NASA’s Contest To Design the Last Shuttle Patch 164
rocamargo writes "The space shuttle program is on its way out, but the core of people who built and maintained it will live on. To honor them, NASA gave its employees the chance to design the patch that will commemorate the shuttle program, which is slated to end in September, after STS-133 flies. From the designs of 85 current and former employees, the Shuttle Program Office has selected 15 finalists. The prospective patches, presented here, will be voted on internally by NASA employees and judged by a small panel." I've been thinking a lot lately about the end of the Space Shuttle. For someone my age, the shuttle really *IS* space travel. I'm going to be really sad to see STS-133 land.
How Many shuttles? (Score:3, Interesting)
Some patches only show 5 shuttles, and dont count Enterprise, but the others do ?
Re:How Many shuttles? (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Time to move on (Score:1, Interesting)
I don't know about the private enterprise aspect of space exploration. Private enterprises are looking for profit and a better life for its shareholders and unless general well being of the public impacts the bottom line, it usually gets left out. That is the nature of a for profit private enterprise. Private enterprise wants to "conquer" space not explore space. Today we are still paying the debt in terms of war and famine from arbitrarily drawn boarders and plundered natural resources from the last great private enterprise "conquests" of the "unknown" world.
Baby steps (Score:3, Interesting)
Figure that Virgin Galactic and SpaceShipTwo are part of the baby steps needed to get to orbital manned commercial space flight. They are kind of like the barnstormers that flew from place to place around the country back in the infancy of manned flight, taking people into the air as a thrill.
I seem to recall reading that WhiteKnightTwo, the launch ship series for SpaceShipTwo, will also be used for launching other Earth to space vessels. I wouldn't be surprised if a version of SpaceShipTwo, with a reduced cargo load and a larger fuel supply, managed to reach LEO. (The first one would likely be a single pilot version.)
The hard part would be coming down, because the extra velocity would need to be shed without affecting the 'shuttlecock' wing configuration that made SpaceShipOne work.
Still, given Rutan's expertise, I wouldn't be surprised if there is an orbital flight not long before the commercial jumps start. (Yeah Cal Poly!)
Re:I'm sick of this! (Score:4, Interesting)
And on that note, the U-2 is still in active use (they call it the TR-1 now). So one of the ironies there is that the U-2 outlasted its replacement.. by a lot. If anything, it shows that there's still use for long range human recon planes (compared to spy sats). Though I guess UAVs are gonna completely take over that role soon enough.
Re:Time to move on - agree (Score:3, Interesting)
Now we have a new station that took way longer to build than we expected, which they want to deorbit soon. Frustrating!
IMO, the US should have run a long-term successor to Apollo from the end of the Apollo Applications Program (read: Skylab + Apollo/Soyuz) with the goal of setting up a permanent base on the moon with an eye on a sucessor for Mars.
But, as when you live in a house for too long (or have a job for too long), you stop being objective and stop planning for the far future. This is how we got where we are today -- a NASA that does somethings brilliantly and others not so much.
Re:Shuttle Wasted 30 years (Score:3, Interesting)
Or was it Apollo-Saturn with its promise of quick and dirty into space before the Soviets what destroyed the progression of the X-15/X-20 spaceplane program and stagnated space exploration for years.
This.
My father was a NASA engineer for Apollo. He and his colleagues were almost unanimous in their opinion that what they were doing was a neat trick, but a distraction from their real business of building spaceplanes. He also worked for what was then Martin Marietta on the early stages of the Shuttle design, in the "big bird / little bird" days, and pretty much left aerospace in disgust when he saw how things were going. We really ended up with the worst of both worlds -- an expensive, shoddily built spaceplane attached to a big dumb booster -- and frankly Apollo had as much to do with that as STS.
That depends... (Score:3, Interesting)
see a shuttle launch in person?
I was at Kennedy over the summer, and I was fortunate enough to be able to see likely the last time we will ever have two shuttles on platform simultaneously. However my timing down there was incompatible with seeing a launch, and I learned something from our NASA tour guide about the launches that I did not know before.
Very, very, few people are allowed to get even somewhat close to the launch. Granted, you can get close enough to feel some of the shockwave, you won't be able to get nearly as close as the media. And unless you have a special pass (which are extremely hard to get) you'll be a long ways away and you'll have to deal with insane traffic at insane times.
As much as I would love to have seen a launch, I think in the end it works out better to watch it on TV.
Don't tell slashdot (Score:3, Interesting)
it sure would be nice if mankind was a little bolder.
Don't tell slashdot - slashdot can't do anything about that problem. Tell your US representative. Tell your US Senator. Send a letter to the VP and POTUS. Contact every federal-level elected politician that represents you. The budget - and hence the missions - for NASA are dictated by congress. The NASA budget keeps getting cut because the politicians believe the American people are OK with that happening. If you are not OK with it then you owe it to yourself, your representation, and the rest of the country to say so.
Re:After the naming contest what would you do? (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually, no payload is expendable, whether it be school teachers or satellites. When your truck can randomly explode with the brightness of the sun, any loss is a bad loss.You think that people wont be up in arms if an ARES V fails and loses 75 tons of supplies, satellites, science equipment or ANYTHING else. especially compared to the shuttles payload of about 25 tons. it would be like losing the dollar value of three shuttle payloads.
and about your "easier to retrieve" comment, i dont think that there has been any reason to separate the shuttle from the SRB's/fuel tank...ever. And even the ARES system doesnt allow for NASA to "pull" the crew module form the unlaunched SRB.
And about those SRB's...i think those were actually the problem with the Challenger, not the cargo or the crew. I dont know if you have really looked into ARES I, but it is nothing but an SRB with a crew module on top. Even Werner Braun Vaughn thought i was a bad idea to send people in to space on SRB's.
And again, the HL-20 isnt practical because its not cost effective to build a few multi-use vehicles, as opposed to using the cheap, reliable Soyuz or another variant.