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Space Shuttle Atlantis Last Night In Space Orbit
techtribune writes "Tomorrow will be a bittersweet day for the crew aboard the NASA Space Shuttle Atlantis as they begin their return home to Earth. This will be the last space shuttle re-entry, the last landing, and the very last crew to pilot the shuttle in U.S. history. The Atlantis Space Shuttle undocked from the International Space Station (ISS) yesterday after delivering a lot of supplies, batteries, and other hardware to the station. They are bringing a lot of trash and everything else that needs to be brought back to Earth, as it's the very last opportunity for NASA to do so on its own." In a related topic, MarkWhittington wrote in with a story about why we stopped going to the moon and why there are no plans to go back.
Just a thought... they carefully cut out all excess weight for a shuttle launch because every extra pound is some $massive.amount. On the way down, however, is it really more of a "pack it all in" mentality?
It's always confirmation bias!
Since June 29, Mr. Obama has had three press conferences, a Twitter town hall, multiple regional TV interviews, and numerous public remarks. On Friday, the day by which Obama hopes to reach agreement with Republicans on major deficit reduction, he will hold a regular town hall in College Park, Md.
Obama has used these opportunities to drive home his view that Congress must raise the ceiling on the federal debt, that a grand bargain on deficit reduction must include tax increases, and that hard-liners in both parties must compromise. It’s impossible to prove that Obama’s public relations blitz is directly responsible for shifting public opinion, but two major new polls show that Americans are indeed moving toward the president’s position, if not fully buying it.
In the Wall Street Journal/NBC News poll released Tuesday night, a growing percentage of Americans – now 38 percent – say that the debt ceiling should be raised, versus 31 percent who say it should not. A month ago, only 28 percent favored raising the debt ceiling and 39 percent said it shouldn’t. Obama, his administration, and most economists assert that a failure to raise the debt ceiling by Aug. 2 would lead the nation to begin defaulting on its debt – or, alternatively, halt payments on other national obligations, such as Social Security checks and service members’ paychecks. Any of these nonpayments would be devastating to the US economy and the individuals affected.
Conservatives, including many tea party activists, say that raising the debt ceiling only enables the government to continue spending at irresponsibly high rates.
The WSJ/NBC poll also found that Obama’s proposal – $4 trillion in deficit reduction over 10 years that combines spending cuts, including on Medicare, and tax hikes on corporations and the wealthy – beats the House Republican plan by 22 points (58 percent to 36 percent). The House GOP plan, called "Cut, Cap, and Balance," would cut and cap federal spending and require congressional approval of a balanced budget amendment to the Constitution before the debt ceiling could be raised. Anything that could be construed as a tax increase – including the closing of tax loopholes and ending of corporate subsidies – is anathema to many congressional Republicans.
Another new poll also found signs that Obama is beating the Republicans in the debt/deficit showdown – though Obama comes in for scorn as well. According to Tuesday's Washington Post/ABC News poll, Republicans are increasingly dissatisfied with their representatives in Congress. Some 58 percent say they’re not doing enough to reach a deal, compared with 42 percent in March. And a majority of Republicans say they’re willing to see higher taxes on the wealthy.
no gadgets required
should it not be considered that the domestic threats to all of us/our
freedoms be intervened on/removed, so we wouldn't be compelled to hide our
sentiments, &/or the truth, about ANYTHING, including the origins of the
hymenology council, & their sacred mission? with nothing left to hide,
there'd be room for so much more genuine quantifiable progress?
you call this 'weather'? much of our land masses world are going under
water, or burning up, as we fail to consider anything at all that really
matters, as we've been instructed that we must maintain our silence (our
last valid right?), to continue our 'safety' from... mounting terror.
meanwhile, back at the raunch; there are exceptions? the unmentionable
sociopath weapons peddlers are thriving in these times of worldwide
sufferance? the royals? our self appointed murderous neogod rulers? all
better than ok, thank..... us. their stipends/egos/disguises are secure,
so we'll all be ok/not killed by mistaken changes in the MANufactured
'weather', or being one of the unchosen 'too many' of us, etc...?
truth telling & disarming are the only mathematically & spiritually
correct options. read the teepeeleaks etchings. see you there?
diaperleaks group worldwide. thanks for your increasing awareness?
with unreliable history of that death trap, might be the last shuttle to burn up, the last crew to die
I say we all put on ape costumes and greet them at the shuttle door just to screw with their heads.
Mr. Whittington's article is written with very little depth. He doesn't even answer his own question. Nixon siad it was too expensive... really? that's it?
Sure the space shuttle program ended up being truly massively expensive, but the entire world surrounding the space program also changed in the mean time and far more valuable things occured in science than "going to the moon"
Going back to the moon from then until say now... wouldn't have had half the scientific value of say Hubble or zero G experiments of the 80's.
It's exciting... yes. And we should go back. There's a pratical side to a moon base that would be extremely valuable in the future. Far less fatigue for atronauts, a fantastic opportunity at power and heat generation at the boundary between the near and far sides of the moon. the ability to use local building materials for some things. A grand opportunity indeed. I'm just scratching the surface.
Is any of this in his article? No. It's just whining.
No plans for the US is what he laments. Next ones to go will be the Chinese and I wouldn't be surprised if it happens by the end of the decade.
People stopped going to the moon and skylab because they ran out of useful things to do there.
The reason for people in space is because it makes for better marketing.
All the science is done by unmanned probes. The Mars rovers have been a huge success. Sure they are less capable than a human, but they are much cheaper, they can stay there a long time, you don't have to bring them back and if something goes wrong on Mars at least nobody gets hurt hence you can tolerate a modest risk of failure.
Yoghurt
hopefully this will be the last story about the last shuttle and the last landing and the last parking and the last unloading and...
But I doubt it.
I just hope they get it on video for the Smithsonian. I cried last night at the last defecation.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I assume the Commander is usually the last one out? I guess then... Christopher Ferguson will be the last astronaut to disembark from a space shuttle.
Karma: Can only be portioned out by the Cosmos.
It's not in Low Earth Orbit?
The reason that our space program is dead in the water is that we are pathologically afraid of the risk of anyone dying. If there's an accident, the entire program shuts down. Not for a couple of weeks, but for nearly a decade while congress has meeting after meeting, and even more bureacracy is put into place to hamper all programs. The solution is a lean, mean, risk taking NASA that can get a new vehicle out there flying every year to test out the technologies and toughen up the astronauts for the conquering of space, which will be the most difficult thing that the human race has done to date.
The only thing worse than a Democrat is a Republican.
Come home safely. Enough said.
Orbiting on land would probably make a huge mess.
We just put two satellites in orbit around the moon this month. They're called Artemis.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/07/110713161826.htm
Actually the concept of the last night is rather flawed for an orbit too. Given the average orbital period is 90 minutes the title refers to the last 45 minutes in orbit.
I have a copy of Art Bell (of coast-to-coast AM fame) interviewing Ingo Swann, author of Penetration: The Question of Human and Extraterrestrial Telepathy.
Ingo was the creative genius behind the CIA's remote viewing program (which was shut down after 20 years because it "didn't work". Conveniently this was just after the soviet union fell apart). In the interview he talked about how he was asked to remote view the moon by an agency that didn't officially exist. "50% of what I know I put in my book, Penetration..."
The most memorable line of the whole interview:
Art: What's on the moon, Ingo? ... Stuff.
Ingo: [hesitation]
Art: Stuff?
Ingo: and THEM.
I found a copies of both the book and the mp3 on the torrents once.
Swann's books on "Secrets of Power" are very high level too... Policemen have "false power" because they lose whatever they've got when they lose the job. Presidents are in the same boat... Bankers are more powerful than Presidents because they control the money.
HTH. :)
Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.
www.teslabox.com
Space travel with chemical fuels just barely works. Massive efforts on weight reduction have made it sort of work. But with all that weight reduction, everything is too fragile to be reliable. This hasn't gotten much better in the last 45 years.
There is no chemical fuel with a higher energy density than liquid hydrogen/liquid oxygen, and the US has used that for almost half a century. Nuclear propulsion would work better. Nuclear rocket engines were built in the 1950s and 1960s. But they're so messy...
on the shuttle Atlantis".
I sense this being a future article that will appear on Slashdot in the next few days!
There was no reason to go back.
With the technologies available in the 1960s all the research done on the lunar samples and from orbit showed the Moon to be a dead, worthless rock in space.
The Mercury program was about increasing heavy lift to Low-Earth Orbit, the Gemini program was about working and maneuvering in Low-Earth Orbit while Apollo was about getting very large loads into Low-Earth Orbit and to the Moon.
Of all those programs, Gemini is the one we should have continued, an affordable and maneuverable system that could stay up for two weeks, more of a sports car in space while the Soyuz is a remote controlled car.
The current collapsed of NASA's manned space flight program isn't the fault of Bush, or Obama, it's the fault of NASA, since Challenger failed NASA has screwed up every attempt to make a successor to Shuttle. The day Scaled Composites flew to space, NASA should have sunk a billion dollars (one shuttle flight) into Scaled Composites to build an orbital space craft. But NASA didn't just like NASA never got a super-heavy lift rocket off the ground despite Congress telling them to in 1987 or NASA balling up two shuttle replacement programs in the 1990s.
I might add it seems to me that running a glitzy space program (on the back of a trillion dollars in debt) seems like entirely the wrong kind of venture for a world superpower mesmerized by the looming death-throes of the carbon economy.
Then again, nothing clears the mind like making a beeline for calamity when your your fate is welded to a fragile vessel surrounded by an infinity of not air.
so let's be like the USRR where they edited out a astronauts who died.
There are not 135 shuttles. two out of five that went into space have killed their crew.
That's a silly way to rate the safety of the vehicle.
First, if there's some non-zero chance of a disaster on a given flight, then over a large enough number of flights, the chance of disaster approaches 1.0.
Second, in the case of Challenger, it wasn't the orbiter that failed, but the SRB's. How many SRB's did they build?
Third, suppose they had built a sixth shuttle to replace Columbia. Would the shuttle be any safer, by virtue of a sixth one having been built? Would the shuttle have been less safe if they hadn't built Endeavour?
It really makes no sense to rate the safety of STS that way. The only sensible metric is, how many launcher were attempted, and how many failed? I'll grant that even by those standards the average looks bad - but compare that to other space programs:
Apollo Program: two major failures in 20 flights (23 if you count the unmanned ones), one of which killed the crew
Soyuz: 66 flights (so far), two failures costing the lives of the cosmonauts on board.
So both Soyuz and Apollo have worse averages than STS. 1 in 20 for Apollo (1 in 10 if you count Apollo 13), 1 in 33 for Soyuz, vs. 1 in 62.5 for STS.
Bow-ties are cool.
on the shuttle Atlantis".
Please don't put half your message in the subject line. Subject line for subject. Message body for message.
Bow-ties are cool.
Not really an answer to this article but I met a couple (anchor and cameraman) with China Central TV in Titusville covering the STS-135 launch. I asked what they think that many Americans say it will be the Chinese that will walk the surface of the moon next. She said they hope to be as good as the Americans.
mfwright@batnet.com
The reason we stopped going to the moon was that the contract on that soundstage was up, and it was needed for filming The Six-Million-Dollar Man.
May you have fair (solar) winds and following seas. You will be missed, you and your sister ships served very well and performed better than expected, even with the casualties. May you come home safely and get the rest you deserve.
As some one who grew up in central Florida right along side the shuttle program I must admit that this brings tears to my eyes. Not so much because its going away, but because its going away with no replacement. We've basically given up. It'd bother me far less if there was already another operational program to fill its place. Too bad we've lost our edge.
And yes, sometimes its okay to anthropomorphize objects for they are often backed by people who gave the objects those human qualities. So what I really mean is, thanks to all the NASA crew that made this program work, and thanks for all the benefits you've given us from it. My job and in fact the company I work for only exists because of NASAs work.
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