Shuttle Makes Rare Night Landing 57
goG writes "After over 200 orbits around the Earth, space shuttle Endeavour landed safely in Florida on Sunday, ending a 14-day mission to the International Space Station. NASA pressed ahead with the Sunday night landing even though poor weather on both coasts threatened any touchdown attempt. Unusually, rain clouds were expected at both Edwards Air Force base in California and the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. The return marked just the 23rd time the space shuttle has landed at night, out of 130 flights."
So...about one in five? (Score:5, Insightful)
One in five isn't terribly rare...
Re:So...about one in five? (Score:5, Funny)
Yup, it's awfully rare. 1 in 6 would be horribly rare. *Terribly* rare is 1 in 7.
Negative rarity scale:
4 - Icky
5 - Awful
6 - Horrible
7 - Terrible
8 - Disgusting
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The actual ratio depends on whether you are counting flights, or just landings.
Scared the piss out of me, too. (Score:5, Funny)
Apparently it came in from West to East, because the boom made me jump out of my chair and scared my poor cats witless.
They should warn a guy. :)
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They did warn people who watch the news and actually follow the shuttle program on. Besides if you live here, how could you not know about it?
The sound of it is just as wonderful as the sound of the shuttle leaving the earth to orbit this planet. It makes a person pretty proud to hear that sound. It means our astronauts are almost home safe and sound.
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I've found that watching the news leads to increased alcohol consumption. Besides, even if I *had* known it was coming, when one is dozing in a computer chair, it's jarring. :)
Re:Scared the piss out of me, too. (Score:5, Insightful)
Apparently it came in from West to East,
I'd be surprised if it ever came in from any other direction...
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Apparently it came in from West to East,
I'd be surprised if it ever came in from any other direction...
I dunno why you were modded 'funny', because post-coffee thought seems to make sense.
Re:Scared the piss out of me, too. (Score:4, Informative)
Here's the landing track:
http://www.nasa.gov/images/content/428601main_KSC217_mid_nooa.gif [nasa.gov]
Didn't *scare* me, just caught me unaware..."BOOOM! Hey..thunder? Nowait, shuttle!". I just moved to Florida, so the shuttle experiences are new (I drug my ass out of bed at 0400 2 weeks ago to see the sky light up from the night launch).
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Yep. Right over my town.
Scared me because my not-all-that-healthy mom was in the house. I thought she took a fall.
Amusingly, she thought the same thing about me.
Re:Scared the piss out of me, too. (Score:4, Funny)
They should warn a guy. :)
They did. Unfortunately, you were not that guy.
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Just a guess here, I'm no expert on the subject, but with federal funding, I'm sure the for _profit_ outfits might find reason to invest more into R&D.
Hang a big suitcase full of money in front of a business with the capability of making what you want and I can guarantee you if there is enough in that case, they will give you what you want.
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I appreciate the pull of private industry to space.
But big suitcases of money from the government is not real cash, and you know it. Business works truly on real dollars from real funding. What the government calls funding, I call "venture capital."
And we all know what's happened before when people make bright ideas out of nothing from a business standpoint: The 2001 "dotcom" stock crash happened for a reason.
The point I'm making is to keep a space presence in place until it's replacement shows up. I almost
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With all due respect, your anti-Obama rhetoric is making your political stance quite obvious and I wonder if part of your hatred of the move to private industry is clouded.
The fact of the matter is we do have backups in place right now. Commercial businesses [space.com] are already launching satellites, let alone other nations. So if we need a satellite launched, we have options.
On the idea of "And let's not worry about the big frickin' rocks that occasionally could pummel us, and the space tech needed to even consid
Spirit/Opportunity (Score:1, Insightful)
they really haven't done anything private enterprise isn't doing already
Many NGOs with rovers on Mars?
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I'm not anti-Obama. I'm anti-idiot. I'm black, and even *I* know he's an idiot for cutting the program in this way.
