger dude in a suit snappin photos and about 10 others.
This is my third attempt to see one take off. If it scrubs tomorrow, it'll likely be Sunday before the next attempt.
DO listen to Rush's Signals the hour before the launch.
DON'T run up and down the causeway yelling "LITE 'ER UP!"
Where does this "cmdrtaco" guy get off posting this type of story? You'd think this site was his personal blog or something.
Maybe in Twitter, but just casually glancing around a bit I see /. user numbers in the >1.7 mil range. When you get that many people signed up to read your tweets, then come back and talk smack.
BTW, nice score on the press creds, Taco. Have a great time. Hope the weather clears and they get that thing off the ground.
If you possibly can, GO. I saw one launch - STS-133. I got the VIP site, but even if you watch it from Titusville it's nothing you'll ever forget.
And to those of you at the Cape: good luck.
The shuttle launch is something that is likely never going to happen again, and those who have not had the opportunity should be jealous. I have seen it from four miles out. It is a vision to behold. I have also been working in mission control during a two flights and been in the integration areas at KSC. I know how lucky I am, and am always saddened by those who choose jealousy over action. To many people think they have seen or done something because they have been to Disneyland, or a major concert, or maybe a major sporting event. But the something like the Shuttle matters beyond the technology of a entertainment event or who wins or loses an event. The shuttle represents our human capability to coordinate thousands of people and mechanical parts into a functioning whole that breaks us from the limits of the earth.
So rather than being jealous, go out and do something useful. Quite wasting your time trying to be the Big Man on slashdot, compensating for the lack of Real Innovation. Do Something.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
A fucktard who doesn't whisper a word unless it's about some comic book shit or some CGI film gets a press pass to a launch? What is this? A fucking joke is what it is.
Real science and technology is dead on Slashdot and CmdrDildo is part of the reason why.
Come on, even I have more followers than him!
As per requested,Twitter just got the @cmdrtaco name back from a squatter. "Greetings new BFFs. It's true: the twitter gods granted me @cmdrtaco from the hands of the squatter who held it for years."
Lost in Space: Doctor Zachary Smith, an agent for an enemy government, is sent to sabotage the mission. He is successful in reprogramming the ship's robot, but in the process becomes trapped on the ship, and because of his excess weight, the ship and all on board become hopelessly lost and it now becomes a fight for survival as the crew tries to find their way back home.
Hey, there will be plenty of pictures from other folk during the launch. Let them take the picture during the launch. I wish I were there. I would stand there and take it all in.
Why is there a stream of water on the right side tank in the video?
That is a great picture. How about adding a link to the original image?
C'mon, make more of them.
If you're going to be in the press observation bunker bring a coat. Before the launch they chill that room to something like 55F. Almost immediately after launch the temp jumps into the 90's from the energy released by the rocket.
Yes, very much like your post is irrelevant in a discussion of the Space Shuttle.
The shuttle launch is something that is likely never going to happen again, and those who have not had the opportunity should be jealous.
All of the shit that happens around us is unique and is never going to happen again. IOW: not much of an argument. It's all a matter of what one values in life. It's important to you: fine. Important to my Dad, who saw a Shuttle launch in the 80s. Not all that important to me -- certainly less important than, say, working on my house.
As far as I'm concerned, recent CPUs and GPUs are no less of a technological achievment than, say, a Shuttle launch. They are all immensely complex technical systems, even if the Shuttle is "just" a spaceplane strapped to a rocket, and, say Penryn is "just" a CPU on a piece of silicon wafer. Whether the parts are mechanical or not doesn't matter much, IMHO. Things fail spectacularly in the silicon world, too.
Doing "Something", to me, definitely wouldn't be watching a Shuttle launch.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
What kind of wacky adventure will CmdrTaco have next? Tune in next week to find out!
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
I worked on the shuttle program at JSC for 7 years and visited KSC last month after a cruise vacation. Unfortunately, I've never seen a launch live and never will.
