Shuttle Launch Success 355
mkosmo writes to tell us NASA is reporting that shuttle launch today was successful. This launch occurred despite the safety warnings from many top NASA officials.
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Shuttle Launch Success
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There are two ways to write error-free programs; only the third one works.
It was a loud one ! (Score:5, Interesting)
Yeah, it was safe... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Yeah, it was safe... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:When is it my turn? (Score:4, Interesting)
In doing some reading on the Redstone rocket I came across this odd duck [wikipedia.org]. A medium range ICBM that flew a total distance of 4 inches (100mm).
Re:When is it my turn? (Score:2, Interesting)
The most complex machine? (Score:3, Interesting)
The shuttles are decades old...surely someone somewhere has built some much more complex machines....
So, what's more complex than the shuttle?
Re:When is it my turn? (Score:3, Interesting)
Epcot (Score:5, Interesting)
And sure enough, about 30 seconds later, it came into view. You could see the shuttle, the fire from the rockets and the thick column of smoke, right over the Mission Space building. The entire theme park was at a stand still looking at the spectacle. Some people cried, most clapped. It was a great moment.
Re:The demand is there, but ... (Score:3, Interesting)
As for SS2 possibly being orbital.. no. It's not likely. We're probably talking 20 more years until anyone but the russians start offering orbital flights.
Yes we care -- surprise package delivery... (Score:3, Interesting)
On reflection, that's pretty scary: a nav system capable of a rendezvous on-orbit is also capable of rendezvous with other similarly sized objects such as the White House.
Re:Disappointed..... (Score:5, Interesting)
2. Comparing it to India is pretty much bullshit, since India was under foreign occupation. The american colonies were British citizens, no less favoured than those in the UK.
3. Taxes. Ah-ha. Now we're getting somewhere. I hope you do, however, understand that an average citizen in the colonies paid insignifficant taxes compared to the citizens back home in the UK. As in, IIRC somewhere between 20 to 30 times less per capita. It also didn't help that the colonists threatened any tax collectors with tarring and feathering.
A lot of the special tax acts, e.g., the stamp act, weren't just to fleece the colonists, but because they paid almost nothing else. So the UK government just tried to figure out ways to keep it fair. Ok, so you don't want to pay other taxes, but, seriously, you're not _that_ special to pay nothing whatsoever. How about you pay this other tax instead, if the old one isn't to your liking?
The Boston Tea Party? Let's remember that that wasn't about some new tax, but about elliminating a tax. Smugglers like John Hancock were making a small fortune by smuggling tea into the USA without paying customs, and thus being able to undercut the prices of the East India Company. So when the British government allowed the East India Company to stop paying that tax too, oh looky, the smugglers were outraged at losing their own unfair advantage.
So exactly what oppressive taxation are we talking about? If paying 20-30 times less taxes than a mainland British citizen was too oppressive, exactly how much tax would be OK for their liking? Zero? Are you still paying that much?
Tyranny and taxation without representation? Heh. Try doing the same today in your land of the free, and see if you'd get away with that. No, seriously. Get your own village (most colonies were about that size) suddenly saying that you don't want to pay taxes any more and threatening violence against the IRS. Or deciding that you can stop paying customs taxes. See how long it would take for your representative and democratic government's men to show up on your doorsteps with flak vests and M16's.
Re:When is it my turn? (Score:3, Interesting)
Sure sure. It was designed that way in large part because it had to be, because of the extreme northern latitude of the soviet launch site, they don't get as much of a kick from the Earth's rotation as the US or ESA. So they *have* to build larger rockets to put the same payload into orbit.
Sadly, Energia was never actually tested with anything anywhere near the capability of the Saturn V. So saying, "it's configurable to 400k" is kind of like saying, "oh the Airbus A380 isn't that big of a deal because the 747 can be configured to be larger." In other words, it's something of a laughable statement. The Soviet N1 would also have been more powerful than the Saturn V, but that too never materialized.
A rocket motor is just a pump you know. That's all it is, a high-speed pump. It's easy to *design* a big rocket. It's something else altogether to actually make one work - because the devil is in the details. For the time being, the Saturn V is still the most powerful working rocket ever built by man.
Re:Richard Feynman's Paper on the Challenger Disas (Score:3, Interesting)
NASA engineers demand precision to the point of insanity. The managment knows this is not possible, and that if the engineers were in charge, the thing would never even get off the ground.
The problem we have is that the engineers tend to over-dramatize the risks, causing the managment to often disregard them completely.
It's a problem, and honestly, I'm not sure that there's any easy solution other than redesigning the craft to be significantly simpler (less engineers complaining = more time for the managment to listen to the ones who legitimately have something to say).
I think NASA's reached the point where the engineers AND managment both agree that the shuttle is a flawed design, and needs to be retired ASAP (which, if all goes well, it will). However, in spite of the clamoring of the engineers, there are many practical and political concerns which dictate that the shuttle must fly. Saving the Hubble is probably the most significant of these (and right now, it looks like we actually WILL go up there in 2008 to fix the thing).
Re:Richard Feynman's Paper on the Challenger Disas (Score:3, Interesting)
The Shuttle was a good experimental design, and it did push some technologies further that otherwise wouldn't have been developed. It has also given a good baseline dataset for what it would mean for reusable spacecraft that otherwise wouldn't be known. The problem here is that additional launchs only give additional datapoints to this knowledge base, and the fact that two Shuttles have completely failed with full loss of the crew gives additional room to pause and wonder if it really is worth the added risk.
Much safer and even cheaper launch systems have been demonstrated. For crying out loud, NASA has even developed some better launch systems than the Shuttle but ended up killing those programs due to changes in political leadership and changing requirements for those projects that made them incredibly expensive.
Saving the Hubble and completing the treaty obligations for the ISS are noble things, and that is what the Shuttle is being kept around to do right now. I still question if there might not be a reasonable alternative, and strongly question the idea that during the years since the loss of the Columbia that the money spent toward trying to put band-aids on the Shuttle couldn't have been wiser spent on a whole new launch system. $15 billion and 4 years could certainly have built one hell of a good launch system, I think. Certainly this is not justification to send 14 people into LEO just to retrieve trash and rotate out the ISS crew. Think about it. Over $1 billion per astronaut. That is not wise spending of money by any criteria, nor are the astronauts billionaires either, which might have been wiser spending of the money and had more people servicing the ISS for the same money.
With the announcement today (July 5th) that NASA is still having foam issues on the external fuel tank, I think it is going to be yet another year before the next Shuttle mission goes up. There are some serious safty issues that are being overlooked, and I would tend to believe the engineers in this case. It is time to kill the Shuttle fleet and move on. Unfortunately, NASA has nothing to move on to.
money (Score:3, Interesting)
No, fiat money [wikipedia.org] is a form of control developed by the powerful. Real money was a great invention that controlled no one -- and that is why it had to be replaced.