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Russian Progress Cargo Ship Docks With Space Station
An anonymous reader writes: An unmanned Russian cargo ship has successfully docked with the International Space Station. The successful launch, rendezvous and docking came after two resupply failures. A Progress launched in April spun out of control and a week ago, a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket disintegrated, destroying a supply ship loaded with supplies and equipment. "Crew reports, 'feels like Christmas in July,'" the International Space Station tweeted.
That was largely the Air Force's doing, not NASA, which wanted a smaller ship, but the Air Force had to have something to carry their bus sized spy satellites into polar orbit or close to it. The thing is despite all that dumbness, we learned a lot about how to and how not to deal with reusable spacecraft from the shuttle program and we've done nothing useful with that knowledge. There should have been a second round of them in development a decade or more ago to replace what we had, and Congress did what they're good at--getting us into another mess by trying to look all budget conscious and stuff while wasting money left, right, and center. So NASA had a choice--fly what they had or develop something else, but they didn't have the money to do both because shortsighted idiots can't see why that's a problem. It doesn't help that your average low information idiot voter out there thinks NASA consumes 15 to 25 cents of every federal dollar when in actuality it's less than half a cent.
Now we're busy re-inventing Apollo and taking a long time about it because we let THAT knowledge decay, so the next time somebody decides we need a space shuttle we'll be almost starting that from scratch too.
Yet, as previously stated, if somebody wants to start a war tomorrow that's no problem at all...