I left JSC in the mid-90s, but tried to keep my excitement for the space program. I vividly recall getting up to watch the landing of Columbia live. See, I wrote some flight software code that makes the landings much smoother and deals with the nosewheel steering, along with lots of code that we never saw executed during any mission (thankfully!). 2 and 3 engine out stuff. Later, I worked writing software used in all the mission control centers around the world, but mainly at JSC. That job made me feel connected to the crews in a way that developing software in a building across the street from JSC never did. Working "on-site" daily, walking into Building-30 and 30S, was exciting. Running into John Young, Mike Coates or other famous people was an almost daily occurrence. Actually, Mike was my boss for a few years (3 levels above) and heard a few of us arguing about which cycle some bit needed to be flipped to "meet requirements" one day. Doing it right was more costly ... I had to change 3 more "modules" to flip that single bit on the "first pass of OPS2" and any software change was expensive. Think "multi-threaded" programs, but in real-time software. Whether that bit was flipped then or half a second later after the computers were non-responsive for 45 seconds when going into On-Orbit OPS seriously did not matter. Still, the requirements won over being efficient (where it didn't matter at all) - I think this was 1 issue with the entire shuttle program. Changes were pretty costly.
Anyway, the morning that Columbia broke up in 2003, was very traumatic for me. I'd sat in the FCR and worked with the flight controllers years ago and was disconnected by 4 states and 3 private sector jobs. Those first 10 minutes when the shuttle didn't show up on TV after re-entry and there simply wasn't any data ... well, I knew it had broken up and everyone on-board was dead. The first indication of issues were temperatures in the landing gear - I'd written code around the landing gear sensors. There were probably 1,000s of people who did something related to the landing gear.
Anyway, last month as I stood on KSC doing a normal tour that anyone can, I took photos of Atlantis on the pad and saw much of the tourist parts with some family before they had to head off to the airport for flights to different parts of the country. I stayed another 4 hours at the visitor center alone and did everything I could there. I was a little disappointed that it was sorta like a theme park now, it had lost the grimy NASA feeling that I recall walking around behind the scenes at JSC in the different laboratories. Engineers don't usually spend much time on aesthetics. Knowing the shuttle program was ending AND didn't have a follow on project saddened me almost as much as when my father died. As I drove off Merritt Island into the sunset, I actually cried, just a little.
The manned space flight program elevates all humans, just a little. You don't get that from robots. Sure, it costs lots of money, but not nearly as much as not doing it does. The engineer in me says robotics is much cheaper for space exploration. The human in me says without men/women involved, it is just a cartoon, not real.
Mankind **needs** a manned space flight program. I'd hope the USA did it, but other countries have the smarts to accomplish it too. They also have a different culture of risk and a willingness to fail in order to succeed that is lacking in the USA today.
Goodbye shuttle program. I'll be watching Atlantis closely, until she is safely stopped at the end of the runway for the last time.
Not to be rude against the shuttle or anything, but if I wanted to talk tech revolution I feel the computer I'm sitting at now and the Internet it's connected to are the absurdly biggest revolutions of the last 25 years or so (yes I know the PC and arpanet itself is older). We're talking going from 64kB to 16GB of RAM, 1 Mhz to 3 GHz processors, tapes with ~200 kB of storage to 2 TB hard disks, it's absurdly many orders of magnitude. Not to mention the Internet going from a university thing to something 99% of all households with children have.
That and wireless, when I grew up mobile phones didn't exist (okay they were invented but nobody had them) and these days there are more subscriptions than there are people, as many have home and work phone. A modern smart phone playing video over wireless broadband from a server halfway around the world is just off the scale compared to what I could have imagined 25 years ago. And the broadband revolution is still very much in progress with fiber rollout, higher speeds and lower prices.
So do I feel I need to go see the shuttle to see progress? I got the feeling that progress is far more tangible and all around me, maybe it's that you get it at a distance but if you take a step back and look at your own life you'll probably see plenty changes right there. The shuttle is fine but I don't feel it has had nearly the revolutionary impact on everything else like the Apollo program did, trickle-down science from the space program not withstanding.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Increased communication results in increased whining (mostly from know-it-all-teenagers), but overall should end up being a good thing.
Hey, when I was a kid we didn't even have colour TV. Now I'm pissed-off that my keyboard's backlighting is shitty.
I'm just leaving myself to head out to Titusville for the launch. Looking forward to capturing as many pics and videos as I can of the events. Got my handy talky all charged to listen to the rebroadcast on 2 meter.
How do we know you are really there? With tech you could easily fake pictures. They could be from anyone.
Soooo... Take a pic of you standing in front of the countdown clock with today's newspaper.
Just Joking. Have fun CmdrTaco. I'm rather jealous of you, especially as it is the last one.
I only got close to flying down there once with a friend. But I'm glad it didn't work out, because it was a cold January day and we lost 7 people that day.
That's how you do it.
