OT?: Goodbye to an era

On a sunny day (Wed, 26 May 2010 10:45:26 -0700 (PDT)) it happened Didi wrote in :

Away with it, 32 flights in 25 years is not very good for a 'space plane'. And circling around the earth does not get humanity anywhere.

Give me a break, so now that they cannot even build a replacement to that the end is is good news? All food must be eaten and excreted, that's what humanity should be all about, you mean? (it is that anyway at the moment)

Dimiter

Two crews dead, almost $200 billion spent, zero useful results. That's what's sad.

John

That, too. The crews, I mean. Not so sure about the $200 billion.

Dimiter

Yeah, but it gets great gas mileage going nowhere--4.6mpg, if you do the math. That's 27mpg per passenger.

Me? I want me some 'o them cee-ramic tiles. And a wheel, for a planter. I bid $0.50.

-- Cheers, James Arthur

The International Space Station was an excellent value.

Overall the knowledge gathered must have been great value, I think.

It launched a lot of useful kit. The Shuttle had too many modes of single point failure notably the brittle ceramic tiles on the heat shield. They were very impressive at close range when red hot though.

So far it has only produced "science" that would not pass muster at the average high school project science fair. It might just possibly have kept a few Russian rocket scientists from helping N Korea but that is about it. Orbiting Earth in an oversized tin can is pointless. The original SkyLab and MIR did just about everything that could be done.

ISS is the ultimate expensive boondoggle.

The Shuttle was at least useful during its lifetime for deploying satellites and maintaining the Hubble Space Telescope. The ISS is only of interest for amateur astronomers to image from the ground.

Regards, Martin Brown

"zero useful results"

Hubble is pretty nice. I'm still blown away by the deep space shot where all you see are galaxies. Worth a few bucks of my money. X 300 million people and we are only 199 billion short.

George H.

Why? It's done no useful science, helped us not at all get to Mars or the stars, and will probably kill more crew one of these years. What it's proved is how hard it is to send people into space, and how useless they are up there, mostly struggling to survive.

Imagine all the telescopes and planetary probes and post-docs you could have funded with the hundreds of billions that LEO coffin has cost.

All the "inspire the kids" propaganda was negated the instant that Christa McAuliffe died on live schoolroom TV.

John

Apart from returning the heavy 10 ton LDEF (Long duration exposure facility) back from LEO to Earth, all the other operations could have been done at a lower cost with concurrent or older spacecraft designs.

Hopefully the information gathered from the LDEF experiment has helped in building satellite electronics that last longer in the hostile space environment.

Hubble didn't need space shuttles. We could have launched several new telescopes for the cost of each shuttle repair mission. Or hundreds of ground-based adaptive-optics/long baseline radio telescopes with better resolution than Hubble.

Think of how much serious science we could have done with $200 billion or so. NASA can't even afford to store and archive data from existing space probes; the Shuttle and Space Station soak it all up. The shuttle was always about money and politics, not science.

John

It kept a lot of hungry, and VERY competent, Russian scientists from proliferating missile technology to developing countries. Now that they are well known, presumably it would be easier to murder them if desired.

A manned mission to Mars will probably have to use similar techniques to assemble a craft in orbit.

The tiles were another dumb, expensive, deadly idea. They could have used bolt-on, single-use ablative heat shields, established technology that would have been safer and cheaper. The decision was political, based on the concept of frequent airliner-looking flights.

The Aries design (thankfully dead) returned to ablatives.

John

We could have sent them the same amount of money and got some science for it. And the science programs would be ongoing, after the ISS has burned up on re-entry... having accomplished nothing for a dozen lives and a few hundred billion dollars.

It may never happen, at least with current technology. The distance and gravity well dwarf the moon landings. And again, why?

John

Did we need a shuttle and ISS to launch and recover electronic experiments?

John

ne'.

Okay, reduce my bid 10% to $0.45 (but I still want one). C'mon Mr. Obama, sell me a tile. It'll decrease the deficit, I promise it will...

Maybe not but we certainly needed to find out what sex in space was like. Very important for long distance flights. Seriously, either you're just being yourself playing the devil's advocate or you're grossly uninformed.

Really? How do the kids create long term zero gravity?