posted 08-27-2001 11:40 PM               

We're more than the children of explorers -- we're a nation of frontier-seekers. We landed on the East Coast and pushed forward to the West Coast until there was nowhere else left to push. We pushed into the suburbs and back into the cities, trying to rediscover the things we might have missed the first time. As we've run out of room to move, things haven't been too cool. It's a pretty frustrating thing for an American, not having anywhere left to explore.

I frequently get excited when I read about new technological developments on sites like Space.com, but it's hard to find people that share that excitement. We don't have money to waste on space travel, they say. We've got plenty of problems on Earth without frittering money away gallivanting through space. To that, I would probably say that there's plenty of money to spend on space exploration -- it's just a matter of how federal dollars are appropriated. I would also say that there are plenty of problems here on Earth that could be addressed by exploring other worlds. Space travel is an industry; if it grew, it could create jobs. Buzz Aldrin himself has predicted that space tourism could be a booming industry in the future. The moon and Mars are full of minerals yet to be discovered. In an atmosphere already inhospitable to life, environmental standards for industries may be relaxed. And space is full of, well, space -- a valuable commodity for a planetary ecosystem rapidly approaching its carrying capacity.

posted 08-27-2001 11:41 PM               

In addition to the inherent benefits that come from sending humans to Mars, to the moon, etc, there are the technological achievements that could benefit us on earth. Is it any coincidence that since our space program has slowed, so have technological advances in commercial air travel? Why does it still take almost as long to get from California to London as it did twenty or thirty years ago? Putting speed aside, what about safety? Are our commercial jets any safer today than when they were first designed? With the demise of the Concorde, the failure of the aerospace industry to devise a replacement becomes more obvious.

posted 08-30-2001 03:27 AM               

I think Pattie hit the nail on the head - the real payoff, and the way the space program should be sold to the public, is the harvest of earthbound tech benefits. I would say medical benefits, but those are so much in the embryonic stages right now - and they won't evolve beyond that until more of an effort is made to create, launch and man a privately-owned space laboratory.

Were it not for space travel, velcro wouldn't have come about (or at least wouldn't have happened when it did), and I would be required to tie my shoes every day - something which I've never quite mustered the necessary physical dexterity to do. Thank God for velcro. But that's probably more than anyone wanted to know. On the flipside, velcro also makes it possible for a mildly bored horse to de-shoe a human. But more on that another time.

I wish that, even if we're not going to put any kind of effort into manned space flight, more publicity would be granted to the unmanned missions out there. When they don't blow up in Martian orbit, these pieces of free-floating technology simply astound me. I remember staying up for something like 42 hours to watch the entire live coverage of Voyager 2's Neptune encounter in 1989. But that says more for the pitiful state of my life when I was 17 more than anything.

posted 10-24-2001 02:12 PM               

One other cool thing about Mars Odyssey? It's going to be left there indefinitely to be used as a communications relay between future vehicles and Earth. Now that's a good idea.

Seeing the Mars Rover scoot across the surface of the red planet - even if it only happens in the opening credits of "Enterprise" each week - now that's the sort of thing that makes me proud to be from this country.

[This message has been absolutely mangled by Earl Green's attempt to use HTML tags (distastefully maimed and then repaired 10-24-2001).]

posted 11-14-2001 08:52 AM               

quote:

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Originally posted by Earl Green:
professor in our own University of Arkansas's chemistry department has proposed a near-earth asteroid probe to NASA which would grab copious samples from three rocks and return those samples to Earth for analysis - and all for a price tag under $3 million. Color me impressed.

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Color me impressed that all that could be accomplished for less than what dot-coms used to spend on weekly pizza parties.

posted 11-27-2002 06:36 PM               

Of course, they planned to go back to Skylab with an early shuttle launch too. But when the early shuttle launches were delayed from the late 1970s to 1981, atmospheric drag (aggravated by unusually high solar flare activity) slowed Skylab down enough that it fell in 1979.

posted 02-02-2003 04:55 AM               

A wild jumble of thoughts springs immediately to mind here. I'll just go through them at random.

On the terrorism front: not to be indelicate, but it's a load of horse hockey. We don't have any kind of offensive weaponry that could meet the shuttle at 200,000 feet, traveling at 18 times the speed of sound. I doubt seriously that anyone else does.

Much of the re-entry stage is computer-controlled; the pilots don't actually have manual control of the shuttle until it has gotten through re-entry and is gliding home. It sounds to me like damage to the tiles on the underside (which probably happened at launch) resulted in heat frying critical avionics. There are some critical banking maneuvers that absolutely must happen at this stage of the flight, and they're really out of the crew's control. If the control surfaces aren't responding, control will be lost, simple as that.

I think that's what happened here: the now well-publicized "tank foam" probably smacked an almighty gash in the half-inch-thick maze of heat shield tiles on the left wing, enough that the superheated plasma that envelops the shuttle during re-entry broke through the underbelly, filling the internal volume of that wing (though not used as a fuel tank as with commercial aircraft, the shuttle's wings are, to some extent, hollow and have an internal volume). This would have destroyed all of the sensors that suddenly registered nothing, as well as the landing gear that suddenly registered zero tire pressure. It also would have fried many, if not all, connections between the cockpit to the control surfaces at the rear of the wing, and along with them any chance of gaining manual control. The heat and pressure would tear the wing apart from the inside, and the resulting loss of control would be catastrophic.

Then again...this is just my guess from the available facts and what I know about the structure of the shuttle. I've cut myself shaving with Occam's Razor before.

As for the station, I'm sure they'll shut everything down over the next month and use the Soyuz capsule normally reserved for emergencies to get home. My only fear then is that the ISS will become the next Skylab, which we always intended to return to via the shuttle after the first three crews flew there in Apollo capsules. But the shuttle wasn't ready to fly in 1979, and Skylab came down due to atmospheric drag agitated by solar flares. The Russians are already talking about minimizing their support of the station because their economy can barely support a space program. So I have real concern about the ISS becoming a flying dutchman of sorts.

It's also important to note that the Russians have had re-entry related disasters of their own, all the way back to the first Soyuz launch, and later the first crew of the first manned space station, Salyut 1, whose return capsule slammed into the ground when the parachutes failed. They got past it after some downtime for an investigation, and we should do the same.

However, I think this is the justification we need to press forward on developing the next generation of manned spacecraft. We're lucky to have flown shuttles almost nonstop for 22 years, but despite refits and upgrades, they're built around technology from the Apollo era, and based on tech specs that were approved during the Nixon Administration. We wouldn't be manning an international space station today if we were still leaning on Apollo capsules, and we won't get any further than the space station if we continue to rely solely on the shuttle. The way the shuttle is launched, it's vibrated and impacted severely before it even leaves the atmosphere in the first place. Even though Columbia broke up coming back to Earth, I'm convinced we'll find that the problem that led to the disaster happened at liftoff.

All of this rational, technical talk aside, I think I'm going to go now and resume gripping the edge of my desk until the palms of my hands bleed and whispering "no" over and over again, maybe go sit on my bed in a lotus position and rock back and forth for a bit to spice things up.

posted 02-26-2003 05:17 AM               

NASA engineers at the Ames Research Center have reported that contact has been lost with the Pioneer 10 space probe, 31 years after it was launched. The most-traveled man-made object in history, Pioneer 10 was originally intended to survive an unprecedented 21-month arc through the solar system to take the first close-up photos of Jupiter and its moons.

Its radioactive power system - not nuclear-based, but drawing energy from the passive decay of radioactive material (similar to the Voyager probes) - has probably faded to the degree that it can no longer send a signal to Earth. One last faint signal was received on January 22nd, but it contained no telemetry or other information (in fact, no useful data has been returned by Pioneer 10 since April 27th, 2002). NASA has no plans to attempt to contact Pioneer 10 or to listen for further responses.

Traveling at a speed of 32,400mph (still the record for a man-made object), Pioneer has now put over 7.7 billion miles between itself and Earth. To put that in perspective, it crossed the orbit of Pluto - our solar system's most distant known planet - in 1983, and is now more than twice Pluto's distance from the sun; at that distance, Pioneer's radio signals took nearly 12 hours to reach Earth, despite traveling at the speed of light.

posted 07-21-2003 08:28 PM               

34 years since we first went to the moon, 30.5 since we last went.

Nearly 6 months since a shuttle went into orbit. Could be 6 months more.