People want to believe KSC is on Cape Canaveral...don't believe 'em. Take SR3 North and you'll run right to the 39A & B.
Grew up on Merritt Island...everyone was involved in KSC in some way. Went to Merritt Island High, eventually worked at KSC for a while (left in '97').
I'm flying into Orlando tonight....so if it's not scrubbed, I won't see this launch. This program shutdown is going to hit MI hard. It'll come back, just like it did after Apollo ended...but things are going to get tight over there for a while.
I just heard some sad news on talk radio - the space shuttle transportation system was found dead in its Florida home this morning. There weren't any more details. I'm sure everyone in the Slashdot community will miss it - even if you didn't enjoy its work, there's no denying its contributions to popular culture. Truly an American icon.
As far as I'm concerned, recent CPUs and GPUs are no less of a technological achievment than, say, a Shuttle launch.
Not exactly the same kind of risk involved or the same type of experience -- one is a spectacle and the other is not:
To watch a launch of a vehicle breaking the bonds of earth's gravity to venture out into an inhospitable environment where those on board risk their lives is on a somewhat different scale than, say, pushing the power button on my desktop.
Things fail spectacularly in the silicon world, too.
Really? The same way they can in Space Exploration? Really?
Thought thinks itself.
As far as I'm concerned, recent CPUs and GPUs are no less of a technological achievment than, say, a Shuttle launch.
Not exactly the same kind of risk involved or the same type of experience -- one is a spectacle and the other is not:
To watch a launch of a vehicle breaking the bonds of earth's gravity to venture out into an inhospitable environment where those on board risk their lives is on a somewhat different scale than, say, pushing the power button on my desktop.
You fuck up a run of a few million CPUs like Penryn, you're out of a billion bucks. That's in the same ballpark as losing a Shuttle. Certainly way more than monetary value of any human life that's lost in a Shuttle accident.
As far as inhospitable environments go: you should visit a sub-50nm fab once, and see the whole manufacturing process start to finish. Kinda makes Shuttle look dumb -- IMHO.
I don't get the whole romanticization of risk and frontier. Watching, say, an electron force microscope work gives me way more chills than any chemical rocket launch ever could. Small things are no less complex than big things. In fact, they can be way more complex, it's just hard to see with your naked eye. The exponents involved in the physical dimensions are irrelevant. Yeah, a Shuttle launch is as physically big, noisy thing, with plenty of audiovisuals to go with it. Knowing me, I'd probably fall asleep at T-20, just like I often do during 4th of July firework celebrations. The boom gets old real quick, you've got only one pair of ears, better keep good care of them.
Things fail spectacularly in the silicon world, too.
Really? The same way they can in Space Exploration? Really?
Just the fact that when you blow up a few billion 45nm transistors it doesn't cause billions worth of damage doesn't mean that it's any less spectacular. Semiconductor failure modes are quite fascinating things, and the accumulated knowledge in this area is well on par with accumulated knowledge about aerospace snafus. I'd tend to think that semiconductor knowledge has been surpassing aerospace knowledge simply due to rather fast progress in the former. About the only place where you'd use the exact same CPU for 3 decades is a nuclear plant control room, and that's just because certifying new stuff costs money that utilities are not willing to spend. No major performance indicators in the aerospace world have improved anywhere near the major indicators in the semiconductor world. None. Specific impulse, fuel-to-dry-weight ratio, etc., are all well in the same order of magnitude as they were 40 years ago. About the only major thing that has happened was SpaceX's pioneering vertical integration and resulting cost and time-to-market savings that are pretty much unheard of in the contemporary trenches. The last time rockets were designed so quickly and at such a relatively low cost was in Nazi Germany...
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
You seem really focused on monetary value. I was trying to show you there are things beyond that. The fact that you can't see that risking/losing human lives puts space exploration in a different ballpark than manufacturing processors I find quite sad -- and of course there's that whole "leaving the frikkin' planet thing". *shrug*
BTW, I'm not discounting the amazing achievements in computing -- I just find it to be in a different category than leaving the planet. And of course, space exploration relies on computing technology.
Thought thinks itself.
Condolences to all you Americans who voted for Obama. And now the Space Program is dead - gone to fund the homeless in Chicago and other Obama voting areas. And now it is $65 million a pop to hitch a ride with the Ruskies.
Comrades, I can say on behalf of me and my friends we are glad we are not American as the US spirals out of economic control. Elections have consequences. Na Zdorovie. We are thinking of popping over to US and buying some houses for our holidays.