Video The Space Shuttle Discovery's Last Mile (Video) 101
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Timothy Lord was in the closest civilian parking lot to where the Space Shuttle Discovery touched down from her last flight -- as a passenger on top of a 747, but it was still a space shuttle flying... a flight that was the sad epitaph for an American era. Timothy's shots of the landing approach are much like all the others you've seen. What's interesting is the variety of people he talked with. One came all the way from Tokyo. And there was the young man who got a Master's in Aeronautical Engineering to work on the space program, which sadly shut down, and who is now looking for a job with SpaceX or one of the other private space-bound companies. We hope there are lots of opportunities in the near future for him, and for thousands if not millions of others who want to go into space or, ground-bound, help our efforts to go where only science fiction writers' imaginations have gone before.
Sadness (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I can't wait! (Score:3, Insightful)
While I think nationalism can be a powerful motivating force, the time has come for everyone to shoulder the mantle of new space exploration on an international basis, like the Star Tram guys are trying to do. Open source, not for profit megaengineering. Can it be done? Sure! Its just really hard.
Hey, if you want to be a pessimist, okay, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Launch_System [wikipedia.org]
http://www.youtube.com/user/UnitedLaunchAlliance [youtube.com]
This is the future:
http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2012/04/smaller-quicker-secret-space/all/1 [wired.com]
And by the way — if you believe the principles and ideals the US and the West stand for have any value whatsoever, then those principles are still worth defending against those who don't share them, and would desire to project their own [nytimes.com]...
We are not perfect, but before there is a chorus of responses decrying how the US is somehow "oppressing" its people, I genuinely hope those who believe that never see actual oppression...
Re:...but it was still a space shuttle flying... (Score:4, Insightful)
just like we gave away our lead in nuclear engineering. oh, and physics, too.
and education.
and manufacturing.
and medicine.
is there anything we're the best at anymore, other than incarcerating our own people?
Not an end, a dawn. (Score:5, Insightful)
The way the article puts things you'd think we were all crawling back into caves now.
In fact the opposite is true. We are casting off an albatross around our necks and are at the dawn of a real golden age of space travel - one that does require whole governments bent to the singular task of getting a ship up a few times year.
No, instead we get multiple companies giving us more frequent space travel, for humans and cargo alike.
We humans land on Mars, it will not be a government that sends them there.
When humanity stopped looking toward the stars (Score:5, Insightful)
Our modern world is very inward-focused. If it's not on the ego, it's on those social problems that never go away. These may be important, but I think space exploration is more important. Humanity does its best when it has a frontier, and some goal to shoot for. That fills us with a sense of hope and power. That in turn pushes us to be better than we were. When we stop exploring the stars and look inward, there's really nothing of interest left, just some intractable problems. The Romans couldn't fix them, the Greeks couldn't fix them, and we can't either. That kind of mentality could make people depressed and stubbornly selfish.
Re:When humanity stopped looking toward the stars (Score:2, Insightful)
You can't even get Americans to collectively pay for a sane first world health care system. How can you justify forcing them to pay for space exploration? It's all about the individual and doing things your own way, not about society functioning as a whole for a greater good. This is where China really differs, where the government has long term goals instead of the next election or tomorrow's headlines.