OT?: Goodbye to an era

You're a goddamned idiot.

On a sunny day (Wed, 26 May 2010 11:25:46 -0700 (PDT)) it happened Didi wrote in :

I dunno what you mean. ISS is a joke. The original idea was that that shuttle would fly many more times. It is a huge money sink, and a total catastrophy. At least Bush'mans rocket (Ares?) was going places. Now they want to scrap that too. NASA is all about remote toys these days, after Von Braun died the whole US pace program is the laughing stock of the world.

That is why they now have to rent a taxi from the Russians. There will be Chinese restarants on Mars befre US lands there.

On a sunny day (Wed, 26 May 2010 21:19:10 -0700) it happened UltimatePatriot wrote in :

Oh that is easy: zero.

On a sunny day (Thu, 27 May 2010 09:26:32 +0100) it happened Martin Brown wrote in :

Ah! WRONG, for a fraction of the shuttle's cost you could have had 10 Hubbles.

On a sunny day (Wed, 26 May 2010 15:09:41 -0400) it happened Spehro Pefhany wrote in :

That spaced out station should be de-orbited and burned, like that Russian thingy was. Either that, or it could be made into a in-between stop for travels to other planets. Or hang a big signg behind it 'Cola' or whatever, LEDs all over it in color, so, ADVERTISING.

On a sunny day (Wed, 26 May 2010 11:56:53 -0700 (PDT)) it happened snipped-for-privacy@yahoo.com wrote in :

It is a shame that your felonious mother did not flush you out, s*****ad.

The first Shuttle disaster delayed the Hubble launch and during the intervening period CCD detectors improved enormously. But if the mirror had been ground correctly in the first place then HST would still have trounced ground based scopes on most targets. It required a servicing mission and COSTAR to sort things out - then it was fine.

VLBI is extremely restricted in what it can observe requiring both very high signal to noise and simultaneous big dish observations.

Optical interferometry is still in its infancy with COAST and CHARA. A very nice review of what is possible with state of the art radio and optical interferometry from 2003 is online at the IOP.

I think you have the ISS and Shuttle confused. They thought they could make the Shuttle more reusable than the Saturn V launch platform. They were right, but the price of having the ceramic tiles was too high.

The first Shuttle disaster was a management failure. The techs were worried that the O-rings would not seal at that temperature but were over ruled by the suits who wanted to put on a show for some VIPs.

AIAA has a pretty good review on the shuttle disasters with slightly more technical details than usually make it into the press.

Regards, Martin Brown

There were shuttle missions where microgravity manufacturing took place. The product was delivered after the mission returned.

Do you even read NASA Tech Briefs?

Build the entire vehicle in orbit at the Space Assembly Platform. Then, only one booster shot is needed to go there, and only one is needed for deceleration once there. Send the return craft afterward.

You spend a lot getting the elements up there, but devote weight to the craft as built in space instead of worrying about escape velocity from a ground based launch.

Said the person not even from here?

Do you even know how many jobs some of the shuttle experiments paved the way for?

And put them up with what?

You're an idiot.

I would quite like a launch system to go with it. The Shuttle wasn't the huge success that everyone had hoped for but it did basically work provided that engineers were allowed to do their jobs.

The ISS by comparison has done almost nothing even remotely useful.

Regards, Martin Brown

When did you see them red hot at close range? Did you take a stroll outside during reentry to look? :)

For all of the Shuttle's redundancy, such as the 4 way computer voting system with a 5th backup loaded only with the ascent and descent program, it did have quite a few "must work" single-point failure modes. I'm not sure that the tiles are one of them, though - the Shuttle has lost a few tiles on many flights and it has never caused a catastrophic LOV.

Besides the obvious issue of the SRBs, some more subtle single point failure areas are, for example, the payload bay door locking mechanism. If you can't get the doors closed in orbit, you're hosed. Similarly, a failure of any of the payload restraints in the bay could cause the cargo to come loose in the bay - which would be really bad if it happened on ascent.

e:

Oh, I mostly agree with you. But not "zero useful results". If Hubble had been launched from a rocket with no repair possible then the mirror mishap would have made it DOA. The Space Station seems like a complete waste. It would be nice if we could scrap NASA and start over again.

George H.

t's

Do cool videos count?

John Larkin schrieb:

Hello,

if you want to have single-use ablative heat shields on a multiple-use spacecraft, the problem is where to put the nuts and bolts. The nuts and bolds should be on the inner side of the heat shield, but there would be a lot of places at a space shuttle where these nuts and bolts are not acessible from the inside. The single-use heat shield must consist of several parts for mounting and dismounting and you need seals at the joints between these parts which must sustain to hot compressed gases at supersonic speed. Using a single-use ablative heat shield on a single-use spacecraft was much easier, no dismounting was necessary. Joints were only necessary at the hatches.

Bye

Spehro Pefhany schrieb:

Hello,

There were other space stations before which were build without using the Space Shuttle.

Bye

Sparky, go chase your tail.