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Topic: Shuttle Launch...WHY?
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infoterror
VoivodFan
Member # 568
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posted July 27, 2005 18:56
    
quote:
Originally posted by Mezcalhead:
We already know we can get a plane up there. A mass transit system eh?
I think Nasa should stop wasting its time with stuff like this and concentrate more on the Mars missions, and the recent project where they torpedoed the asteroid, etc...pure scientific study that means something.
Can someone please give me one important reason why all this money was spent to send those...what is it seven guys up there to fly around for a while? Please, I'd like to know.
Aha. I see where you're coming from. The Shuttle is a political thing at this point - just like trying to get a rocket up after sputnik, to prove we aren't losing it. I'm in favor of keeping the shuttle around, and not giving in to those who want to junk the space program, but I'd enlarge it across the board... -------------------- http://www.livejournal.com/users/infoterror/
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Mezcalhead
VoivodFan
Member # 26
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posted August 13, 2005 12:02
Blip from a little piece i found:The shuttle has a great future behind it. It was supposed to fly every week — but now is lucky to go a handful of times a year and is grounded again after NASA spent two years and $1 billion failing to figure out how to stop foam from dangerously flaking off the fuel tank. It was supposed to carry satellites into orbit for launching, an impossibly costly way to get satellites into orbit. Now it’s creaky, dangerous and nearly purposeless. Journalist Gregg Easterbrook, in a devastatingly convincing scourge of the shuttle program, writes: “The shuttle’s main engines, first tested in the late 1970s, use hundreds more moving parts than do new rocket-motor designs. The fragile heat-dissipating tiles were designed before breakthroughs in materials science. Until recently, the flight-deck computers on the space shuttle used old 8086 chips from the early 1980s, the sort of pre-Pentium electronics no self-respecting teenager would dream of using for a video game.” A Federal Aviation Administration official estimates that if commercial aviation had the same accident rate as the shuttle, more than 500 flights would crash a day. The science projects conducted aboard the shuttle have the musty whiff of make-work. The experiments on the doomed shuttle Columbia included examining “bacterial and yeast cell responses to the stresses of spaceflight” and developing “the gravity-sensing organs of fish in the absence of gravity.” The spectacularly expensive space station is just as dismal. It was supposed to serve as a jumping-off point for further space exploration and provide a platform for zero-gravity manufacturing. Nothing doing. Now, one of its main functions is to serve as a symbol of international cooperation. The U.S.-Russia joint work on the station is a nice bookend to the Cold War, which had fueled the space race between the two countries. But how much do you want to pay for your nice bookends? The bottled water that astronauts drink on the space station costs nearly half a million dollars a day, according to Easterbrook’s calculation. It has two astronauts on board who are focused on routine maintenance and serve as guinea pigs to test the effects of long-term weightlessness.
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posted July 27, 2005 08:27
posted August 21, 2005 13:24