NASA is on my pedestal because people with short-sighted visions have given us *only* NASA to put there. Plenty of other presidents (both GOP and Democrat) could've started a stronger private industry initiative decades ago with a long-term vision of private space launches. They haven't.
If someone had the vision to push private industry harder *and* phase out NASA's sole ability to lift humans
Re:Enjoy 'em while you can, folks (Score:4, Interesting)
SpaceX will have its Dragon [spacex.com] module docking with the ISS 4 years before Ares I/Orion's first test flight, and manned missions 2-3 years before Orion. While I agree that it's bad for NASA to stop manned spaceflight before the replacement is available, THAT part was not Obama's plan. Bush decided that in 2004. Obama just wants to cancel the Constellation program, which seems like it's already behind what commercial systems like SpaceX have available.
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SpaceX is a joke of a company.
Do you know how simple the falcon 1 is? And they only have a 2/5 record with it. While most modern rocket systems, which have far greater abilities, designed in the last 20 years have perfect records.
The Flacon 9 is much more complex, SpaceX will take a decade to get it right.
Asking SpaceX to get a man to LEO is like asking the Wright
Re:Enjoy 'em while you can, folks (Score:5, Insightful)
The Ares 1 has not had its first test flight. The 1-X had a test flight, which was just the first stage. They don't plan on a full Ares 1 test flight until 2014. Pretty much every modern rocket is based on earlier models which didn't have perfect records. Falcon 1 was designed from the ground up. It would have been a near miracle for the first couple flights to not have problems.
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NASA is on my pedestal because people with short-sighted visions have given us *only* NASA to put there. Plenty of other presidents (both GOP and Democrat) could've started a stronger private industry initiative decades ago with a long-term vision of private space launches. They haven't.
I don't understand, why should the government push private industry? If space launches are profitable private industry will provide if they are not private industry will not.
Why is it bad to push private health insurance but good to incentivise private space launches?
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_Budget [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States [wikipedia.org]
Taking from the 2010 proposed budget and the 2010 population estimate, $18,700 million / 308.732 million = $60.57.
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"The fact of the matter is we do have backups in place right now. Commercial businesses are already launching satellites, let alone other nations. So if we need a satellite launched, we have options."
There is no other space vehicle with the carrying capacity of the shuttle. There are satellites in orbit that couldn't have been placed there by any other spacecraft currently in existence, or under development.
"Really, they've killed a bunch of astronauts and they do so at a huge, HUGE, cost to the public."
Th
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A decade without US space launches (Score:2)
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Why manned flight? (Score:3, Insightful)
"Enjoy" is exactly it -- manned space flight is cool. The STS pictures are amazing. It is not cost effective. I want us (humans) to have a strong committent to space exploration, real science, and for thirty years have noticed that it is a rare scientist who will speak well of the Shuttle program. It has had some great successes, such as the HST repairs (I don't know how else those would have been feasible) but the more common story I've heard is that NASA would delay launches to try to force them to go
Re:Why manned flight? (Score:5, Informative)
It has had some great successes, such as the HST repairs (I don't know how else those would have been feasible)
No, that was a miserable financial failure, not a success. You probably have no idea of the staggering expense of a "reusable" vehicle like the shuttle.
The HST was planned to cost $400M to build and launch. It ended up costing about $2500M because it takes a lot of expensive screwing around to launch on the shuttle. I don't know if the $2500M cost includes the $1500M cost of a shuttle launch.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hubble_Space_Telescope [wikipedia.org]
JWST is going to "cost" about $4500M, but that's a R and D jobs program not a production program. It could be made to cost anything between maybe $1000M and $100000000000000M depending on how many grants they want to farm out (empire building, etc). I also have no idea what they'll use for a launcher based on all the American launcher cancellations. Probably either a Space-X product, or hang the thumb out like a hitchhiker and hope the ESA will bail us out.
Herschel cost about 1100M euros. I don't know if the 1100M euro cost includes the cost of a dirt cheap Ariane 5.
