Shuttle Atlantis Finally In Orbit 96
Klaidas writes "After delays, the shuttle Atlantis has finally been launched today as expected. NASA reports: 'The shuttle Atlantis is in orbit, headed for a challenging new phase in the construction of the International Space Station. Commander Brent Jett and his five crewmates will install a new 17-ton segment of the station's truss backbone, adding a new set of giant solar panels and batteries to the complex. Three spacewalks are planned.'"
Penguins! (Score:5, Funny)
Look it up!
space station work (Score:2, Funny)
Re:space station work (Score:5, Funny)
Silly, they don't make tubes long enough to reach into space.
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Not yet, but soon! (Score:1)
Weeelll, then again, maybe they will! [space.com]
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LOL thanks for the laugh, I actually made home to watch that episode.
Regards,
MBC1977,
(US Marine, College Student, and Good Guy!)
Delays... of the Slashdot kind... (Score:5, Insightful)
I was watching MSNBC's shuttle coverage with 2 minutes left on the clock until launch when Cowboy Neal's "scheduled" post hit the front page. As Richard Hammond of BBC's Top Gear [bbc.co.uk] would say, "Oh no this is bad..."
May I propose a "This is going to happen within X hours/in the future" option for the submit on logged-in users, sorta like what Pud does for F*ed Company? That way they can get more priority, those who abuse it get banned from using it, and makes things work better.
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The difference being that we have thousands of years of experience building bridges, and maybe 70 years of experience sending stuff into space.
MG
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Maybe you should pick up a book sometime. You'll find that you can learn from lots of other peoples experience with out having to experience it all yourself.
I'm sure our current bridge builders didn't start by throwing logs across streams.
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bridges are something that you can learn about by looking at "currently installed" ones.
besides some books qoute older books that quote older books
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Name one book about bridge building that quotes another that quotes another
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Its been a while since I complained about stories. (Score:3, Interesting)
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tag = pointless (Score:1, Insightful)
More pointless than war in Iraq, and more deadly if you're an American. (Something like 7% of astronauts have died on the job, a significantly higher death rate than the US military.)
-Isaac
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And 7% is a fairly good rate for something that we still aren't really good at (why were doing it!
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I really don't think NASA cuts have really impacted IIS construction, though. Columbia was th
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Don't forget Columbia's disintegration and the subsequent shuttle program delays. That probably cost a couple years.
Re:tag = pointless (Score:4, Insightful)
The main difference is that they need to use the same astronauts over and over again because they are highly trained, and they either have a safe mission or a deadly catastrophe. Soldiers on the other hand are easily replaced (it's not like there are only 10 people in the world to do the job) and way more likely to get non-lethally injured. It is stupid to make the comparison looking at a sample of a couple hundred astronauts to millions of soldiers. If you want ridiculous comparisons, 8 Presidents out of 43 have died in office, that is a nearly 20% chance you will die if you become President, now who would be stupid enough to want to take that risk?
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Astronauts (Score:2, Troll)
I call bullshit. How many PhDs does one have to have in order to push a button (which is essentially all they do)? Is optimum physical fitness required for working in weightless space? "Astronauts" are just technicians that have been idolized and aggrandized by the myth and hero-making marketing machine. Yes, the original guys (who were actually test pilots - true daring and fearless men) w
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The parent argued that astronauts were "reused" because of the amount of training they received. You replied:
How many PhDs does one have to have in order to push a button (which is essentially all they do)?
A decent sized chunk of astronauts do not have PhDs. Having a PhD is simply used as a measure of what an astronaut candidate has already accomplished and their ability to learn. Most astronauts don't really
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Why yes, it is.
1) On ascent, you face the launch G-forces.
2) In space, your body starts breaking down. If you're weak when you go up, and you stay for a long time, you might well be wheelchair or even bed-bound when you return.
3) To minimize this effect as much as possible, astronauts spend long periods of time in space every day exercising. ISS astronauts burn about 3,000 calories per day every day, despite being in a zero-G environment
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I count 5.
What kind of math are you using?
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Why aren't they investing our tax dollars into an endowment and let congress just spend the interest? That would make a lot more sense than just borrow, borrow, borrow.
IANA accountant, but...
The current US government budget is $2.77 trillion USD. Assuming an annual return rate estimate of 15%, we would need about $18.46 trillion USD in an endowment just to keep the same. To account for an annual inflation rate of about 3.2% and to allow for a real annual growth of 4% (to account for possible bad yea
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Jeez, while I was asleep, Patrick Buchanan started reading slashdot. Just wow.
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Read the wikipedia entry on Reductio_ad_Hitlerum [wikipedia.org]. You've made the same kind of attack except using Pat Buchanan instead of Hitler.
snark (Score:2, Funny)
Donald Rumsfeld? [dailypress.com] Posting on
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Re:tag = pointless (Score:5, Interesting)
I really hope we don't do the whole Skylab thing again. "Okay, we've burned a ton of money and fixed all of the glitches. Lets let it burn up now!"
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1) Pumping large amounts of money into defense contractors - particularly important for those contractors during peacetime. FWIW - I say take the 100's of billions of dollars we're pumping into Iraq, and divert it to NA
Re:Does anyone else care? (Score:5, Funny)
Good luck and Godspeed! (Score:2)
Being an astronaut is an incredibly hard job and I salute the brave men and women who risk their lives (and sanity) in the name of science. There's a reason something NASA related is a recurring theme in PopSci's "Worst Jobs in Science. [popsci.com]"
What's that giant sucking noise I hear? (Score:3, Funny)
Good luck and Godspeed to the crew on their current mission. Being an astronaut is an incredibly hard job and I salute the brave men and women who risk their lives (and sanity) in the name of science.
Easy, chief. Don't hurt your flag-waving hand too much.
The job of the astronaut sucks. (Score:5, Insightful)
Being an astronaut is an incredibly hard job and I salute the brave men and women who risk their lives (and sanity) in the name of science.
As a job, being an astronaut today is not that great. The guys who go up on the ISS are being worked really hard for their whole tour, because it's now so hard to get people up there. The workload has increased substantially since the number of flights declined. There's a good chance the tour of duty in space may be longer than expected, due to problems on the ground. (The Soviet-era cosmonauts had it even worse; one guy was up on Mir for 438 days, being unfortunate enough to be up during the collapse of the Soviet Union.)
But that's not the worst part. NASA has too many people for the flight slots, so many of the "astronauts" will never fly. Right now, there are 100 flight-eligible astronauts, most of whom are doing mid-level management jobs. (NASA's phrase is "will serve in technical assignments until assigned to a space flight.") Or worse, filling the daily "lunch with an astronaut" [kennedyspacecenter.com] slot. NASA is no longer training new astronauts.
Being an astronaut doesn't make you famous any more. Here's the list of active astronauts. [nasa.gov] How many have you heard of?
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Vance Brand (Score:1)
Astronauts at work (Score:2)
Driving the truck. [floridatoday.com] That's what the job looks like. Those guys even look like truck drivers.
Then when they get there, they have to unload the truck. [usatoday.com] ""There's an awful lot going on, and it's going to be non-stop work from start to finish ... with virtually no time for breaks."
That's the reality of the job.
Anything fall off? (Score:4, Insightful)
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And they're getting it with Constellation. The Orion crew module is going to be more like an Apollo capsule. It will sit on top so nothing can fall on it, and it will have traditional escape rockets to get out of danger in an emergency launch situation. I mean space-gliders are awesome, but part of me thinks they made them mostly to show off. I mean, how else are you supposed to top the Saturn-V?
I think the current estimate is 2
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I've heard that they are going to test a 5 segment SRB (with one stage being a dummy stage) with a dummy second stage and a dummy Orion spacecraft unit in early 2009. This will be the first of 4 test flights. It doesn't use all 5 segments because the manufacturer ATK won't have a
Re:Anything fall off? (Score:5, Insightful)
We (I'm a NASA engineer, and I work on manned systems) absolutely do. The Orion vehicle will be a lot safer since it will have realistic abort options through all phases of flight, not have the complications of a winged vehicle, and will have an escape rocket. The crew will be on top of the vehicle away from falling debris (where, as Mike Griffin said, God intended them to be).
That being said, human spaceflight is never going to be "worry free", at least not for awhile. Riding rockets to orbit is still a very dangerous business, with even the most reliable launchers in the world turning in a 1% failure rate (imagine if aircraft had that...). Most rockets (including the shuttle) carry explosive charges to terminate the flight. The requirement to have those range safety packages are a reflection of the relative immaturity of the launch business.
While great strides have been made in the nearly 50 years orbital launches have been occuring, once or twice a year we have an explosion or failure to reach orbit that reminds everyone it's tough to get into space. Everyone I know in this business (whether their payloads are robots or humans) spends a great deal of time worrying about the ride uphill.
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Purpose of it all? (Score:2)
What is the purpose of the ISS?
1. No major scientific gains have come from this project except from the few things we have learned about biology in space (while here I aside that this alone is valuable information and will be useful over the next few decades).
2. There is no economic value of such a object at current time (aside: I agree, but see my last aside; science doesn't always have imme
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Sure, but Mendel's work proceeded from a clear scientific question about the nature of heredity. He wan't just casting around for an experiment to do to justify the expense of a super-cool high-tech pea patch.
Re:Purpose of it all? (Score:5, Insightful)
If there was immediate economic value to the ISS, the government wouldn't (and shouldn't) be doing it -- private industry would be doing it instead.
For whatever reason, a lot of people complain when the government "wastes" their money on projects unlikely to be profitable in the short term. That's clearly the only thing the government should be spending money on, as anything likely to be profitable in the short term will be accomplished by private industry, likely more quickly and more cheaply. If you are mad about high taxes being spent on botched, potentially profitable ventures, blame the $400Bn pork barrel project also known as the Department of Defense.
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So, by parallel reasoning: If there was immediate economic value to the Interstate Highway System, the government wouldn't (and shouldn't) be doing it -- private industry would be doing it instead?
...come to think of it, the ISS is kind of like a highway rest area (and hotel, restaurant, lab, etc) in the sky.
And for comparison, someone above quoted ~$1.3 b
Reverse space race? (Score:5, Insightful)
1970's: We put a space station into low earth orbit
1980's: We had frequent flights to LEO with a reusable craft.
1990's: We had occasional flights to LEO with a reusable craft.
2000's: We managed to get people into orbit with a craft that might get used two more times before the end of its life.
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2010: Project Constellation comes online with a >130 t heavy lift rocket. Dates on internal documents are adjusted to -48 years for consistency. Man returns to the Moon.
2020?: A nuclear rocket is designed (Prometheus?): Surviving NERVA and the original Project Orion designers go on a killing spree in their nursing homes.
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Ok, it's a given that the Apollo missions were with a different rocket, but after that...
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Downloadable recorded launch video. (Score:5, Informative)
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A complete video from launch to orbit (9 minutes) can be found on YouTube [youtube.com].
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Love those rockets starting
Great (Score:2, Funny)
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In other news ... (Score:1)
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Harry Caray (Score:2)
Linda Ham (NASA flight director): Yes.
Harry Carey: Is that thing ever coming back?
Linda Ham: Uh, it landed a week ago.
Harry Carey: How many survivors?
Linda Ham: Everyone survived, Harry.
Harry Carey: Oh. That's a relief. [ long pause ] Hey, Linda! What was it like inventing the space shuttle?
Linda Ham: Uh.. I didn't invent the shuttle.
Harry Carey: Well, I wonder, whoever did, made a lot of money! And then, I bet he tried to invent something e