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Space Shuttles Discovery and Atlantis Meet One Last Time
longacre writes "One dull morning last week, two teams of NASA technicians simultaneously gathered at two iconic buildings — the 525-foot Vehicle Assembly Building and the shorter, but equally important Orbital Processing Facility 1 at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida, tasked with moving a space shuttle orbiter from one building to the other. The 'shuttle shuffle' would have Space Shuttle Discovery (the oldest and most flown orbiter surviving in the three-ship fleet) in OPF-1 swapping places with her sister ship, Atlantis, the second oldest and second most flown orbiter. Fleet leader Discovery would emerge from OPF-1 as a preserved spacecraft, gutted and mummified for museum display."
The two of them, together finally !!
TFS refers to the shuttles almost like they were living creatures, lovers who are being separated by cruel fate. Puh-leez. Why is this garbage here?
So... Which one will be the Ark?
Goodbye, and thank you for the fish.
Did they get along? Were they friendly?
How did this "meeting" go?
Look -- they are pieces of equipment they are not people or even animals for that matter. This is taking anthropomorphism way too far. It's one thing to refer to them as "she" and even to grow fond of them and revere them with the same affection you'd give a pet -- but to somehow imply they have consciousness is just silly.
I hate it when museums do this kind of thing to aircraft (or in this case spacecraft). Nothing is more uninteresting than a hollow shell body. Once the problematic liquids are drained there is no reason they can't leave the engines in place. The parts that make things like this interesting are all the mechanical components and displays that make up the actual vehicle. Every time I see this done to an aircraft, I can't help but think of how much of an utterly boring display it makes. They might as well erect a cardboard cutout equivalent, it's nauseating.
When they were still being flown, did NASA ever coordinate a rendezvous between two or more shuttles? Or did they only keep one in the air at any given time? I don't seem to remember seeing any pictures of shuttles docked with one another.
Does Rule # 34 apply here?
...the shuttles *really* hate that.
I'm watching the "From Earth to the Moon" series right now, and t made me pretty sad to see the one shuttle with its guts all removed, and the other moving in to share the same fate. I wonder if the U.S. will ever have a manned space program again. If NASA is like a lot of other government agencies, there is a large percentage of the workforce that is getting ready to retire and without a program to enable hiring younger people, I imagine that manned U.S. space flight will be done.
Gentlemen! You can't fight in here, this is the war room!
If/when civilization collapses, we're going to need examples of past technology. Everything from the butter churn on up. What if you were trying to recreate a movie projector and found that only the casing was preserved, with no internal workings? I understand the health issue for the public, but they should mothball one of those intact.
One function of museums is to be a repository of knowledge, art, and technology, for future generations. It's not the only function, but I would argue that it's the most important function. It's not just a display that you look at for entertainment.
Cory Doctorow has a book, Makers, from 2009 (available for DRM free download http://craphound.com/makers/download/ ) that talks about distributed open source museum spaces. Three years later the Smithsonian announces they're going to offer a part of the collection for worldwide printing.>
That's great. It will serve the surface educational mission of museums. Multimedia exhibition. But if you're at a post sea-rise far inland Argentinian coast trying to figure out how to make a steam engine, how are you going to make use of a rotting polymer copy?
Nothing. They're MACHINES people! They're JUST machines....
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
In more ways than one.
Give it time, someone will argue it.
You may want to look up some of the shuttle history. Carrying out experiments in space was not the original idea. That was what the space station was for.
The original concept was a smaller vehicle, intended to move people and small cargo back and forth between a permanent manned space station. It was truly intended as a *shuttle*. It was intended for frequent launches; hence the interest in a reusable vehicle. Heavier payloads were intended for conventional rocket designs (some kind of Saturn evolution).
But then funding was cut. Getting a new heavy lift booster, a space station, *and* a shuttle was not going to happen.
At the same time, the Air Force got involved. The AF needs the ability to launch spy satellites in to polar orbits. By working together, the thought was that STS could be kept alive. But polar orbits are harder to reach, and spy satellites are big and heavy. That meant a much larger vehicle. So the shuttle design evolved into what it is today.
But then the Air Force realized that the compromise design was lousy, and decided to stick with conventional rockets. SLC-6 was never used.
As a result, NASA was stuck with something of a white elephant. The shuttle was trying to be too many things at once. It wasn't the small, cheap "bus" that was originally conceived, but it also wasn't a cost-effective heavy launcher.
It's a shame; some really brilliant technology and engineering went into the program. But when the design goals are conflicting and ever-changing, no amount of engineering skill can compensate.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
It's only a Google search away:
http://rule34-data-001.paheal.net/_images/e87437d84ebd02ab3c9e8a8e5ef817f9/289857%20-%20Blackrose%20Boeing_747%20NASA%20Space_Shuttle%20airplane%20inanimate.jpg
http://rule34-data-000.paheal.net/_images/4fb0a62354c27b6e69d1a2bdf5a15e43/191603%20-%20NASA%20Space_Shuttle%20Space_Transportation_System%20featured_image.jpg
Urgh. I knew what was going to happen and I clicked on those anyway :/