Discovery Prepares for Return 189
Kailash Nadh writes "Discovery's astronauts packed up their stuff on Friday as they prepared to undock from the international space station now that NASA has cleared the shuttle to return to Earth next week.
Their most difficult task before leaving the station was the maneuvering of a huge cargo container filled with 2 1/2 years worth of trash into the shuttle's payload bay. Once back on Earth, the items would either be disposed of or returned to researchers."
Hauling The Trash... (Score:2, Interesting)
You would think that they could hurl this stuff into the sun or send it into a de-orbit burn. A certain engineer of late would be offended if someone called his ship a "garbage scow". Alas, I guess that's where the shuttle program is heading.
Unmanned flights (Score:4, Interesting)
Why is this filed under 'Science' (Score:3, Interesting)
NASA uses the word 'science' as a figleaf. What they mainly do is engineering, and they badly do what they should have perfected 20 years ago.
Microchips have become routine, brain surgery has become routine, but in 'rocket science' there's been no progress. It's a process and internal culture issue, and it isn't being fixed.
Re:Unmanned flights (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Hauling The Trash... (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah. Calculate how much energy that would take. It's actually pretty hard to hit the sun from here.
Bringing it down in the shuttle is actually far and away the easiest way to get rid of it. Getting it up there was expensive. Once the shuttle is there, and the bay's empty anyway, bringing anything back is not that big a deal. Some extra mass in the deorbit calculations.
Why would we spend the time and money to build and attach and pilot a remote deorbit pack when we have the shuttle coming back anyway?
The Enterprise had 400-odd people on it. I guarantee they had some pretty extensive waste recycling systems. But they had matter transmutation, so they didn't actually have to deal with disposal, they could just feed mass in, and get food/water/gold/clothing/whatever they needed back out again. If you think about it, people in a society with that technology would soon come to view looking at actual trash as very disgusting.
Metamoderation and SPACE DRAMA (Score:2, Interesting)
How the hell is this insightful? Even a "talking head" reporter on TV wouldn't say this drivel.
Anyone else just immediately get the urge to metamoderate, every single day?
God, I am so SICK of the space opera that is NASA. I don't give a god damn FUCK about the shuttle, and the only reason the networks are covering it so closely is because if the shuttle does disintegrate (thus becoming a major repeat "disaster") they'd be caught with their pants down if they didn't.
Every local nightly news report the last couple of days has opened with "breaking news" about what Astronaut Bob is doing. "oh, he pulled on a piece of fabric." "Oh, he might have damaged something else." "oh, here's the crew, are they doomed? Let's ask them." "oh, here they are collecting trash from the station, how exciting."
Re:Aldrin (Score:3, Interesting)
People with field experience should be consulted when the situation warrants it, but making the "part of the decision structure" is probably not a good idea. Astronauts have already demonstrated by their participation in the program that they are willing to make irrational sacrifices for a ride into space. Participation of people with that kind of psychological profile only risks wasting more money on unnecessary space flights.
Decisions about the shuttle program should be made by impartial and disinterested scientists and engineers, in a broadly-based peer review process, based on the scientific and technological merits alone.
Note that Aldrin doesn't seem to question the merit of manned space travel, only the vehicle.