Shuttle over the bridge

That doesn't make it a less interesting challenge. Besides that there are loads of experiments which cannot be conducted on earth because of gravity. The people in the ISS aren't there just for fun and its difficult to do everything remotely. The same goes for exploring Mars. An experienced geophysicist can do a lot more work in the same time than the robots which are currently over there. So at some point sending people to Mars is more economic than keep sending robots.

They are doing useless make-work science projects, and trying to stay alive.

Never send a man to do a robot's job.

Or Larkin to do an engineer's ;-) ...Jim Thompson

Senile asshole.

Gotcha, again >:-) ...Jim Thompson

The US media didn't show up???

Cheers

The only _proposal_ for a manned communication satellite that I have heard of, was the original Arthur C Clarke geostationary satellite proposal in 1945. The crew was needed to replace tubes in communication equipment :-)

The usefulness of the Hubble was hampered by the Shuttle. First of all, he cargo bay dimensions limited the diameter of the main mirror. The Shuttle maximum altitude on a repair mission dictated that the Hubble must flow on a very low orbital altitude, only a few hundred kilometers. This makes the orbital period quite short, so a single exposure must be well below an hour, thus stacking of exposures are needed during several orbits.

The close by earth blocks a significant angle of view, in addition to the general direction towards the sun. Even at the current orbit, there are some air molecules, causing some air glow.

Apparently the Hubble and KH11/12 spy satellites have some thing in common and more than a dozen spy satellites have been launched during the year, so why not use the same for astronomical satellites.

Modern astronomical satellites are launched at much higher orbits, with long orbital periods, making it possible to use long continuous observation periods. Launching to the L2 Lagrange point opposite to the Sun, the Earth will constantly block the sunshine and the usable angle of view will extend to nearly the whole sky.

It's certainly dangerous and expensive. It's going to look useless until they find something useful to do up there. Asteroid mining might be a good start, and adjusting the orbits of earth-grazing asteroids could suddenly look likely to be a very useful activity after we've catalogued a few more of them. Ask the dinosaurs, if you don't believe me.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

Not at the time. The technology wasn't equal to that task until very recently.

It certainly could have happened with a ground-based telescope. It would have been easier to fix if it had, but not that easy. You'd have wanted to dismantle the telescope, re-figure the mirror and put it all back together again. Not what they did with Hubble, but probably a better solution.

Perhaps. Why wasn't that an option with Hubble?

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

..

Jim-out-of-touch-with-reality-Thompson won't have noticed that the Dubbya initiatives were all aspiration and no cash.

Until Dubbya - by neglecting to notice that the US banking system had blown up a house price bubble - had made sure that the US didn't have any money to spend on expensive photo-opportunities in space.

Engineering it to be repairable made it too expensive to discard :-)

My takeway from "The Right Stuff" was that NASA's primary .... thing ( mission, technique, what have you ) was *always* PR.

It's always been JPL that does the heavy data gathering.

-- Les Cargill

"The aircraft didn't even know it was upside down." Tex Johnson

Too big to fail.

Without a reasonable goal it was wasted cash. After the moon walks there was no goal.

The goal was something like normalizing traffic in space. The shuttle was just the pickup truck for a farm in the sky*.

• Hear that in Levon Helm's voice...

If you are unaware of it, the cartoon series "The Venture Brothers" touches on this general subject now and again, of the transition from our innocence about space - when that was progress - to our state of mind now.

-- Les Cargill

If asteroids were made of solid gold, they wouldn't be worth mining. All that gold would just drive down the price of gold anyhow. One of the amazing things about Earth is that all sorts of useful stuff (aluminum, iron, salt, rare earths, exotic metals, sulfur, coal, oil/gas, silver, gold, helium, uranium) are nicely differentiated for us, often by prehistoric biological processes. That's not likely the be the case on asteroids.

Deflecting asteroids and comets is worth doing, but does not benefit from putting humans into space.

JFK is quoted in today's New York Times as not giving a damn about space; he only wanted to beat the Russians. It was all about testosterone.

They had to make work for the Shuttle.

"The Shuttle was designed to service the ISS, and the ISS was designed as a place for the Shuttle to go." Ditto Hubble.