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Suggesting Innovative Uses For Retired Space Shuttles
coondoggie writes "It was a sad event when the iconic NASA Space Shuttle program ended last week with the landing of Atlantis. After the last mission the flying shuttles will all be assigned to museums where millions will admire them as static displays. But wouldn't it be cool if they were put to use in places where you might not expect?" (Best viewed with the slide-show consolidating software of your choice.)
useless, uninformative and not even funny. So perfect for Slashdot?
How did bullshit like that even make it onto the front page???
That was the most stupid slideshow ever. Any random "Top Ten" in http://cracked.com/ is better than this drivel. Lame!
Loban Amaan Rahman ==> Anagram of ==> Aha! An Abnormal Man!
none of them are witty or clever.
The ideas are lame, and the photoshops are particularly bad.
Too bad, it could've been funny if some thought was put into it.
Jesus Christ, that's not even Fark worthy.
We are eternal, all this pain is an illusion.
Pretty much none of these are actually "cool", except perhaps for the idea about traveling around air show circuits together with the 747. Fake sets of the Space Shuttle would work better for pretty much all of them, although I do have to say using them to line the road would be interesting. Better would be to as one as advertising displays for an Air and Space museum (you know, how they put a fake fighter on a pole. An actual space shuttle would be kinda cool.)
I know it would be impractical/too expensive, but what would be really cool would be launching them into space empty, and putting them into permanent orbit. That would be cool. Perhaps they could even serve as impromptu space stations, but just having them orbiting the Earth forever would be a very fitting retirement. I know, we don't need even more garbage in space, orbits decay, etc. Otherwise, these thing belong in museums, not some kind of advertising for commercial ventures. I mean, come on, a giant Starbucks? Starbucks contributed nothing to space exploration. It would be a horrible abuse of the iconic image for commercial profit to use a shuttle that way.
Now, as part of corporate headquarters for SpaceX... that'd be kinda fitting.
"None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license." --John Milton
They have wheels, rocket engines, and drag parachutes. I say we take Atlantis and Endeavor out to Utah and have the world's most bitchin' drag race.
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In fact, I think this takes the cake. Can anyone remember a lamer story ever appearing on this site before? Granted, the competition is stiff, but this has got to be the numero uno.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve your problem, you're not using enough of it. --AC
The Russians used their copy to try and hold up the roof of a collapsing warehouse... that didn't work out so well.
Honestly the most useful thing they could do would be a heck of a lot of destructive testing. You could argue they've already been doing that for the past 30 years, at least twice to failure (along with lots of non-mission impacting single engine failures, leaks, etc). I'm talking a little more extreme, for example, chop the wings up and analyze the heck out of them for the effect of orbital radiation on metal fatigue development patterns, etc. The skin runs at a ridiculously high pressurization, like 15 PSI, everything else in aerospace runs 8 psi max, so chop up the crew cabin and analyze that for pressurization related metal fatigue.
You know how civil / mech engineers are supposedly given iron rings made from "X collapsed bridge" at graduation to remind them not to build stupid things, maybe aerospace engineers (or more appropriately, MBAs) should be given o-ring and ceramic tile necklaces?
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger