Posted: 7/28/2005 6:29:44 PM EDT
| What say you?? I sure hope not.. |
| Not exactly because the USA has nothing waiting in the wings to replace it. The shuttle is 25 years old, just think about the space shuttle like your family car, but on scale millions of times bigger. Get the drift? It's getting old, and parts are starting to wear out, and you just keep on changing parts just to keep the family buggy going another summer or winter etc., and so is NASA on a national scale. |
The beancounters in congress are who i am referring to. If i had my way nasa would have an enormous budget, but space exploration currently constitutes less than 1% of our national budget. I guess welfare, the war on drugs, the war on terror, abortion, campaign finance reform, political scandals, and all are far more pressing and interesting than exploring the great unknowns of the universe. It's sad... all people want is their fast food, reality tv, and welfare checks. As long a s people are watching rediculously stupid pop culture shows like "american idol", and worshipping celebrities, we are fucked. I have nothing but utter contempt for the morons of the general population. Hate to say it, but we are screwed as a species. |
Excuse me, but while you masturbate watching Close Encounters, we do have several pressing problems here on Earth. Like fighting a religious cult that is trying to kill every one of us? Just go to the hill and wait for your spaceship. They'll be along shortly. At this point, there are a hell of a lot more useful things to be spending our money on. |
ColonelKlink, you're welcome at my house anytime!  TC |
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NASA hasn't done anything significant since they put Hubble into space. Since then all they've managed to do is forget to convert to metric, lose a startling number of probes, as well as a number of other fuckups. I say close NASA and create a new agency dedicated to exploring the depths of the oceans....ON EARTH. Only 6 men have dove below 875 meters in a rebreathing suit. That's less people than have landed on the moon. |
M16 (Easily 40-year-old "technology") M60 (ibid) Ma Deuce (70? 80? 86? if you go all the way back to the M1919) B-52 (50+) P-3 (50+) KC-135 (50+) The Soviets have a very reliable launch vehicle that is not significantly different than that which carried Gagarin into space in 1961. It's just bigger, with a new engine design from the '70s. Furthermore, the failures in the Shuttle system are in a fairly recent development, the ecologically-friendly insulating foam on the External Tank. So what "modern" technologies does anyone suggest to replace the current Shuttle? Toyota Prius engines? Maybe there's a way to directly convert AOL CDs to propulsion. |
The Shuttle is the F-111 of the space program. Designed by commite to do everything for everyone and ended up doing nothing for anyone. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle#Retrospect exerpt from article: "Because loss of crew is unacceptable, the primary focus of the Shuttle program is to return the crew to Earth safely" Then why even go up to begin with!? 
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Hate to pop your bubble, but they do. The next gen shuttle vehicle was shown (a small model) on the news the day of the launch. It is another stick rocket with the return craft secured in a double thick area near the cone. Sorta like a saturn V on steroids. As for the current shuttle, all they really need to do is get rid of that damn "enviornmentally friendly" foam covering on the external fuel tank. Go back to what they used originally. |
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I would say a lot depends on the next landing. If that don’t go well the Shuttle is dead, and NASA may not be able to save it anyway. The monumental inefficiency, incompetence, and down right stupidity show by NASA in the last 25 years is beyond belief. This level of just plain screw ups has been going on at NASA for decades… roboman pointed out NASA hasn't done anything significant since they put Hubble into space, but he may be to young to remember they initially screwed up on Hubble and sent it up with a flawed mirror that was out of focus. 3 years later it took a shuttle flight and a couple hundred million dollars to fix that screw up. IMO NASA is past hope time to scrape the agency and start fresh. |
YEAH!! Ya MORON!!  here's a picture of it:  
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Damn, I completely forgot they screwed up with Hubble initially...... NASA is a waste of an agency. Disband it. |
YEAH!! BATF also. 
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If the shuttle program aint dead it should be. It's an outdated orbit bus. It's limitations have defined the limitations of our manned space program for almost 25 years, and those limitations were absurd 25 years ago. We've left heavy lift and long term stations almost entirely to the Russians. To my mind, those two elements are far more important than reusable vehicles or orbital satellite insertion and maintenance. The Russian heavy lift rockets are kludgy and not terribly stable. They shoot from a poor spot logistically. Their unreliability makes our shuttle the next best thing available. Either we sink billions into patching back up this tired old warhorse, or we trump the Proton and design ourselves an environmentally friendlier, more reliable alternative to it. Anyone know if the Russians paid their rent on Baikonur this month? |
Amen, brother. You said it all. |
+1 IIRC, isn't the house reps. the ones that control the budget? Letters! |
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The shuttle program was a cluster fuck from the get-go. Instead of being used as an experiment laboratory and a hardware development platform as envisioned during the conceptual stages it was slated as the nations only launcher and it forced the DOD and other agencies (which by far are the largest users of launch services) to design all of their spacecraft to fit in the cargo bay and meet all of the man-rating safety requirements. Huge fucking waste of money, time and other resources. The other rationale for the shuttle, i.e. the notion that satellites could be designed to be serviced in orbit was flushed down the toilet after the Challenger fuck-up as the west coast, high inclination lauch capability was scrapped. This left us with a shuttle that basically went where there were no satellites to service. What utility was left was launching less capable satellites into less useful orbits because of the ban on liquid fueled transfer orbit stages, all at a cost that was obscene. About this time the ISS was pushed thru to give the shuttle a reason for existence, which in itself has turned into the biggest waste of money in the history of government programs. NASA as a technology development and exploration entity is fine; NASA as a regulatory and administrative agency is FUBAR. C (I lived this shit for 25 years) W |