Atlantis Blasts Off On Final Mission 143
shuz writes "Space shuttle Atlantis lifted off today on its STS-132 mission to the International Space Station — the final flight for the venerable vehicle. The mission involves three spacewalks over 12 days (PDF), during which the team will replace six batteries on the port truss which store energy from solar panels on that truss, bolt on a spare space-to-ground Ku-band antenna, and attach a new tool platform to Canada's Dextre robotic arm."
NASA has video of the historic launch and reader janek78 adds this quote from the mission summary: "Atlantis lifted off on its maiden voyage on Oct. 3, 1985, on mission 51-J. Later missions included the launch of the Magellan probe to Venus on STS-30 in May 1989, Galileo interplanetary probe to Jupiter on STS-34 in October 1989, the first shuttle docking to the Mir Space Station on STS-71 in June1995, and the final Hubble servicing mission on STS-125 in May 2009."
Amusingly .. (Score:1, Interesting)
As I refresh /. rhythmbox is playing "The final countdown".
Re:Why, oh why? (Score:3, Interesting)
Because the supply chain for Shuttles has been disrupted some time ago (FYI - yes, "before Obama"). Trying to restart it now to keep those costly mistakes flying would be a task not that far from a new space programme.
Re:Why, oh why? (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Why, oh why? (Score:0, Interesting)
Simple. Every government dollar not spent on social spending, re-addressing social injustices, is a wasted dollar in the eyes of the current administration. Who needs space exploration and exploitation when there is still racism and income inequity to conquer in the untamed fly-over country?
Re:Why, oh why? (Score:1, Interesting)
A) Sell NASA and give its research to taxpayers. Essentially everything owned by NASA would go to the highest bidder with the understanding of a few goals they must accomplish. The research would go to any American company wishing to deal in spaceflight.
or
B) Give NASA proper funding to do things.
We currently have a crippled private sector (taxpayer information being withheld) and crippled public sector (no funding) and it doesn't work.
Why is it that we can give tons of money to failing businesses that are going to fail eventually but can't give money to improve national defense and research (and yes, supremacy in space allows for supremacy in war as many of the technologies go hand in hand)?
Re:Why, oh why? (Score:3, Interesting)
They shutdown the Shuttle supply chain years ago. A lot of parts are now irreplaceable. The Shuttle was canceled by a Republican Administration and congress. The initial follow-on program with a lot of tested hardware (OSP and related programs were actually at the flight testing stage) was canceled by Griffin and turned into a jobs program.
Also, on a somewhat bureaucratic side, but with real implications, the Shuttle's Certificate of Airworthiness needed recertification this year. It could not pass any real safety inspection. They would have had to waiver most of their certification criteria. And, at its current demonstrated safety level of around 98%, that amounts to a 50% chance of Shuttle loss over the next 30 launches. Nor is there any real expectation that Orion would have been ready in 2015. Constellation is not a good engineering design. You could pour money and get a marginally useful vehicle, but its not *necessary*. The O'Keefe plan of building manned capsule for existing launch vehicles is a much more compact realistic approach than concurrently building a manned capsule and launch vehicle.
The funny thing is that there is actually no official "manned certification" in NASA. No set criteria. No testing procedure. Nothing. The closest thing to a certification is the FAA's certificate of airworthiness and that is a completely different creature. Man-rated is a political question usually used to get funding for another vehicle.
Last point - there are very few, if any, people in NASA who have actually developed a working manned launch vehicle. The Shuttle was designed 40 years ago. And most of it was contracted out. Since Shuttle, NASA's development of vehicles has been good at the R&D level, but once ramped up to flight testing, it becomes just plain dismal.
Look, the reality is that we would have had a working prototype flying now had they not brought Constellation into the picture. X-38 and the X-37 programs were concurrent and shared pretty much the same design concept and programs. (I would even go so far as argue they were the same program saved by the military after NASA dropped the ball). It is not out of the question that the X-37 could be adapted for manned use by keeping the shell and combining the forward section with the cargo bay. It would be tight, but so is Soyuz. Or, they could modify the X-37 to use the parasail used by X-38. Either modification would be a lot faster than anything NASA has proposed wrt Constellation.
Re:I outlasted Atlantis (Score:3, Interesting)
Time flies. I remember getting Chicken pox and being over-joyed because I got to stay home from school and watch all the coverage of the first Columbia mission, and then I was out at the cape (for most of the week), till Challenger went up (and blew up). Wish I could find the Kodak Disc Film (oooo trendy).
Here's hoping the next launch vehicle (Government or Commercial) helps gets us that much closer to a permanent place in space.
Re:Why, oh why? (Score:3, Interesting)
First of all the space shuttle is mostly 70's technology. Second of all there is no reason why "old" should be equated with "inferior". Soyuz is the most reliable manned spacecraft and it has direct roots all the way back to the start of the Soviet space program. Old can also mean simpler and less likely to suffer from mysterious technology failures. I have lab equipment older than you and it ticks along nicely and serves its purpose just as well as it ever did.
Re:12 days? (Score:3, Interesting)
Not quite. That allows too much freedom of motion and visibility.
Try an arctic survival suit over a wetsuit with a full motorcycle helmet, faceplate down, wearing hockey gloves, carrying a hundred pound backpack, all while hanging upside down in the dark. Now begin by changing the batteries and...