Another Space Shuttle

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Funny, I was under the impression they were all Amercans. Well there you go, they're trying to take over again

 

The NASA has faced the problem of serious underfunding for a decade ... it's not that surprising something like that happened. Silly tragedy.
I wonder what the US will do to adress that problem since money is becoming shorter in face of the growing defence spending. Most likely the republicans find a solution in buying more space based defence applications eventually that was the starting foundment and testing ground of commercial use of US space transport missiles (after a few years of spectacular failures with the losses of costly military satellites over the 90s they eventually matured ... more or less) ....

... and they accuse the europeans of subventioning the Ariane .... we just pay openly and do not mask it as defence spending.

 

My wife's father worked for NASA doing technical drawings. I forgot the one craft he worked on, but it was the one that was suppose to replace the shuttle. I'll look into that.
I think if we commercialized the space program, we could see a vast improvement. I say could, industry is not always the best. But competition does wonders sometimes.

 

Elios....could it have been one of these? This is a web site (see link at bottom) that has several proposed shuttle replacements, most of which have been cancelled. Of note is the Rotary Rocket Roton, which was actually a commercially funded program, with no government involvement at all. There were some excellent videos of some test footage of the Roton, but with the Rotary Rocket website gone, so are the videos. I used to have them on my old comp, but the hardrive decided to imitate a cat at a scratching post, so they're long gone. Suffice it to say, it DOES work as far as the rotor blades go, with several flyby passes being shown in the video. Unfortunately, either lack of funding or government regulation got in the way of the continuation of the project. It was definitely one of the more unusual designs, but had passed all flight tests up until the demise of the program. BTW, Tom Clancy (author of The Hunt For Red October, The Sum of All Fears, etc) was one of the major investors in the company.

From the link below, click on the links on the left hand side and you will get a one-page summary of each proposal/program, with links to the actual program sites at the bottom of each page.

http://www.spaceandtech.com/spacedata/rlvs/x37_sum.shtml

[ February 04, 2003, 22:17: Message edited by: MaxxQ64 ]

 

Three and one-half tons isn't a whole lot. I guess you could get supplies out to the Space Station. And maybe figure out a way to bring back samples or laboratory animals. But, I guess it could be scaled up to the limit of the materials.

P. Roto Type

Nifty beyond anything I've even imagined!

 

Yeah....the main purpose was to ferry people and supplies....the heavy-lift capabilities were to be carried out by the next-gen unmanned boosters, i.e. Delta IV, and others.

The videos of the Roton wer pretty cool to watch and listen to. The rotors were spun up using rocket motors mounted at the tips of the rotors and fed (after the initial pump needed for startup) through the centrifugal force of the rotating blades. I believe the highest they ever got was about 500 feet, not because they couldn't go higher, but because they were doing flight testing in very small increments. Pretty amazing watching it basically slip sideways, stop, then go off 90 degrees from that, then gain altitude...even more fun to watch than a helicopter.

 

Off CNN.

You have to be kidding me. And I really do mean it. You have to be kidding me.

I'm not really arguing. I'm just saying a flat no.

Like when someone asks if they can play Neverwinter Nights on a Dell Inspiron 3200, that has 144meg of SDRam and a Pentium II 266mhz processor.

No.

Now, if you wanted to say, "We're examining the last part of the tape, and will be making a statement concerning [the tape section that has been omitted from the released footage] when we have fully analyzed and are prepared to submit a detailed report concerning the destroyed Space Shuttle and the flight recorder information."

Then that would be cool. I'd wait for it. Even if it took 6 months. I might ask about it every couple of weeks or so, just as a passing reference.

"How's that tape comming along?"

"Pretty good. We're making noticable progress on it."

"Cool."

 

7 people died. Big deal. People die every day. Americans always go over the top about this kind of stuff.

 

Actually Americans, including myself, don't make a "big deal" out of this tragedy. Space exploration is inheritly dangerous and the loss of explorers is expected - to a degree.

We expect bad things to happen. It is the nature of life.

At least they died for a noble cause. They were not killed murder-bombers in Palenstein. They were not killed by Saddam's thugs. They died for knowledge and the liberty of free thought.

They are equal, in most American's minds, of the soldiers who died at the beaches of Normandy, in the deserts of Afganistan, the forests of Yugoslavia, ad infinitum...

Please remember this: Americans despise evil. This is why we are so actively involved in the world. The world appears chaotic and vile and we can see ourselves at its savour.

As the saying goes in United States: "We must be strong for the world".

(End Nationalistic-Rant)

 

People die every day. True. More people died on that day from cancer and various other diseases. True. Does that mean that the 7 people who died on the shuttle deserve our disrespect? Not a chance. Any disaster deserves a brief moment ogf respect, not ignorant jokes, or trying to make this an issue of "American arrogance." Last I heard, since the Challenger, there have been over 180 missions. Not my math tells me that 1/180 is less than 1%. We take bigger risks going to the store. This horrible incident shows that although the American Space Program is a success (in the humanistic sense of the word -- people achieving the near impossible) but it is not a success that comes at no price whatsoever. While I'm not going to spend days mourning, I have no problem taking a moment to show some respect for the brave explorers who died -- the same way I briefly mourned the lives of the sailors killed on the Kursk, or my periodic thoughts on the miserably poor around the world. The callousness displayed by some people on this board is stunning. To use modern terminology, "dissing" the dead does not make you cool, funny, or hip. It makes you a small minded piece of crap.

 

Ok, hang on here for a second.

When the little girl from Colorado makes the headlines, I'm the guy sitting there, thinking about all the other ones in New York and Manila and Prague and Moscow and Peking; all the other ones that go missing, and don't make the headlines.

I have my little fantasy world. And I like my little fantasy world. It's on the outskirts of Kuldahar, and Nym got cut down with a Lightsaber before he got near the vault. There's sexy elven girls in thong bikinis, and nyphomatic dwarven chicks with beards.

But my little fantasy world isn't the real world. If it was, there wouldn't be little girls missing.

If you look ALL back through, ALL of my posts, I wasn't talking about the 7 dead astronauts.

I was talking about preventing any more astronauts from being killed in the future. It irks me that NASA is reporting that section of the tape is "destroyed". Physically, it just doesn't work like that. Saying that the data on it is scrambled and there are sections which are unrecoverable is one thing; but that's not what NASA is saying. NASA is saying "We managed to recover the middle section of the recorder."

And it doesn't work like a hard disk or cdrom. The flight recorder is a solid state box of NVram. It's a permanent write, just like all our jets. Except the box has been engineered to withstand a complete re-entry and 50g impact. It's got all the bells and whistles on it.

Also, I didn't mention, but I think I will now.
MAXX had a point, and I was trying to figure it out too.

So was one of the NASA engineer spokesmen. He said, the day after the shuttle went down, that there was nothing they could have done about it. In the past, NASA had used ground based "cameras" to look at the shuttle. And they just couldn't have gotten the necessary resolution to check the shuttle like that. The ground based cameras just couldn't resolve it down to the 2cm level.

The Hubble can't focus that close. So that leaves all the "spy" satellites. They'd have to have used one of the "spy" satellites to inspect the shuttle. And because the resolution is SO crazy on those, the pictures would be top-top-top secret. Even if there was a problem; the engineers would not have been allowed to see the damage. Not the picures, unless they were washed through a computer to "downgrade" the resolution to the bare minimum necessary. And even then, NASA would have to have picked a single engineer to look at the photos, and say "Yep. That's bad. Really bad.". And that's what those 1000 other engineers would have to go on.

And to top it all off, about the ONLY thing they could have done would have been a spacewalk. They'd have to have lauched a missile, with either the ablative epoxy, or a "near-fit" tile with the epoxy. And one of the astronauts would be in a space suit, outside the boat. Tied with pieces of cloth and hoses and whatever else they could have scrouged up around the thing. He (she?) would have been dangling out there, getting the supplies from the missile, and repairing the underside of the boat.

It would have been wicked kind of dangerous. And awesome kind of impressive if they had managed to pull it all off, and land the shuttle with all 7 alive.

And when it all goes back; when you draw all the lines back to the original problem.

Bad public relations. Means not as much cash. If they (NASA) had gone nutz, and had operated on the presumption that there was a problem of that magnitude, and they were wrong about it, it would have been absolutely terrible PR.

*whew*

 

EJ, I've read you posts. I was not referring to you when I mentioned callousness. All I know is that 7 people are dead. I don't know if it could have been avoided -- I don't know enough. What I do know is that to denigrate the astronauts because they are American, or for any other reason (which some others have done here), shows a very sick and twisted mind, one in which the owner can hold no pride whatsoever.