I live within viewing distance. And the only time I've ever nervous-- well, if the sea breeze is blowing in the right direction and it blows up too close to the pad...I'm more terrified of the fallout from the giant cloud of hydrochloric acid.

Of course, if it blows up too close to the pad... well, everyone in a 20 mile radius is pretty f****** too.

I don't feel sorry for space industry casualties. Most astronauts are military personnel-- anyone who is in the military has a tacit agreement that they are expendable. Every time anyone mentioned a "tragedy," I point out that the real tragedy is losing one of the world's most expensive objects.



Overall, the space industry has really lost its luster. The Cape is god awful looking-- the architecture is frankly garish. They have an extremely bad PR machine. The "visitor" complex looks like a dime museum you'd find off an Arizona desert off ramp. And the environmental record? hahaha.

They've been trying to save the shuttle program for a decade, haven't put up any impressive satellites and haven't formulated any impressive pull out for when the space industry closes next year. I mean... they did one hell of a terrible job planning the area in the first place.

For something "space age," the area around here definitely has never left 1962.

i have a soft spot for astronouts and pilots. i am a little nervous about this mission about fixing space telescope which i enjoy the images it sends.
i feel very sad when an accident happens. my father was a fighter pilot... there are few stories there!

I see your point but after an unscheduled visit to Huntsville space center I dont see space vehicles as these ultra high tech devices anymore and dont expect to - Looking at the rockets and shuttle boosters one realizes this is a giant tank of fuel that gets lit on fire. A giant bottle rocket. Its just pure horsepower. No wonder why the space people have a little cowboy attitude to them - your sitting on a giant bomb. Theres sort of a nascar / tractor pull / monster truck quality to space travel in my opinion.

What do you mean we dont have cool stuff in space anymore? The Mars Rovers were pretty cool, and the Hubble is still advancing the science of astronomy and our understanding of the universe. Plus all those cell phones and comunications rely on some support from above.

I'd love to fly a high performance jet fighter just once.

What do you mean we dont have cool stuff in space anymore? The Mars Rovers were pretty cool, and the Hubble is still advancing the science of astronomy and our understanding of the universe. Plus all those cell phones and comunications rely on some support from above.

The Mars Rover was definitely cool. You know how much it costed? Around 300 million. Average shuttle flight cost? Between 1.5 to 1.8 billion dollars.

You add another 200 million a flight for the Delta rockets. We could do 3 Mars missions for every shuttle launch.

The Hubble? It is a worthless hunk-of-junk from an economics point of view. For every repair mission they do on the Hubble... they could send up four brand new Hubble telescopes.

The International Space Station? Pretty cool. But it's more or less going to fall apart from disrepair. I think the space industry is going to take far too long to transition. In the mean time, we'll have one of the largest, most expensive hunks of "outdated" technology circling the Earth til we find a cheaper way to get to space.

As for the other satellites, the US doesn't really pander to commercial space interest. France, China and Russia send almost all of those up now. France and China can put a satellite in space for like a third of what we can. This is one of the ways we get so many spy satellites in space. The UN slapped back by banning the militarization of space and you instantly saw corporate support plummet.

There's been a lot of really good satellite ideas that have been scrapped in the last ten years. It's mostly because everyone wants to keep up the romance of manned space missions rather than finding something useful to do in space. They even scrapped the recent satellite mission to put a satellite up in space that could have factually measured whether or not global warming exists.

It's more or less the US trying to wave its penis at the traffic that is the rest of the world to say "We're spending the entire gross domestic product of Eastern Central Africa to prove to people that we're better. GOD BLESS 'MERIKUH!"

In the category "Seems Odd to Me":

The lunar landing took the astronauts 238,857 miles from earth. Almost 40 years later, max orbit for the manned shuttles is about 385 miles.

I always knew we faked that moon landing...

;-)

yeah it is a pity kurt that we stopped going to the moon. those saturn class rockets were something. space shuttle was only designed for low orbit. if aliens ever visited us we would have to meet them at the doorstep because we ain't got nothing to take us furhter.

i grew up on robert heinlein and sure do wish some of his future would come true. somehow we all failed to maintain that vision. america used to be the world science leader, now all the smart people are drawn to finance world instead. i blame it on the republicans.

The space shuttle was designed to be a space construction vehicel - it parralelled the age of mass satalite deployment and the building of the space station. It did what it was designed to do. The next phase is back to the moon for building a moon base and mine helium 3.

-- how so? Only the shuttle has the capacity to carry satellites the size of Hubble.

Hey, evilp, sure yeah got that part -- I wasn't gonn try to send ya to the moon in a shuttle...

Jump's agreeing, we just ain't goin nowhere these days.

We've got access to all the money in the world, yet 385 miles max orbit is it for the shuttles -- pphhht -- Larry Walters reached 3 miles in a lawn chair using balloons and a pellet gun.

What else ya got, NASA?

I guess Im stating NASA isnt here for our entertainment - they just do what needs to be done at this stage

Well that's no fun.

But, more seriously, and beyond entertainment, this is what we're missing per Jump's quote: "...somehow we all failed to maintain that vision. america used to be the world science leader...".

I'd argue that that is "what needs to be done".

But that is whats being done

Stone,

The Delta IV Heavy is big enough to carry a Hubble sized satellite. In fact, you could fit an average sized satellite and the hubble safely in the payload.

And cost per flight, $170 million dollars.

But it doesnt have the mechanical arm needed to place it inot orbit - plus didnt the hubble have wing solar panels that needed to be unferelled in a special way? Its not as easy as pull the trigger and shoot the load

"But that is whats being done"

Well, perhaps our continuous low orbit for the last 40 years is prep for something ultra-spectacular, EP?

Cuz we ain't left the porch in a while.

I'm sure that since every single piece of NASA hardware is custom made... they could make a custom solution to find a way to make it work. Every single Delta rocket is also custom made. I'm not saying there's not issues without my proposal... just saying that it is much cheaper to litter the heavens with new satellites than save old ones.

Hell, there's more technology in an iPhone now than there is in the entire Hubble telescope.

If anything, the Hubble is complicated by the fact that it is three telescopes in one (infrared, UV and visible light.)

thing is there's really no compelling reason for people to be doing things in space right now...after the first couple of moon landings to establish supremacy during the cold war, there hasn't been anything to do up there except make up "research projects" to carry out...

from an engineering point of view, the shuttle makes no sense at all...to strap a few people on top of a machine with so many parts that could go and have gone wrong...talk about maximizing risk...the current plan to separate human space vehicles from payload carrying vehicles seems pretty logical...

so until china seriously makes an effort to go colonize the moon or something major like that, american manned space missions have no mandate and will never attract the level of funding they had in the old apollo days...until then, the manned space industry is just trying find a reason to support the jobs that are left...

also, the thought that the shuttles are basically 35 year old (when they were designed) technology makes me wonder what a truly modern spacecraft could be, if given an apollo sized budget in today's dollars...it's hard to believe it's been that long since i woke up early in the morning to watch the first shuttle launch on TV...

I think a very big part of the near term future for space is tourism. Its time. Thats how you will finance it going forward.

yep, low earth-orbit tourism will ramp up but i'm thinking more about the big scale stuff that NASA was set up for...regularly scheduled moon trips for the average joe i think are still two generations away at least, if not longer...

if a small, lean company like scaled composites can innovate on a relatively miniscule budget, it just makes it that much worse to see NASA unable to jump to the next generation of technology...being so huge means that you have to hang on to dinosaur technology to pay off your investment even if it makes no sense anymore...

pretty much the same argument for the Big 3 car makers...they kept milking the same crap cars rather than develop new technology and designs until it was too late...instead of better engineering, you got gimmicky marketing pitching "dyna-ride" suspensions, and "corinthian leather"...

wanted to bite on your hartmarx posting, but it would open up a whole new branch of discussion on govt vs private industry...bottom line, i think it's impossible to be ideologically pure and everything needs to be assessed in its context, but it continues to blow me away how americans have decimated their domestic industrial complex by 1) buying imported goods en masse (consumers), 2) running companies into the ground by looking at the short term (both management and the unions that hold them hostage), but especially 3) supporting governments (both rep and dem) that have basically opened the doors to allow anyone access to the american market with little reciprocity...

"basically opened the doors to allow anyone access to the american market with little reciprocity"

I love you. We've been the target of a trade war from every nation on Earth for 50 years - we can import anything they want to sell us, yet our exports are taxed to no ends or outright banned. I want an American president with balls to say enough. Free market capitalism only works when the playing field is level.

Spiff dont forget, especially in regards to China, when we build a plant over there we have to officially transfer technology patents to them. Its outragous.

I don't think you can really classify the shuttle as a giant bottle rocket. Sure it's pure thrust. And not agile like the F-22. But, it goes through extreme temperature swings of like....400 degrees F. It can sustain 7+ astronauts in zero gravity, a vacuum for weeks while allowing space walks and experimentation. It re-enters the atmosphere and doesn't burn up. Sure, low orbit. What a drag. Shit. As Louis C.K. would say "Every time you are in an airplane you should just be blown away. You're flying through the sky while sitting in a chair!" The space shuttle is AMAZING. This isn't Star Trek. The space shuttle isn't made by Apple and tossed in the trash every time they come up with a new color or a new cat to use for the OS. The space shuttle isn't the 2010 model of a car and if the fog lights fail people are pissed. I don't care if NASA doesn't find something on the surface of Mars that is directly applicable to my life. Scientific discovery and curiosity is cool! Maybe that's why I spent my undergrad career looking in a microscope and why I got so annoyed when architects would use pretty pictures from "Science" and pretended to be a scientist because their building looks like a seashell or the shape was made by the Fibonacci sequence.

Oh and don't forget the insanely high amounts of radiation that the shuttle has to endure.

Hasselhoff I agree - the shuttle bashing is unwarranted. Id argue the low orbit shuttle missions are infinitely more complex than the Apollo moon landings. With Apollo its shoot, coast, land, shoot back - basic physics. The shuttle actually performs operations. But the future is in mining Helium 3 on the moon. Who knows where we go from there.

The amount of fuel needed for large-scale applications can also be put in terms of total consumption: According to the US Energy Information Administration, "Electricity consumption by 107 million U.S. households in 2001 totaled 1,140 billion kWh" (1.14x1015 Wh). Again assuming 100% conversion efficiency, 6.7 tons of helium-3 would be required just for that segment of one country's energy demand, 15 to 20 tonnes given a more realistic end-to-end conversion efficiency


15-20 tons. What kind of craft could bring that back to earth? Thats only 40,000 pounds. Sounds like a lot but...

evil,

don't want to completely hijack this thread, so i'll respond under a separate posting...