OT?: Goodbye to an era

They should make an impressive show when they burn up on re-entry. Can't wait!

John

Except that it was not the shield technology that killed them, idiot.

Their fragility was a factor, but not the reason why either.

The main reason was because the idiots that made the tank housing did not test and certify their insulative materials in a vacuum.

AIUI, the main problems with the Shuttle were:

1. It never got anywhere close to its claimed mission frequency. It was a development system tricked out as a production system.

1. All the payloads had to be man-rated, which increased their cost enormously, making the Shuttle even less attractive as the promised 'space truck'.

2. Because of (1), the production pressure was always very high, leading directly to Challenger's breakup and indirectly to Columbia's.

1. Because it is a government bureaucracy, NASA doesn't just go bust when it becomes too dysfunctional to do its job economically. The space program became a zombie somewhere between 1975 and 1980, but it keeps on eating people's brains.

On the other hand, I think manned space flight is intrinsically very valuable as a cultural activity. I want people to continue to push the limits like that. No amount of pretty pictures from space probes is going to replace that for me.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

More proof of your utter stupidity.

First, that it took you so long to come up with the one thing you needed to do, and secondly, for deciding to do it to begin with.

The next space telescope will be a huge binocular with huge arrayed mirrors ala Keck.

It will cost a LOT to put up and build in space.

You are an idiot.

No, it will get placed into space that way, but MEN will still be required to rendezvous with it to assemble it.

You ain't real bright either, I see.

We will likely end up at war with N. Korea again. Do you think that is our doing? If so, you are an idiot.

It is obvious that life did not teach you anything.

That one is law enforcement's fault. They are the true stain on what is left of America.

It took the Nazified bastards one step closer to imposing a police state on us, and gave them the funding to buy the hardware to back it up with.

The cops are the gang you should all be fearing. The worms are going to be coming out of the woodwork as their towns and cities run out of money, and all the garbage can emptying trucks with two employees per should never have been in the budget to begin with.

The wars are fine. We need to wake America up to the theft that all of our governments exercised on our tax coffers while they 'upgraded' all their rights abusing, profiling pig ranks.

The military folks are fine. It is these oath abusing bastards you and your kids have to watch out for.

That's a goddamned shame. Maybe they should be enlightened as to how you really feel.

Is that not what you wanted to do to me for so long, Johnny?

You're an idiot.

Spitzer.

James Webb.

Herschel.

AlwaysWrong.

John

OK, but it's all symbolic. If we do serious manned missions, there will probably, sadly, be enough deaths that the political capital will evaporate. The expense will be enormous, the payback illusory, and the brain drain serious.

John

Oh, I don't know. There are a lot of folks that feel the way I do about it. Including (I think) all the astronauts.

BTW at grad school, I worked for Sally Ride's advisor (Peter Banks) for awhile, partly because I was hoping for a ride on the Shuttle myself. I gave up on that when I discovered how long it took to get an experiment flown on any platform--it took over 20 years' work for him to fly his favourite experiment.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

I'd suspect that the divisions of NASA who buy my stuff would cheer my position. They do real science, but most of the money goes to spam-in-a-can.

All I've ever wanted to do to you is laugh at you.

John

It illustrates the complexity, and thus cost, involved in having a craft that is multi-stage and launched vertically.

An awful lot of research into SSTOs could be done for the cost of a single shuttle launch.

Sylvia.

rote:

t's

John, you're a maniac to respond to all of this... Anyway, I remember watching some PBS/Nova thing about the Hubble screw up, and thinking, 'what and no one checked it??'

I'm not sure I'd want to work on something that was launched into space. I'd always be worrying about some screw that wasn't tight enough... or maybe too tight.

George H.

Heee, heee, heee, sorry just can't stop giggling. Where are those jobs now?

George H.

s one may get inhabitable.

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the other

there :-)

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No, it's a percentage thing not a numbers thing. If it was numbers, then driving your car is more dangerous than coal mining.

George H.

rote:

t's

Why? I'm all for spending money on science and research. I just want to see it well spent. Seems like the Navy (NRL) does a good job.

George H.

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'Tweren't the tiles.

On Columbia, the foam blew through the reinforced carbon-carbon composite on the leading edge of the wing, near the root. None of the fancy tiles were implicated, and you probably couldn't use ablative there--it's far hotter there than on the heat shield of an Apollo.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs