Can the US Still Lead In Space Despite Shuttle's End? 365
Hugh Pickens writes "NASA Administrator Charles F. Bolden says that the future is bright and promises that one day humans will land on Mars. 'American leadership in space will continue for at least the next half-century because we've laid the foundation for success,' the nation's space chief said in a speech at the National Press Club. 'When I hear people say that the final shuttle flight marks the end of U.S. human space flight, you all must be living on another planet. We are not ending human space flight. We are recommitting ourselves to it.' Bolden says within a year private companies can take over the process of sending cargo shipments into orbit and by 2015 industry can take over astronaut transport, freeing NASA to focus on the long-term goals of reaching beyond Earth's shadow. 'Do we want to keep repeating ourselves or do we want to look at the big horizon?' says Bolden. 'My generation touched the moon today, NASA, and the nation, wants to touch an asteroid, and eventually send a human to Mars.' A group of former astronauts and other critics have blasted the agency and the Obama administration for ending the 30-year-old shuttle program, once the cornerstone of NASA. 'NASA's human spaceflight program is in substantial disarray with no clear-cut mission in the offing. We will have no rockets to carry humans to low-Earth orbit and beyond for an indeterminate number of years,' write Neil Armstrong, Jim Lovell and Gene Cernan. 'After a half-century of remarkable progress, a coherent plan for maintaining America's leadership in space exploration is no longer apparent.'"
Re:Not the end of HUMAN spaceflight...just AMERICA (Score:5, Informative)
SpaceX has already sent an unmanned Dragon capsule into orbit around the Earth [wikipedia.org]. They have a contract with NASA for cargo flights to the ISS, and are developing the manned version of the Dragon with an integrated abort system (see this video [youtube.com] for a demonstration).
American spaceflight is NOT coming to an end. It's just not going to be a NASA monopoly any more.
we have more probes on mars then any other (Score:5, Informative)
we have more probes on mars then any other nation.
And look at mars rover that lasted for YEARS longer then planned.
Re:keep dreaming (Score:4, Informative)
'American leadership in space will continue for at least the next half-century because we
- aha, keep dreaming.
The US bond crisis is coming, followed immediately by the currency crisis. I bet there will be more pressing needs, like more weapons to start resource wars against multiple countries much before the US will once again be able to go far into space in its new ships, never mind having humans on board there....
While you may well be correct, remember that the percentage of the GDP that the US expends for space exploration is pretty much a rounding error [thespacereview.com]. We can afford it.
Re:Rockets are just too inefficient (Score:4, Informative)
we can drop a bomb anywhere on the planet now, it's called an ICBM.
Re:I'm not a nationalist, so I really don't care. (Score:5, Informative)
"Besides, what does NASA do for me anyway?"
Wow, I know they say there are no stupid questions but there sure seem to be a lot of inquisitive idiots.
You want to know what NASA and the space race has done for you....Look down at your keyboard, its attached to a computer.
Microprocessors were derived from the space race. As well as the satellite communications that you may use to connect with other idiots.
Not enough for you...heres some more things that were by-products of the space race and the space age.
Kidney dialysis machines
Computer-Aided Tomography (CAT) scan
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)
Freeze-dried food
Cordless power tools & appliances
Disposable diapers
Rotary blood pump
Fiber optics
Satellite dish
Bar codes
Ear thermometer
Fire-resistant fabrics
Smoke detector
Thermal gloves and boots
New techniques for machining and casting exotic metals like magnesium and titanium.
Carbon fiber epoxy, and all kinds of composite materials
CNC machining.
Microwave communications.
Huge improvements in photovoltaics (solar cells to generate electricty).
Solid state memory
Satellite photography
velcro.
And about 1,400 documented NASA inventions that have benefited U.S. industry.
Oh yeah did I mention TANG!!!!
I called you an idiot several times above. I may be wrong. You may just be an ungrateful, unimaginative Luddite. But I'm betting your both an an ungrateful, unimaginative Luddite and an idiot.
If you dont like it, you can always turn off your computer since NASA and the space race never did anything for you any damn way.
Re:USA: best science for the buck (Score:2, Informative)
i could care less if the US is seen as the "leader" in space exploration.
That would imply you do care about how the US is perceived. Looking at the context within the rest of your post, though... the correct phrase would've been "I couldn't care less".
Signed,
Your Friendly Neighborhood Grammar Nazi
Re:One Era Ends To Make Way For Another (Score:5, Informative)
Why the shuttle has wings at all:
http://history.nasa.gov/sts1/pages/scot.html [nasa.gov]
Re:One Era Ends To Make Way For Another (Score:3, Informative)
The shuttle is in it's current form because:
SRBs are used because the fly-back booster (think bigger shuttle to carry little shuttle to altitude and Mach 6) cost too much.
The large delta-wings are to give the shuttle the 1500 mile cross range it needed to land at it's point of launch from a single polar orbit, from Vandenburgh (KSC is only suitable for conventional orbits as these launch over water).
The 60 foot long cargo bay was to accommodate military satellites - think HST looking down. The shuttle was to take all of the military payloads in order to get sufficient payloads to reduce the cost-per-flight.
The space shuttle concept existed as a low cost shuttle to and from orbit. It's mission was to service a couple of 50 man space stations in low orbit, interplanetary vehicles and a space tug, servicing geosynchronous and the moon space station and colony. With the cancellation of these missions (inc. Saturn & Skylab), it fell back on delivering all other payloads. This also mandated the 15 foot diameter payload bay to accommodate space station sections sufficiently large to be habitable.
The shuttle's main failures were:
The turnaround time for an orbiter was supposed to be 14 weeks. Unable to do that, costs skyrocketed.
To illustrate, the original mission rate would have meant more missions that have ever flown in the past 30 years would have been flown in the first three years.
Its original mission came late - the space station. Rather than appearing towards the end of the shuttle's life, it should have been at the beginning.
The programme's main failures were:
Its requirements were skewed just so that the US would have something for manned spaceflight. This compromised the overall vehicle.
The space shuttle was only to be small, although necessary, part of the manned space programme. It didn't make sense to be all of it.
Not enough active development was done, Arguably the shuttles should have been developed and replaced with better concepts as experience was gained. This was done to some extent with upgrades and newer shuttles.
The major, major failing was with the shuttle operations. The shuttle should not be operated when it is too cold, and it should have been grounded when it was behaving in ways that weren't tested. i.e. foam shedding was something the TPS was never designed to cope with. They should have redesigned and tested.
The Space Shuttle is a spectacularly impressive piece of engineering, it will be missed. To be properly replaced there have to be missions that the US is willing to commit to seriously, with the appropriate levels of funding. Without the appropriate missions, and hence requirements, there is the risk of producing another compromised vehicle.
To conclude, we shouldn't focus on the vehicles, it is the missions that are important.
Obama didn't cancel the Shuttle, Bush did (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I'm not a nationalist, so I really don't care. (Score:5, Informative)
This list seems at best dubious in many aspects.
MRI, for example, was an outgrowth of magnetic resonance studies on chemicals that had been going on for a long time, which was invented in england in the university of Nottingham.
I'd like to know how NASA influenced velcro - which was patented in 1948 in switzerland.
Thermal gloves and boots - what? I think you'll find the Eskimo (inuit) got there first.
The incas did freeze drying naturally hundreds of years ago, and freeze dried coffee was available around WWII.
Disposable diapers have a long history, and were around well before the 60s.
Kidney dialysis was done in WWII.
These are just some examples that jumped out at me as unlikely.
Re:One Era Ends To Make Way For Another (Score:4, Informative)
There are a few reasons for that. First, the entire Shuttle paradigm--a big vehicle that carries humans and a pretty good amount of cargo, and is reusable--has been pretty well discredited by Shuttle's poor performance. Carrying cargo and humans together has been shown to be inefficient, since the safety standards for each are so different, and cargo just doesn't need people around to manage it, high-profile failures like Skylab, Hubble, or Palapa 2/Westar 6 notwithstanding. People would be (rightly) very skeptical that a follow-on vehicle with the same design could perform much better, even with better technology. That means that any follow-on would probably be much smaller, just a crew transport, IOW similar to the vehicles proposed during the Orbital Space Plane project back before Columbia, or Orion and the other proposed crew transport vehicles.
Second, many of the details of the Shuttle design have proven unsafe. Any follow-on vehicle, for example, would have to be a series-staged vehicle, like most rockets, as opposed to the Shuttle's parallel-staged design in order to avoid damage from foam shedding, as with the Columbia accident, or booster failure, as with the Challenger disaster. Along with the above point, this means that any new vehicle would basically be a completely new design, rather than just a copy of the Shuttle aeroframe.
Third, we've had advances in materials science and aerospace engineering that mean we could do better now in terms of the details of the Shuttle's design that they could back then, many of them gained due to Shuttle experience. We've flown a winged vehicle through high-Mach regimes at very high altitudes in the Shuttle program, something that hadn't been done before. So, by using a new design, we could produce a vehicle that did better than Shuttle. Again, a reason to simply not copy Shuttle with better internals.
Fourth, doing so would be very expensive. Since, as noted above, the Shuttles have not been particularly successful, there's no reason to spend a lot of money copying them. Instead, people are spending money on copying Shuttle's big unique capability--ie., crew transport--while cutting out all the irrelevancies that cost a lot of money. Even then it's expensive, but you skip the need to design a lot of stuff and it works out to be cheaper than trying to also build the carrier rocket, a big payload bay, etc.
countertrolling & the trolltalk.com crew (Score:2, Informative)
Cheat the moderation system - here's where countertrolling explains what he's doing while he trolls others (to his fellow trolltalk.com friends) to downmod them via his registered account, logout, & ac stalk, harass, and troll them:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2245866&cid=36491652 [slashdot.org]
Here's where countertrolling's "troll mechanics" for downmodding others is explained in detail by someone that got sick of it happening:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2271908&cid=36579618 [slashdot.org]
As far as bogus up moderations, the trolltalk.com bunch (tomhudson, countertrolling, & others) collectively "team up" to upmod one another, in teams, as favors to one another.
(Talk about low, and bogus!)
---
In fact, here's what countertrolling says about it, why he does it, and to all of us here:
"What the skiddies here don't understand is that I don't give a shit about dumbass 'karma' on the internet.. I'm here for the jollies with nothing to lose or fight for.. watching them destroy their world.. They can go absolutely nuts as far as I'm concerned.. It's nothing but pure entertainment (and data points) for me and mine... Tragicomedy is probably the best word I can think of to describe it" - by countertrolling (1585477) on Thursday June 30, @10:26AM (#36622502) Journal
QUOTED VERBATIM FROM -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2281808&cid=36622502 [slashdot.org]
Sounds like a sick individual to me.
(Don't get lured into their journals either. That's their main goal along with getting these data points that way. Just ignore them and they will be powerless before you know it (no mod points)).