OT?: Goodbye to an era

Custom machining hundreds of unique and fragile tiles, and gluing them on, is better? A number of dead astronauts might disagree.

John

Sure, those were make-work demonstration experiments. But was any of that useful?

It took a might effort to get them to stop sending me that luducrous rag, but I finally won.

For the record, the space program did NOT invent teflon, silicon transistors, or TANG.

John

All the shuttle disasters were management failures: the decision to send human crews into space.

John

But we could have launched a fleet of space telescopes for the cost of a few shuttle missions. The repair missions cost more than the telescope.

Read "The Hubble Wars" by Chaisson. It's amazing. A decent amateur mirror grinder could have spotted the error in the mirror. It was incredible that they actually launched it without ever testing it.

John

Both unnecessary and grossly dangerous and overpriced.

Cheaper to launch a variety of newer, better performing telescopes than to keep fixing one old one.

John

Cheap expendable rockets, like we use for comm satellites. Bonus is no crew to kill.

The new telescopes, bigger and better than Hubble, will be launched with expendables.

John

On a sunny day (Thu, 27 May 2010 08:38:11 -0700) it happened John Larkin wrote in :

Well, that goes a bit far. Eventually we will have to find a way to colonise other planets, as this one may get inhabitable. And those guys are *eager* to go and blow themselves to kingdom come.

Perhaps being astro-nut is safer then working on a BP oil drilling platform, and 4 sure safer then coal mining,

Wait! Wait! I know!

Zero.

John

may get inhabitable.

Do the numbers. Astronauting is thousands of times more dangerous.

John

The Cold War killed real manned spaceflight. The way it should have been done is reusable spaceplane, followed by a space station, then a moon landing and onwards. However, the last 40 years has been a total waste.

On a sunny day (Thu, 27 May 2010 09:37:59 -0700) it happened John Larkin wrote in :

may get inhabitable.

Na :-) it is just a status job. We have one astro-nut too, Wubbo Ockels IIRC. He gets the TeeVee shows and simple science programs. He was once in the ISS for a few days. Even Neil Amstrong is still alive no?

But thousands of Chinese, and even many Americans die in coal mining, many each year.

Then I think the most dangerous job is soldier in the US army (or any army). As astro-nut you are safe up there, dropping bombs perhaps.

I have been thinking, as to the 'nut' in astronaut, one was going to kill the other because of some love affair, wonder when we will see the first murder up there :-) And then we need astro-police, and astro-judges, and of course astro-lawyers.

I wonder if there's room in the cargo bay to loft a modern equivalent of an Apollo ship into HEO?

And, of course, if they'd call off the crusades in the Middle East, and the insane war on drugs, the savings could pay for space exploration ten times over.

And yes, John, Robots are Cool! ;-)

Thanks, Rich

Well, is there any solid scientific access(Not sales talks,etc) to those thousands of experiments(including the raw data)? The least I would expect is a Nasa/ESA website where all of those were accessible for review. People sure paid enough money for that.

What's the score in the assault on Iraq, Afghanistan, and now Pakistan, and the saber-rattling at Iran and N. Korea? How much have we spent there, how many lives have been wasted, and what's the outcome? Hell, what's the outcome _supposed_ to be?

Or of the war on drugs? What's its cost in lives and wasted dollars, and what exactly has it accomplished?

We need to get America into rehab for its addiction to war.

Thanks, Rich

Well, give my regards to Mr. Ludd!

Cheers! Rich

That sounds like sour grapes. What's wrong? Wouldn't NASA buy anything from you?

Don't avoid the issue. Cite useful science or technology from ISS microgravity experiments. Hell, cite useful science or technology from any ISS experiments.

And yes, NASA does buy from us.

John

What? Beta-dependent "current sources" ?:-)

You bring new imagery to Bill Engvall's "Dork Fish" ...Jim Thompson

You are another goddamned retard.