An Ariane 5 only costs about 120M euro, or about one twelfth of a shuttle launch. Or, rephrased, you can launch 12 scopes on an Ariane for the cost of launching 1 scope on the shuttle. Or rephrased, a shuttle launch, with an empty payload bay, costs more than the entire Herschel program, but an Ariane launch is a pretty small line item on any scope launch.
http://www.spaceandtech.com/spacedata/elvs/ariane5_specs.shtml [spaceandtech.com]
A shuttle launch costs about $1500M
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle [wikipedia.org]
Generally speaking, "partially rebuilding" a space telescope costs about as much as launching a new scope on a launcher thats not a joke.
A partially broken down scope seems like a waste, but if it would cost more to fix than to launch a new one... Of course, if we had a freaking assembly line of space telescopes, sort of like a place that Meade has for earthbound scopes, we could probably launch something like a HST or a Herschel for maybe $250M each, plus about $150M for an Ariane5 launch, which would otherwise only pay for about 1/4 of a shuttle repair mission.
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Actually I agree with you; I was just trying to be nice and cut our manned space flight friends some slack. :) They can be rather passionate. I maintain, however, that manned space flight is really cool. Just not worth it.
Re:Why manned flight? (Score:5, Interesting)
Well, if history is any indication, it'll never happen without a manned space program. Nations that don't have a manned space program (e.g. the EU) also spend less on unmanned missions, and the greatest unmanned US missions were initiated and funded during the Apollo era, when spendings for manned space exploration were also the highest. Manned space exploration inspires the public. Even STS does. Without such a program, the giant funds for unmanned missions that are supposed to be freed because of all the saved money will never materialize.
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"Hilarious boondoggle ends. Cuts off access to sister boondoggle."
Re:Enjoy 'em while you can, folks (Score:4, Insightful)
Are you proud of Nasa playing Fedex, which the Russians, Indians, Chinese, or SpaceX could also do sooner or later, or are you proud that it got from nowhere to the moon in 9 years?
It's like software or many other things. Versions 1 and 2 are highly innovative and lots happens. Then your software becomes business critical to customers and innovation stagnates, new releases only contain fixes or minor changes - goal is only to milk it for all it's worth. Obama is cutting out the stagnation and getting them back to the cutting edge.
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Hate to be the one to tell you, but it's not like Constellation was going to be flying any time soon (2017-2018 based on latest estimates). SpaceX is likely to be flying sooner than that, same with an Orion-lite on a EELV, and at a cost substantally less than the 40 billion dollars that Ares-1 was going to cost. Plus I'm not sure exactly how they managed to do it, but the proposed replacement was going to cost even more than the Shuttle to operate, while doing substantially less.
BTW Constellation (and Orion
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Private spaceflight will be ready before constellation would have been.
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Yes, it is damned hard. Well, perhaps not hard, but really, really expensive. In order to have just one or two flights per years you basically need to have the same infrastructure that you would have for a dozen flights per year. that infrastructure isn't just the facilities, it's also the thousands of people that build, maintain, and operate the shuttles and their components, the launch facility in Florida, m
tap lava pools? (Score:1, Funny)
nice clean steam/heat vents everywhere (much cleaner than the increasing random eruptions). we'd be back to having an atmosphere before we realize ours is kaput? no money in it? may as well blow up then.
could it be? (Score:1, Funny)
part of the 'newclear' power those freaks have been ranting about for all these years?
some of us would do almost anything to make them stop/delete themselves, no?
gnu online dating; sheesh
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Perhaps they are werewolf aliens that need to howl at the moon?
Bad weather? (Score:2)
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The shuttle was allowed to land despite the threat of bad weather? Whats the new motto at NASA; "Safety last"?
The tiles are delicate, literally flying thru hail or rain could destroy them while they're red hot. That would be a shame if it happened on flight #1. That is no great loss if it happens on the last flight, or second to last, or whatever it is. Just put some bondo and spray paint on that dude before setting up the Smithsonian exhibit, or whatever.
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Maybe they wanted to be back in time for tea.