Maybe now they’ll let the shuttle go fix the Hubble.
A key test of a daring yet wobbly spacewalking technique that could be used someday to repair space shuttle heat shields worked well Saturday and got good reviews from two astronauts from the shuttle Discovery.
The repair simulation put them at the end of an oscillating, 100-foot combination of a robotic arm and an extension pole that astronaut Piers Sellers said made him feel “like a bug on the end of a fishing rod here.”
In a 7 1/2-hour spacewalk, the first of three orbital excursions planned for this mission, Sellers and Michael Fossum said they could do most of the mock tasks they were assigned with only moderate difficulty.
Kick-ass. It’s nice to have some good news. Then again, the problems with the space program have nothing to do with the skill and determination of our fine astronauts. Those people literally put their life on the line to extend our knowledge.
while it is good to have an American spacecraft up and running again, I am nonetheless chagrined – people don’t go into space just to prove that the machine that brought them there won’t be destroyed on reentry. we are supposed to be actually accomplishing something.
It is way past time for the flying kludge known as the STS is retired in favor of something less complicated, cheaper to operate, and more reliable.
hopefully this will do the trick:
[PDF warning]
http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/146764main_CLV_CaLV_Description.pdf
Well said, the problems with NASA have little or nothing to do with the technical side of things. The problems with NASA come from politics, and the way decisions that should be made based on engineering and scientific data are being done on political (NASA’s) grounds. Big careers are on the line, and those matter more than the lives of the little people.
That said, it is also a shame that NASA is abandoning the shuttle, or at the very least, the concept of the shuttle. The fact is, the shuttle CAN be operated safely. Maybe not with the curent NASA. But it can. The sort of procedures being tested now should be the basis of an evolved machine – a mini-shuttle or something of the sort, that builds on the lessons learned from the shuttle. Instead, NASA is abandoning everything it learned (and all the know how of it’s engineers) to go back to the past. The CEV is basically a bigger Apollo capsule. Meanwhile, in Europe, a small Shuttle is being developed!
I hope there’s still time for NASA to wake up and EVOLVE, instead of having this knee-jerk reaction to the (very unfortunate and in the end, needless) loss of two shuttles and fourteen good people. This is not the old NASA. Before it becomes a better, grown up NASA, I even doubt they’ll be able to go back to the moon! Most of the people who put men there are dead or retired by now, and everything will have to be re-learnt.
Wouldn’t it be better to just go forward instead of backing up to then go forward again?
Oh man, there’s so much that’s wrong with the way NASA is still doing things that I could rant for days…
If NASA learned how to build a shuttle without bits falling off it every time it’s launched, the astronauts could spend their time on more useful activities.
…that could be used someday…
Until that “someday”, each launch is a crap-shoot?
Oh, that’s right, they always have been.
Alix sums it up well: “Those people literally put their life on the line to extend our knowledge.”
You know what I want to see? I want to see any lunar landing site viewed from a telescope that is not located in America. I want to see where that moon rover is now. If there ever was one that made it to the moon.
Chuckle. Well, I know where the operations manual is — and signed by the astronauts from that journey. But, I’m not about to piss off an old boss of mine by telling folks how to get in touch with him. We parted on good terms.
Besides [tee-hee] NASA-conspiracy-theory folks have even less of a sense of humor than neo-con-black-helicopter types. They’d never understand how someone from Grumman ended up in a completely non-military trade like sport.
They need to keep a shuttle or two around for the heavey lifting, like semi’s of space. But develop a smaller, more practical shuttle type craft for the routine trips up and back.
I always wondered if the people who think we didn’t go to the moon also think the Russians(soviets) didn’t go as well. Maybe we all used the same sound stage. Gee, I guess there was detante before there was detante.
Mmm, sorry, but as far as I know the Russians HAVEN’T gone to the moon… They gave up when their HUGE rocket blew up on a lauch pad test, weeks or days before the Apollo 11 landing. All the russians have on the moon are robotic probes.
Isn’t it ironic that we now rely on their space vehicles?
Sure is! Russia seems to be ‘into’ space in a more fundamental way than the US. In the US everything is more political and business-related – those with the more powerful lobby win. just note the re-use of some Space Shuttle components in the new CEV launch vehicles… They look hastily cobbled together, instead of a nice, clean, new design. Why? You’re not dumb…
But again, that’s no reason to go back and waste all the knowledge taken from the Shuttle program. What’s right with the russian space program isn’t (only) the relative simplicity of their craft – that ALSO plays a very important role. It’s the way the whole project is conceived as a whole. Note that the design hasn’t changed for DECADES. When it was last updated, it was updated as a whole, instead of favoring this company and that other and then assembling something with what they provide… If NASA had some authority then they could build something better, with a reusable mini-shuttle, expendable lunart modules, and so on. But what I see now has been done hastily to look good(ish) on paper. That makes me a non-believer of Moon-Mars-and-Beyond, at least during my lifetime.