Discovery Set to Launch July 13 161
An anonymous reader writes "The US space shuttle is set to launch July 13 for the first time in nearly two and a half years, after being grounded following the 2003 Columbia disaster, NASA said today. NASA experts held a final 'flight readiness review' meeting on Wednesday and Thursday to make a final decision."
Re:whaa? (Score:5, Insightful)
The space business is a dangerous game and everyone used to accepted that. This was when astronauts were larger than life Supermen rather than scientists. I just want to know when the threat of death became an unacceptable risk for exploration.
My memories (Score:5, Insightful)
My dad is gone now, and I'm not sure what he would think about things now. I think he would be sad. We have angered countries, lost landmarks and shuttles have fallen. I would not want him to know these things, and I bear them now in his memory, but maybe, just maybe, we can regain our standing as a nation and in space....
Quite odd (Score:2, Insightful)
Yet less than a week later, the same news networks were saying that a major commission had concluded that NASA infact hadn't met their targets, lumped with a whole lot of criticism of the space agency as a whole, too.
But as this topic confirms the launch will go ahead apparantly regardless of what this commission found? I wondered if anyone could clarify the situation at large? (I'm not trolling or anything here, just geniunely puzzled about the table of events leading up to Discovery's launch.)
Re:whaa? (Score:4, Insightful)
One aspect of the recent tragedy was that those astronauts died on nothing more than a glorified taxi run. Their mission contributed nothing to science, it had no scientific reason to take place
The sooner we re-focus on real exploration in space the better, and we can do it without the shuttle or the money pit that is the ISS.
NASA needs to stop wasting money and get on with unmanned exploration of Mars, Europa and elsewhere, replace Hubble, and launch the terrestrial planet finder. All these projects are being pushed back to make way for this current fad of unscientific garbage that explores NOTHING.
No Guts, No Glory? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:The second round into the same hole... (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: whaa? (Score:3, Insightful)
> I mean granted, I'm sure they know what they are doing but what happens if we lose Discovery too?
It would surely mean the end of our manned space program.
It might well mean the end of our entire space program, since it looks like the unfunded Mars mission serves no purpose other than to kill our unmanned space program.
Re:whaa? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:whaa? (Score:2, Insightful)
The chance of dying on the space shuttle is basically 2 out of 113 based on past history. The percentage of US troops in Iraq that have died is around 1% (1700 out of 170,000 or something like that).
Of course no one has ever died on any of the unmanned interplanetary missions. Maybe the lesson is that we should be doing more of those. What Iraq and the Shuttle have in common is they are BOTH horribly expensive, deadly, wastes of money. At least there's no draft for Shuttle astronauts.
Re:How can you say it is safer Safer? (Score:2, Insightful)
More people have died, but the shuttle program has lasted much, much longer than any of the previous programs and has flown many more times than all the other manned missions combined.
So (# deaths)/(length of program) is lower, and (# deaths)/(# flights) is lower, thus making it safer on average than any of the previous projects.