Re: Endeavor is back!

On Aug 21, 5:02 pm, "Octopus Ride" <toomanyn...@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Dave Kelly" <sweet...@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message

news:2KHyi.28753$RX.15223@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx



"brew ziggins" <osm...@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
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Touched down about five minutes ago - a thing of beauty!!!

Can anyone tell me when the plug will be pulled on
this money pit?...I mean REALLY...enoughs enough!
OK...I'm a tad bitter...so WHAT I'm near sighted...and
too short...and overweight...were THOSE reasons to
disqualify me from 8th grade astronaut camp?
THIS eagle has landed...
Dig?

At the risk of sounding like a dork, I'm gonna respond seriously to this
post (hey, Kelly already did a serious one himself today, so I should be
forgiven).

Anyway..........EXACTLY! I'm all for exploring the cosmos, but this
ridiculous space station has sucked up literally tens of billions of dollars
(they plan to spend a total of a HUNDRED BILLION)and it hasn't achieved one
single thing they claimed it would when they fought the annual battles to
get it funded. A bunch of Russians and Americans and billionaire tourists
and who knows who else get launched up there, they fly around doing
basically nothing for months except listening to tunes when they wake up,
then something breaks, then they try to fix it. The shuttle is used to fly
new guys and spare parts to the space jalopy, then when it gets back they
spend money to fix the shuttle.

Neither the station nor the shuttle has accomplished anything whatsoever in
years, besides sucking up money (and in the case of the space station, fall
ten years behind schedule). Its a giant pork project for Houston Texas and
various aerospace contractors, nothing more.

They were going to manufacture new materials, splice genes, make new
medicines, all sorts of cool sounding stuff. That was just a sales pitch.
Instead they take astronauts' blood pressure a million times and think of
new ways to take a poop in zero gravity.

This whole program is a monumental waste of money and resources, and almost
no one on earth cares one whit about the things. Fewer are excited by it.

Imagine if they had spent the money on new and fancy unmanned probes to
Mars, Venus, Uranus, wherever! We might have learned something. Instead
we get an orbiting tin can that does nothing but require fixing and a space
truck that flies up the parts and repairmen.

This massive flop of a program has set real space exploration back decades.

Shoot it down!!!

OR

Damn straight. The answer to your question is the last shuttle flight
is tentatively scheduled for 2009, with it's replacement the Ares/
Orion spacecraft tentatively scheduled to fly in 2010. They are
planning on the first lunar mission around 2015 or 17.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ares_(rocket)

The tragedy IMO is that all they have done is reinvent the wheel. The
Orion is essentially a larger, upgraded Apollo spacecraft and the Ares
booster (there are two) The Ares 1 is a single shuttle solid rocket
with a second stage

The Ares 5 is a shuttle main tank with two SRB's and a upper stage.

We should have done what the Russians did (and continue to do) which
is use reliable, proven technology to get men and materials into
orbit. They STILL use the same rocket that launched Sputnik and Yuri
Gagarin into orbit (coming up on its 50th year of service)
It has an unparrelled safety and reliablity record. The Soyuz
spacecraft (the Russians equivalent of Apollo) is celebrating it's
40th year of service, and while it has had several fatalities, they
were early on in the program. I don't know exactly how many flights it
has made, but I would venture it is nearing four or five hundred
missions

If we had continued on with the Apollo program we would have had a
space station in continual service since 1973 (Skylab) We probably
would have a permanent base on the moon too.

The moon is the key to any deep space exploration that we do in the
future. They have proven that they can manufacture liquid hydrogen and
oxygen from moon rocks,

Anyway, it's all Nixon's fault, he was the one who canceled the Apollo
program after it had only flown 15 manned missions. It was perhaps the
worst decision of his administration IMO

Scot

.

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