Re: OT: First astronauts by a private company, at 3:22PM ET *USA*

Not bad.

I wonder if the Russians have started giving credit and posthumus awards to the real first man in space.

I really hope it works - I was disappointed that thunderstorms prevented the earlier launch window from being successful. This one is much harder to see from the UK. ISS is no longer visible as from today. If we are lucky I will catch the transfer orbit passes as they catch up the ISS but the early one is in a bright sky and the next very near horizon.

I very much hope they make a safe journey to the ISS and back.

Manned spaceflight is inherently dangerous. We should really send robots into space unless and until we find something that they cannot do.

So far so good. Launch worked pretty much perfectly with a nominal orbital insertion. Inflatable dinosaur zero g demo should have been a fountain pen to duplicate 2001 a space odyssey. Now to look out for their vehicle in the next two orbits roughly every 90 minutes.

You have to admire the sheer guts it takes for astronauts to do that.

Space travel is a military and cultural pursuit, not a scientific one.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

JFK was. Xi is.

Literally. Those international astronauts are up there to be chummy. Not much low orbit science needs humans to push the buttons. None in fact.

I rather we spend money on something useful and not deadly. The shuttle crashes showed that we were technically inept.

Spending billions on spam-in-a-can has crippled space science far more. The first A in NASA is "aeronautics", which NASA barely does any more.

How clever of you. Did you invent that yourself?

Put me on Mars for 12 hours, and I'll get more science done than machines will in the next 100 years.

-- john, KE5FX

I saw those shoulders and thaought "Buck Rogers"

Okay. You'll have to make your own way home though. ;)

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

That's neither fair nor accurate. Careless, negligent, incompetent, maybe. But the space shuttle flew 135 missions, so its designers can hardly have been technically inept. From Wikipedia:

With regard to the Challenger disaster: "Repeated warnings from design engineers voicing concerns about the lack

With regard to the Columbia disaster, following damage to the carbon-carbon leading edge of the wing caused during launch: "Ground control engineers had made three separate requests for high-resolution images taken by the Department of Defense that would have provided an understanding of the extent of the damage, while NASA's chief TPS engineer requested that astronauts on board Columbia be allowed to leave the vehicle to inspect the damage. NASA managers intervened to stop the Department of Defense's assistance and refused the request for the spacewalk".

Not, therefore, a /technical/ issue (particularly the Columbia incident), but a /management/ one.

Bad engineering. SRBs, that tank, the tiles, the whole concept. The whole kluge was a bomb waiting to explode. But more important, the shuttle was a badly-designed machine whose purpose was to service a useless space station. I blame George Lucas.

What was it for? What did it accomplish?

Send it back before you die.

This is theatre. They are costumes.

I'm all for making experimental aircraft, so we should have made one shuttle, not 6. What the other 5 accomplished was to bleed money from dozens of probes and space telescopes that should have existed.

Things went wrong quite early in Shuttle concept design due to the US DoD requirements.

Those requirements required an ability to return heavy (10 tons or more) loads from orbit to ground e.g. MOL style spy space stations. Any other users would have been satisfied with returning a few tons (the crew) safely to ground. Due to the DoD requirements, the vehicle became huge. This required large SRBs, which had to be split for transporting under bridges to launch site (Challenger).

DoD requirements also called for landing back to launch site after one orbit (after delivering a load to orbit), so that the orbiter could be launched again within a few days. Since the Earth rotates 15 degrees longitude each hour, the launch site has moved 2000-3000 km during one orbit, thus big delta wings were required to do that sideways movement. Large wings are also target for all kind of debris (Columbia).

DoD realized that it did not need such capabilities, so other purposes had to be invented (ISS).

I don't have strong opinions on the manned-space-flight thing, so much money is tossed at the military-aerospace industrial complex already that what's a few more billion bucks between friends.

Yeah, the "great powers" have to keep up the theater of being "great powers" and if the US doesn't send two guys into LEO today China is going to send three guys around the Moon tomorrow and point "neener neener neener!"

The Falcon 9 seems like a sensible design for a semi-reusable launch system, the "Starship" vehicle seems mad. I do dislike how the media tends to report verbatim Musk's fever dreams that that thing is going to Mars or is some kind of interplanetary craft for exploration of the Solar System, it's an orbital tourist vehicle at best if they ever get it to work right. If they try turning it around at the kind of figures they throw around they'll likely encounter logistical problems with that similar to the Shuttle

The math on the kind of vehicle and propulsion system you'd need to get a significant-sized crew to Mars in a reasonable amount of time has been known for some time and that thing isn't it.

Shuttle flights cost about a billion dollars each. Imagine the real science that could have been done with all that money and talent.

I can't think of a single payoff from manned speceflight.

Top posting on usenet is anarchy.

That's a serious distortion. I highly recommend Diane Vaughan's "The Challenger Launch Decision" for a much more balanced view. (It's a sociology book, but nevertheless very good indeed.)

It's not at all clear that anyone could have done anything to fix the problem anyway, or whether any rescue could have been attempted.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs