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NASA Shuttle Discovery Set To Buzz Washington, DC
coondoggie writes "Barring bad weather, NASA said the space shuttle Discovery mounted atop the space agency's 747 Shuttle Carrier Aircraft will make a series of low passes — 1,500 ft. — around parts of Washington DC on April 17 between 10-11 am eastern daylight time." Discovery will be on its way to the Smithsonian from Florida; this is a rare chance in the post-shuttle era for people to still see a shuttle in flight; I'm planning a marathon drive to reach the parking lot at the Steven F. Udvar-Hazy Center for what NASA's calling Shuttle Fly-In Day, in hopes of catching a glimpse.
From the headline, I thought the shuttle would be gliding over DC on its own, not strapped to the carrier. Still pretty cool.
I had the chance to see the Enterprise atop the 747 upon its successful drop tests back in the 80's. Truly a magnificent sight.
However, this was not -- and yours will not be -- a chance to still see a shuttle in flight. You'll witness a 747 in flight carrying the Space Shuttle. It will be gutted and turned into a shell of its former self leaving the US to outsource manned spaceflight to the Russians for years to come.
To Copy from One is Plagiarism; To Copy from Many is Research.
The technology of the Space Shuttle is ancient today, to say the least. It goes back all the way to the 1970ies, a time incomparable to the state of America today. Only those who can't imagine a better future, glorify the past.
So we have nothing to learn from the past? It's those very past glories that give incentive to keep improving so we can have that better future.
And I think it's pretty easy to compare the 70's to today. Let me give an example: 1970's had Led Zeppelin, 2010's has Justin Bieber. See, comparison is easy!
Gotta remember to bring the camera in next Tuesday, we're right under the landing path for Dulles..
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I saw it back in 1987 over Montreal. Not only was it really neat to see the shuttle "in person", it was magnificent to see a 747 flying so low over my town.
If you're there, don't miss it!
Space Shuttle ended up being everything to everybody, and when that happens you usually get mediocre performance. Many of its missions made no financial sense. For the cost of the Hubble repair missions they could have launched 2 or 3 more up there.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Dear itchy trigger finger types in the nations capital.
Don't shoot! She's a homeless vet that has seen her glory days fall behind her. Just because she has an explosive / rocket filled history doesn't mean she's about to go go off again. they are taking her to a group home where they take care of her kund. She wont hurt anybody in her wheelchair, she's just touring the sites like any other tourist.
It really hit home how sad this was when I was watching Stargate SG-1 and they had to send up a space shuttle to get Jack O'Neil and company out of a stranded alien space craft in orbit. I then realized in current times, the use of a space shuttle would be part of the science fiction.
I wonder what will happen to the final carrier plane. The other one was retired for parts and whatnot, per wikipedia. It probably had not very many cycles nor hours while used by NASA, although they didn't exactly buy it new either.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Yeah, because planes that are flying at 30k feet never crash either...
"Action without philosophy is a lethal weapon; philosophy without action is worthless."
F16 shoots down space shuttle approaching White House!
At 30,000 feet you have a bit more time to recover and glide than you do at 1500.
Every time I start to have faith in humanity, I ruin it by driving to work between 7 and 8 am.
For the financial and mass budget penalties of designing for on-orbit repair, they could have afforded to do all the optical tests on the mirror so as to not launch a bum mirror, and packed the thing with 50 backup gyros.
Either way, launch 3 scope, or launch one really good scope, it would have been a better mission without the shuttle.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
And the 1980s had disco.
See what I did there?
I saw the shuttle on it's 747 carrier way back in the 80's near London Heathrow airport. It was something I'll not forget and a wonderful sight to the science-mad little boy.
Only it was back 30-some-odd years ago. My family and I were off to see my parent's old school friends living in Denver, CO area in '77 or '78 and we saw the Enterprise on the back of a jumbo sitting on the tarmac at Stapleton. Grandest sight ever at the time.
April 17th is the day everyone's federal taxes are due. It's almost as if they're celebrating tax day by saying, "come everyone and see what your taxes are paying for! We're going to fly a space shuttle we can't afford to fly anymore around the capital with fuel bought by your tax dollars!" Or perhaps the government didn't have enough money to fly it in until everyone paid their taxes. I'm not saying it's not a cool spectacle... it's just an interesting day for NASA to choose.
It's all fun and games until the thing crashes into The White House, Congress or both. Although that may decrease the corruption there. Notice I didn't say eliminate. We have groomed plenty of corrupt replacements at the state level.
At 30,000 feet you have a bit more time to recover and glide than you do at 1500.
Or alternatively, at 30,000 feet you have a lot more time to build up vertical momentum before you hit the ground.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
They tested the mirror - the problem was that they inserted some pin backwards, and the tests were done wrong. Something was in the wrong position for the tests.
Sure, you could have loaded 50 backup gyros - assuming you knew that the gyro was going to be the part that would fail. Could you launch with 50 backups of every part that could possibly fail?
Hindsight is generally more accurate than foresight, or at least better in assigning blame. Plus accurate foresight is seldom credited.
The alternatives are:
1 - Design for on-orbit repair.
2 - Design with the correct backups and on-orbit sparing.
3 - Design it cheap, to just be replaced.
Pick one, and generally everyone who picked one of the other two will criticize your choice.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
There's gotta be a line in Vegas on that.
Request permission for flyby...
Who did what now?
The 1970's had it share of bad teen idols as well. Shaun Cassidy and David Cassidy come to mind.
What was then: http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/imagegallery/image_feature_1204.html
And, "A Spaceship Landed on Earth" by Rockwell Intl, Aug 1978 16mm film: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hgk4GskErjQ
There's still big arguments on where the orbiters will be placed. Texas still feels they deserve one based in Houston (lotsa diatribes on nasawatch). Geez, now that the Shuttle has stopped flying is when the politicos take interest in this program. Would have been nice if they took interest when it was still flying.
mfwright@batnet.com
...someone is going to freakout about a low-flying plane and report that its some sort of terrorist attack.
NEVER FORGET 01-31-2007
We know how well this went last time somebody wanted a photo shoot.
http://cityroom.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/04/27/air-force-one-backup-rattles-new-york-nerve/
Create a nation of terrorized went-panty self-entitled anti-intellectuals and you get what you get.
The gyros have limited lifetime, and their failure is not some random out-of-the-blue occurrence. They will all eventually fail, well before the entire satellite will be dead.
Even with design for on-orbit repair, they could have launched 2 or 3 Hubbles for the price of one repair mission. If it was to be a throwaway design, it'd probably be more Hubbles per Shuttle launch, but so what.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Out of curiosity, any idea how many other parts on the HST have a known limited lifetime? Obviously thrusters would be one, assuming they have thrusters instead of using gyros for attitude control and torquers to despin the gyros. Another would be the gradual radiation damage to the solar panels. Any others? How does solar panel life compare to gyro life?
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
No thrusters there. Gyros are the biggest concern it seems, they seem to last well under 10 years it seems. The panels were replaced twice, but those replacements were not due to radiation damage but due to poor mechanical performance and due to undersizing of original panels' electrical output. The first replacement panels were stiffer and would vibrate less when going from sunlight to shade and back. The second replacement panels, of Iridum vintage, were smaller and provided more power, reducing drag and vibration, and providing enough power to run any combination of instruments needed at once.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
I'm sure that anyone who happened to see the F/A-18 come down & crash in Florida
won't be impressed to see a Shuttle (apparently) flying low, as if to do the same...
(Fortunately, most won't have seen the F/A-18 fly-in & crash...)
Where will they mount the trophy of their kill?
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