Atlantis Expected to Launch Today 104
PreacherTom writes "Following recent delays, NASA makes its fifth attempt to get Atlantis off the launchpad at 11:15 a.m. EDT today. NASA stopped Friday's launch try only 45 minutes before its scheduled departure for a faulty fuel tank sensor: the same glitch that thwarted two previous missions. The launch delay cost NASA $616,000, and if the mission is scrubbed again, the space agency must abandon for a few weeks its efforts to send the shuttle off on a construction mission to the International Space Station."
Gone (Score:5, Informative)
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Looks like a perfect launch. Just saw the main fuel tank seperate. Godspeed astronauts!
I *would* have watched it, but nobody covered it (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I *would* have watched it, but nobody covered i (Score:5, Informative)
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I think that guy should be fired (no offense to him personally). It's starting to sound like an advertisement. Put descriptive text at the bottom of the screen and let everyone watch the show. It doesn't need narration, as spectacular things are trivialized when some moron does "on-the-scene"-type reporting.
Remember "go at throttle up"?
Re:I *would* have watched it, but nobody covered i (Score:5, Interesting)
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I stayed up late to watch it! (Score:1)
Townie Syndrome (Score:2)
I live in Washington, DC. If I had a dime for everytime I heard someone say "I never visit the museums, the monuments, etc..." I'd be a billionaire. And the museums here are free. Not free as in "we're going to make you feel guilty at the door". No. Really Free. Nobody bothers you at all, except that now there are metal detectors.
Anyway, I think that when something is right in your own backyard, (sort of), there is a tendancy to not appreciate it. Here in the US, there are a lot of people that pay
Re:I *would* have watched it, but nobody covered i (Score:2)
The only times programming should be interrupted is acts of terrorism or large natural disasters, not expensive scientific experiments. There are things happening all over the world that hav
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Why ? The chances are that if you didn't already know about it, then neither will affect you directly in any way. There's no reason why either should get immediate coverage. Besides, terrorism thrives on attention; interrupting the programming for it is a great way of helping terrorists spread terror.
The best response for terrorism is to continue the programming as nor
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Exactly.
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Re:I *would* have watched it, but nobody covered i (Score:1)
A little late there cappy... (Score:1, Funny)
t minus 9 minutes (Score:1)
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It's up! (Score:2)
A little late... it already launched... (Score:1, Redundant)
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Are you some kind of crazy, boy!?
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So... (Score:5, Funny)
I don't even like the show that much, but to me, Atlantis == Stargate, especially when I'm just waking up.
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Well... (Score:1)
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You've got a point, though.
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Cost? (Score:2)
Was that money spent on things it wouldn't otherwise have been spent on? IE, is it a marginal cost or just that day's "share" of a fixed cost? Did it have to get taken from some other budget (either within NASA or not)?
NASA accounting always confuses me.
Re:Cost? (Score:4, Informative)
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I suppose it could well be difficult to pump out the LH2 and actually recover enough of it to be relevant... that stuff is *really* hard to handle.
Now, to be fair, it's not (entirely) unreasonable to ignore the LOX costs... NASA pays a few pennies a pound for it, and it's worlds easier to handle.
Re:Cost? (Score:5, Interesting)
While we are at it, the genius that wrote the article also included the following:
If Atlantis cannot lift off on Saturday, it will have to wait at least until late September and even then, NASA will have to waive a post-Sept. 11 rule that says launches must be conducted in daylight so that the spaceship can be photographed for signs of damage.
Post Sept. 11? WTF? That's post COLUMBIA ACCIDENT rule. Wow, that's really bad. Evidentally the news drone at ABC churning out web stories must have been working on a Sept. 11 anniversary piece about the same time and mixed up his disasters....
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It went ok. (Score:4, Informative)
Flash evaporator (Score:1)
huh ? (Score:4, Funny)
Cheesy, but true (Score:5, Interesting)
When someone asks me why we have to spend so much money on space exploration, I should have them watch a launch with my daughters. It's all about the thrill of exploration, the daring of it, the wonder of fellow humans climbing up off this planet and touching the stars.
I can't wait to see what we do next.
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I'm all for private space exploration, and I can see the justification for government-funded unmanned space exploration, but the government has no
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Don't confuse grammer with typing errors.
Re:Cheesy, but true (Score:4, Insightful)
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Face it, it only reason "space exploration" is government territory is that the USA wants to turn space into the future battleground. It's more for military reasons than for any of those you listed.
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"Exploration" is not the same as "travel". The topic is "exploration".
I'm fairly sure the people at JPL will be very surprised to learn their missions are really reconnaissance for the military invasions of Mars and Titan and Wild 2.
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I wonder if, in their minds, they may have thought of the shuttle on-pad as a 'toy'
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My older daughter asked, "are there people on there?" I told her that there were. She said, "it must be cool to ride on a space ship." Yeah, I told her, I imagine it is. "I hope I get to go on that ride someday." I remember hoping the same thing. I hope that she gets the chance without having to come up with the current price of a ticket.
Cynical, but true (Score:3, Insightful)
When someone asks me why we have to spend so much money on space exploration, I should have them watch a launch with my daughters. It's all about the thrill of exploration, the daring of it, the wonder of fellow humans climbing up off this planet and touching the stars.
Um...not to be cynical, and Slashdotters hate being reminded of these things, but your daughters are in awe because they don't know that:
Re:Cynical, but true (Score:4, Insightful)
good luck getting a ticket (Score:2)
Here are some questions for you:
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As for liveable conditions, find a solar system body with water, and establish an underground colony. Not easy, not cheap, but possible without terraforming.
Let me know when you've got a working plan to save the environment (how many decades just to slow down our current rate of consumption of nonrenewables?), gramps, and we can discuss this again.
I'm sick of this cynical old-fartism.
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Reminds me of current United States politics, the you're with us or you're against us philosophy. What we need is civil discourse and SuperBanana's post is just that.
Mod it up.
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I agree that the post shouldn't be lost to below modded threshold, though I disagree with the points in the content of the post. I responded to them below. Posts like this one are why I browse with +5 to Troll. Aside from missing some truly funny posts that get modded Troll, the Slashdot groupthink beats down any that pose an alternate view to a popular opinion.
I have no idea if the poster was really trolling or not, but when something is modded Troll, people are less likely to respond with a thought o
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When someone asks me why we have to spend so much money on space exploration, I should have them watch a launch with my daughters. It's all about the thrill of exploration, the daring of it, the wonder of fellow humans climbing up off this planet and touching the stars.
Um...not to be cynic
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It costs $16BN a year to keep NASA running
And it costs $129BN a year to run the Department of Agriculture.
And the US government spent $71BN for the Department of Education (mind you, the federal government operates ZERO schools)
One in five of their classmates go hungry at home or at school because their parents can't afford to give them enough food,
The National School Lunch Program spent $7.1 billion in FY 2003. http://www.fns.usda.gov/cnd/Lunch/AboutLunch/NSLP F ac [usda.gov]
Re:Cynical, but true (Score:5, Informative)
I'm going to be cynical of your post here, troll, just FYI. There's a reason I view at +5 to Troll, and not just because some of them are funny. Someone might read your points and accept them at face value if there is no counter. Unlikely, but I will address them. Mods, give the parent +1 Underrated. A true +5 Troll is rare, and the points should be addressed, not lost below threshold.
It costs $16BN a year to keep NASA running of which $3BN is political pork, and a fair bit goes towards research which is primarily for the purposes of weapons and has nothing to do with the "quest for knowledge".
Yes, $16 billion dollars is a Big number. But the total 2007 budget for the US Government is 2.77 trillion. NASA's budget is a bit under 0.6% of the total. That is nothing. The pork contained in the budget is not just NASA's problem, but is a problem across the entire US Gov budget. Fix it there. Now, can you list the research items contained in NASA's budget that go toward the sole purpose of weapons? I need sources. Besides, you can turn anything into a weapon if you try hard enough. I can give you many examples that have helped in our "quest for knowledge" if you want them.
The ISS, which this mission supports, is falling apart after just a few years in space. It was supposed to last JUST 10 years after final assembly, and it hasn't even been fully assembled. Failures have ranged from oxygen generators to basic handtools to attitude correction gyros. The price tag was $100BN; that money largely went to our nation's (and other nation's) defense contractors, which build the majority of the hardware NASA uses.
Falling apart? Sources please. As far as I know, the ISS is not falling from the sky, but has been manned and operational (albeit with a reduced crew), and construction is now moving forward. Individual component failures are not unexpected. Space is hard. People seem to have this idea that we just pop up there every once in a while, hang around for a few weeks, and come back down. We're escaping our planet's gravity well, and building a huge complex outside of it in a harsh environment. This environment is a hard vacuum, filled with radiation, and has no gravity. It's like building a cruise ship in the middle of a choppy ocean, without a dock or support, only little boats. You're upset about some repairable component failures? As to the price tag...so what? 100 billion spread out over the project timeline isn't that much. What does it matter which companies got the contract to build it, as long as it is completed to spec? It isn't like these "defense contractors" are pure evil; they employ people that build things.
The "smoke" from the solid rocket engines contains huge amounts of hydrochloric acid.
I'll give you this one. Yes, it sucks. But in the larger picture, the damage it is doing is nothing compared to the current global levels of pollution. If there was a feasible method that involved zero pollution, I'm sure we would use it. The simple fact is, any fuel we have right now that provides enough thrust to escape the gravity of Earth will give off some pollution. We'll never be able to find cleaner alternatives if we don't do this research in the first place. This actually is rocket science. (Hey, at least we don't use an Orion Drive, which is theoretically cheap by comparison, but gives off a bunch of nuclear fallout, right?)
One in five of their classmates go hungry at home or at school because their parents can't afford to give them enough food, and the government currently spends slightly more than NASA's budget to feed 7 million children a year a decent lunch. Let's not even get started about basic supply and book shortages. We're supposedly the most powerful nation in the world, but we can't but enough [food in the stomachs / textbooks in the hands] of our children so that they can recieve a sufficient education to support themselves later in life, i
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I can't think of any legitimate reasoning for docking people's hard-earned wages in order to entertain your children with giant fireworks.
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I can hire someone to draw a cartoon that will out-awe NASA with your daughters, and I bet I can do it for less money.
Impressing people isn't why we passed the 16th Amendment. There may be good reasons to spend everyone's money without asking them what they want, on expensive manned space launches (I hesitate to call it "exploration") but as much as your kids enjoyed watching it, that ain't one of them.
Liftoff! (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/launch/
$616,000? (Score:2)
Thank goodness it succeeded (Score:2)
A little late on this article (Score:3, Informative)
NASA makes its fifth attempt to get Atlantis off the launchpad at 11:15 a.m. EDT today.
Launched? (Score:2, Funny)
Dang that's fast (Score:2)
So, I guess the question is "How fast can Atlantis make the Kessel Run?" My gues is at least 30 parsecs.
/. editor to try again to make launch date (Score:5, Funny)
UPDATED: Sat 11:22AM: He missed the mark.... Again."
Tax Dollars (Score:1)
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Whenever we've hired a new guy (I work for the US government), one of the first things I point out to them is:
- Your typical government engineer costs the government ~$200K to employ.
- Your typical engineer may be paying ~$10,000 in federal income tax.
In other words, the tax burden of 20 people just like them is going to keep them employed for the public good. Please make as good of use of their money as you hope other folks are doing with yours.
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All of the shuttle orbiters are named after sailing ships which were involved in research or exploration.
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It launched... (Score:1)
Downloadable recorded launch video. (Score:2)