When the Shuttle Atlantis launched Friday ...
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A sad day (Score:2, Insightful)
Today marks the beginning of the end for the US of A. Growing up in the Space Age, during the Space Race, I have fond memories of the Apollo program, and watched avidly as first Skylab and then the ISS was build.
Then the world got taken over by sound bites and economists and we never went back to the moon.
Now the US doesn't even have the capability to put a man in space.
Progress?
None of the above. (Score:5, Insightful)
I knew about it.
I don't think it was a waste of tax money.
I just didn't watch it.
Re:A sad day (Score:5, Insightful)
Would you call "hanging on to a 30-year-old program that was much less safe and more expensive than designed" progress?
Progress is turning manned trips to LEO into a service provided a number of US companies. Progress is NASA focusing on projects and rockets that will take humans and human knowledge to heights never before achieved by mankind. That's always where NASA made progress that nobody else could.
Let's worry about that, and making sure that happens, rather than clinging to a (relatively successful) program that has run its course.
Good Riddance (Score:2, Insightful)
Materials science and computers have come a long way in the last 30 years, so now we can do better than that pork-laden flying deathtrap.
Yes, progress indeed! (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, given the entire space program through Apollo was just sabre rattling to show off "big rocket" ICBM technologies that were already irrelevant before they launched I'd say we've made progress since we've stopped that aspect of it. STS was suppose to reduce the cost to space for payloads. It didn't, it was an abject failure and should have been canceled two decades ago. That it is finally gone is indeed progress, the same way that removing a malignant tumor is progress.
There are problems with space development in the US, but the end of STS isn't one of them. Larger issues have been surrendering the lead in commercial space development with myopic ITAR restrictions and a repeated squandering of money on half-baked human spaceflight follow on ideas.
Anyway, it might not seem like progress at first and we could certainly have hoped for more but the reality is the end of STS is the closest thing to progress we've seen since Challenger blew up and the DoD was finally released from the requirements to use the STS. While it was tragic that people lost their lives the Challenger accident saved the US space program by allowing sane launch platforms to once again be developed for both national security and commercial interests. STS should have ended then, the tragedy is that it bled the space industry for another 25 years. Good riddance, our adversaries and competitors couldn't have done anything worse to us through sabotage than we did ourselves by dragging a bad idea along for so long.
Re:A sad day (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:A sad day (Score:4, Insightful)
I disagree, for some things like going to Mars it makes far more sense to send a machine to do that. But most of the work that's being done on the ISS and was being done onboard the shuttles was far better than what you'd be doing with machines. If it really were that easy to do science with machines, then why precisely hasn't most lab science been turned over to machines at this point? Given the toxic and or infectious materials that are routinely involved with lab work, robots should be doing it. The main reason that they aren't doing it is that machines are still nowhere near as capable of conducting experiments as humans are.
You just lose out on way too much going that route. Sure you get a result that's free of mistakes and readily repeatable, but you also lose out on the mishaps that occasionally warp us forward or the insight into why we're doing something in a particular way.
A happy day, a new era (Score:4, Insightful)
Now the US doesn't even have the capability to put a man in space.
That is so not true. SpaceX is readying the next crew vehicle.
We are going from being a nation that can only have one monolithic government entity send people into space, to one where ANYONE can send a man into space if they desire to form a company and build a launch vehicle. No more astronauts only and handful of selected special guests, this is the start of the real vision of space brought to life where eventually ANYONE can go.
Other (Score:2, Insightful)
I knew about it.
I looked at pictures and read articles about it.