When the Shuttle Atlantis launched Friday ...
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A sad day (Score:2, Insightful)
Today marks the beginning of the end for the US of A. Growing up in the Space Age, during the Space Race, I have fond memories of the Apollo program, and watched avidly as first Skylab and then the ISS was build.
Then the world got taken over by sound bites and economists and we never went back to the moon.
Now the US doesn't even have the capability to put a man in space.
Progress?
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I think the beginning of the end was a while back. It's more like the middle of the end now.
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I assume the beginning was when we stumbled onto high energy quality fossil fuels without planning what to do with it and understanding how finite they were. Well we still have nuclear power left and that will be infinite though - HA!
To think that people would rather go into the deep sea where they face constant loss of energy to corrosion, high pressure, and low temperature, as opposed to going into space where they face one atmosphere pressure, high initial cost, long materiel lifetime, moon dust, a polit
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Yep. The US is definitely on the 'B' ark now.
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Now the US doesn't even have the capability to put a man in space.
Progress?
That's because most the best young engineers went to work in finance or programming social media web sites. Lots of progress if you count conjuring something out of nothing, or was it the other way around?
Re:A sad day (Score:5, Insightful)
Would you call "hanging on to a 30-year-old program that was much less safe and more expensive than designed" progress?
Progress is turning manned trips to LEO into a service provided a number of US companies. Progress is NASA focusing on projects and rockets that will take humans and human knowledge to heights never before achieved by mankind. That's always where NASA made progress that nobody else could.
Let's worry about that, and making sure that happens, rather than clinging to a (relatively successful) program that has run its course.
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Would you call "hanging on to a 30-year-old program that was much less safe and more expensive than designed" progress?
Good point. Of course as a software engineer I'm used to things being reliable and under budget.
BAHAHAHAHA (Score:2)
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Would you call "hanging on to a 30-year-old program that was much less safe and more expensive than designed" progress?
I'm all for retiring the shuttle in favor of a safer and cheaper alternative. Problem is you guys don't *have* the safer/cheaper alternative yet.
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Re:A sad day (Score:4, Interesting)
The early Cold War Space Race was driven by penis-waving (not that genital displays are a bad thing) and while putting men in space quickly was a captivating public benchmark, it's not the best way to EXPLORE space.
Humans are merely machine operators, and we need (on Earth and in space) machines which don't need on-site human tenders.
We can get a lot more accomplished and EVOLVE systems more quickly if we don't concentrate on shipping meat early on. Let commercial outfits ship the cattle, but do science with robots and remotely-manned systems first because we need them as building blocks.
When people and wooden ships were totally expendable, the manned model made sense. That was on Earth. People are now functionally worth FAR LESS than the hardware required to launch and return them. That makes them a burden. We can, instead, send machines for the dull, dangerous job of exploration. Machines can be expendable, we don't need them back.
Re:A sad day (Score:5, Insightful)
Think: Antarctica (Score:2)
UT. If we do get someone on mars, a real person, I guarantee you interest in space exploration will skyrocket
Yes, it will increase while there's still novelty value. However once a Mars base becomes everyday (say after a couple of weeks) then it will fade from the news and from popular consciousness unless something dramatic happens. That is exactly the si5tuation with Antarctic bases. We all know they are there but so what? They just carry on doing whatever it is they do there, and we just carry on doing whatever it is we do here. There's no reason to continue being enthusiastic about them, they're mundane.
The
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I keep saying, the Antarctic is a tropical paradise in comparison with Mars, and has breathable air, water, and gravity to support human physiological processes. Yet I don't see passionate arguments that the Spirit of Exploration requires colonization of Antarctica.
Aside from PR for science, why send humans to Mars? The only role I can see for humans on-site on Mars is to repair the robots that do the actual exploration.
The only way I can see colonization of other planets making any sense is in some future
Space interest skyrockets, then most get bored (Score:2)
The general public watches until they hear a few words that sound scientific, then their eyes glaze over, and switch the TV back to football or Real Housewives of Tulsa.
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So you're in favour of spending a few hundred billion dollars on a PR exercise? Personally, I'd rather see that money spent on R&D that will benefit people on Earth. There's always the argument that space research will have useful spin-offs, but the converse is also true: non-space research has a lot of space-related spin-offs too. For example, being able to pack more processing power that the whole of NASA had in the '70s into something that can be radiation hardened and is about the size of a thumb
Oh my god, its full of nerds... (Score:2)
Speaking of money, I now know why all the shuttle launches are so freaking expensive. With 11% of slashdot on board, no wonder it is expensive to get up to LEO....
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The US, specifically, can WAIT and LEVERAGE the work of others instead of doing all the heavy lifting.
All that romance is because few humans have spent time in the utterly hostile environments offworld, where they will always have no choice but to interact through mechanical barriers that keep them from dying instantly.
In such utterly hostile areas, man MUST have machines so capable that human labor isn't necessary.
Re:A sad day (Score:4, Interesting)
I just thought i'd toss this out there, but there is another inhabitable planet in the solar system. Venus.
At first glance this may sound positively absurd. Acidic atmosphere, ultra high pressures, temperatures that could flash fry you in a second.
But what's really interesting is that part of what makes venus uninhabitable (ultra high pressure) also makes it a prime candidate for colonization.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colonizing_Venus#Aerostat_habitats_and_floating_cities [wikipedia.org]
Venus, at an altitude of around 50km, has comparable qualities to earth.The gravity is similar, the atmospheric pressure is similar, and the temperatures are similar. This means that we could make colonies with normal earth air (which is a strong lifting gas in the veneutian atmosphere). Since the pressure inside and outside the balloon is similar, if a leak was sprung you'd merely repair it as quickly as possible,since leaks would only result in mixing at normal atmospheric rates.It's also been suggested that more habitats could be built out of carbon sifted from the CO2 atmosphere.
So there are 2 possible planets in the solar system that can be colonized. You could probably power the colony by solar, wind, or nuclear and already being 50km above the surface it'd be much easier to escape the gravity well. Venus is also closer to earth.
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If we do get someone on mars, a real person, I guarantee you interest in space exploration will skyrocket
...for the first two landings. Then - as history shows - all those people will get bored and switch back to China's Got Talent!* unless something goes horribly wrong. Space travel as a source of "bread and circuses" will not be sustainable.
In terms of contribution to science, the robot probes have massively out-performed manned spaceflight and made huge contributions to engineering know-how (which probably comes in useful when you want to design a comms/navigation satellite or a remote drone for hazardous
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We NEED to land on another planet, a human needs to set foot on it.
Uh, why?
And even if we do.... the earth and mars are both over four billion years old, humans are roughly 100,000 years old. What's the burning rush? If we took a 50 year break from space exploration, and spent the money in other ways, what would be the problem?
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To get the Helium 3 that's up there.
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It seems to me that the primitive, anti-intellectual idea is that science and exploration require a human being to be present to make a speech and plant a flag, when we know that we can do more actual exploration and research with robots that can enter almost any environment and stay there for months or years, not hours.
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The goal for humans has to be to stay on the moon or Mars indefinitely. Not only will we get lots of useful new technology but it will be the first step towards moving beyond the confines of earth. We know life on earth was devastated by asteroid strikes before and there are also possibilities for mining valuable material. Oh, and scientific curiosity as well. A lot of what we know about the history of the earth comes from observing other planets and comparing them to our own.
For all the amazing things we c
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For initial exploring, I agree, send the machines. They can do the one way trips.
We do need the ability to put humans in space. If nothing else, we need a way to maintenance items in Earth orbit.
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If nothing else, we need a way to maintenance items in Earth orbit.
It's much cheaper/easier to just send up another one when something breaks.
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Re:A sad day (Score:4, Insightful)
I disagree, for some things like going to Mars it makes far more sense to send a machine to do that. But most of the work that's being done on the ISS and was being done onboard the shuttles was far better than what you'd be doing with machines. If it really were that easy to do science with machines, then why precisely hasn't most lab science been turned over to machines at this point? Given the toxic and or infectious materials that are routinely involved with lab work, robots should be doing it. The main reason that they aren't doing it is that machines are still nowhere near as capable of conducting experiments as humans are.
You just lose out on way too much going that route. Sure you get a result that's free of mistakes and readily repeatable, but you also lose out on the mishaps that occasionally warp us forward or the insight into why we're doing something in a particular way.
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ISS is manned because pictures of people in space are good when you request funding. An automated lab in space would be far less impressive, even if it generated the same amount of scientific output. It's also manned because it's being used to conduct research on the long-term effects of being in space on humans - research that is completely pointless if we're not actually going to put humans in space for a long time.
The ISS is only 355km up at apogee. That's easily close enough for teleoperation of sci
Yes, progress indeed! (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, given the entire space program through Apollo was just sabre rattling to show off "big rocket" ICBM technologies that were already irrelevant before they launched I'd say we've made progress since we've stopped that aspect of it. STS was suppose to reduce the cost to space for payloads. It didn't, it was an abject failure and should have been canceled two decades ago. That it is finally gone is indeed progress, the same way that removing a malignant tumor is progress.
There are problems with space development in the US, but the end of STS isn't one of them. Larger issues have been surrendering the lead in commercial space development with myopic ITAR restrictions and a repeated squandering of money on half-baked human spaceflight follow on ideas.
Anyway, it might not seem like progress at first and we could certainly have hoped for more but the reality is the end of STS is the closest thing to progress we've seen since Challenger blew up and the DoD was finally released from the requirements to use the STS. While it was tragic that people lost their lives the Challenger accident saved the US space program by allowing sane launch platforms to once again be developed for both national security and commercial interests. STS should have ended then, the tragedy is that it bled the space industry for another 25 years. Good riddance, our adversaries and competitors couldn't have done anything worse to us through sabotage than we did ourselves by dragging a bad idea along for so long.
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The reason STS was held on to for so long is that there has never been a clear successor. If NASA retired the shuttles 20 years ago they wouldn't have got extra funding to develop replacements. Better to hold on to the funding they did have.
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Yes because the United States doesn't have a commercial manned program that gets people to suborbital much cheaper per kilo and will go orbital soon in Scaled Composites/Virgin Galactic.
Nor does the US have Space X who are about to test a manned space capsule, much cheaper per kilo.
Nor is the US sending a probe to Jupiter and a rover to Mars this year.
Nor does the USAF have a robotic space plane that is currently in space, a program NASA stopped working on which was then transferred to Air Force. A space pl
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How many people have these two actually gotten into orbit thus far, and at what cost?
Because talk is cheap, and I can't help but notice the Shuttle was marketed with pretty much the same terms too.
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Our gap in manned launch capability is scheduled to be smaller than the gap between Apollo-Soyuz and the shuttle.
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Deep space exploration was decoupled from the Shuttle when the Challenger exploded, because after that the Shuttle was banned from carrying fuel payloads. So from that point on going beyond LEO required a new capsule, which NASA is finally going to build. The fact is that LEO is cheap to access for cheap satellites, while most of the really interesting exploration would take place at altitudes which the Shuttle could never reach.
So the Shuttle has to go, but think how great the Apollo architecture was. It c
Not the beginning of the end (Score:2)
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Sure. You wanted a small government and big business; you got them. Congratulations.
Yes, but don't blame [competent] economists (Score:2)
Then the world got taken over by sound bites and economists and we never went back to the moon.
If the world had been taken over by economists -- or competent ones, anyway -- we'd be so flush with resources that our space program would be flourishing with accomplishments that exceed everyone's expectations.
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Then the world got taken over by sound bites and economists and we never went back to the moon.
If the world had been taken over by economists -- or competent ones, anyway -- we'd be so flush with resources that our space program would be flourishing with accomplishments that exceed everyone's expectations.
competent economists? Don't you read what you write? Goodness me ...
They are competent economists (Score:2)
The economists are competent. They study economics and learn how to get rich.
A happy day, a new era (Score:4, Insightful)
Now the US doesn't even have the capability to put a man in space.
That is so not true. SpaceX is readying the next crew vehicle.
We are going from being a nation that can only have one monolithic government entity send people into space, to one where ANYONE can send a man into space if they desire to form a company and build a launch vehicle. No more astronauts only and handful of selected special guests, this is the start of the real vision of space brought to life where eventually ANYONE can go.
Not much (Score:2)
"Is readying" is very different from "currently has"
It's only a matter of time though. They are slated to be the next crew vehicle, so it's not like it is wishful thinking. That is where we are headed.
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Now the US doesn't even have the capability to put a man in space.
Progress?
Neither does the US of A have a fleet of ships of the line or the capacity to mass produce bronze cannons any more, the production capacity of mechanical type writers has dwindled to almost nothing and they don't make amber monochrome monitors like they used to.
You remember when we were young, we would laugh at our elders who were starting to see any kind of change as decadence rather than progress?
You're getting old ;)
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Unfortunately there hasn't been any great progress in human space activities since the mid 80's.
However in robotic space exploration there have been great progress. And that is also important. The Voyager probes were a great success, just too bad that there weren't more of them - so that we at least could have gotten a close look at Pluto too. And the rovers Spirit and Opportunity did last a lot longer than expected on Mars, which definitely is a good sign.
As for the space shuttle - it has been a great tool
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Everyone in the history of the country that has ever had an agenda to push has said something like that.
I think the "end" is relative.
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You mean that the end was when JFK was shot in Dallas. In a way that may be true.
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Too expensive, too many mistakes, too much time and
... too much PowerPoint. [edwardtufte.com]
PowerPoint, NASA and the Columbia Shuttle Disaster (Score:3)
None of the above. (Score:5, Insightful)
I knew about it.
I don't think it was a waste of tax money.
I just didn't watch it.
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And another vote for this one. Yea, I knew but seldom watch TV so I didn't make the effort to watch it.
[John]
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Same.
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You mean you had actual work to do? That makes two of us, apparently.
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End of an Era (Score:3)
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I wish I had taken the time when I was in FL a decade ago to see one up close, I did however see it from the hotel room by accident, but it's still not quite the same.
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I had a chance a couple years ago, staying at Daytona Beach. But the launch was postponed. I would love to have seen the look on my boys' faces. Who knows when another opportunity to experience wonder and inspiration will come along.
Ratings must be low (Score:2)
See all those votes for the last option? Clearly we need to send another average schmoe into space to boost launch ratings!
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Well, I selected the last option because I knew there was a launch coming but did not care too much about it. Still I believe it is important so the second to last did not carry the right idea.
Ya didn't have to be there. (Score:2)
I knew about the launch, I thought about it and what it meant... but I didn't need to experience it live.
You know, way back when I was 12, I watched Enterprise let go and fly, on TV. A few years later I saw Columbia launch the same way, and I watched in replay-after-replay as both Challenger and Columbia and their crews were lost. But I have a lot of other things going on in my life, and participating live in an event just for its historical value doesn't rank at the top of my priority list. So my answer
Good Riddance (Score:2, Insightful)
Materials science and computers have come a long way in the last 30 years, so now we can do better than t
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Materials science and computers have come a long way in the last 30 years, so now we can do better than that pork-laden flying deathtrap.
We can, but we won't, because more people would rather spend money nation-building on another continent and prosecuting people here at home for "moral failings" than actually learning something about the universe, especially when said knowledge conflicts with their current dogma.
Might as well start replacing science books with the King James Bible, the Christian Taliban won't have it any other way, and as they're the ones currently carrying the "fiscal responsibility" banner, that means space exploration is
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The US has done better already, X-37, a robotic shuttle that can stay in orbit for months, not weeks.
"The spaceplane's first orbital mission, USA-212 was launched on 22 April 2010 using an Atlas V rocket. Its return to Earth on 3 December 2010 was the first test of the vehicle's heat shield and hypersonic aerodynamic handling. A second X-37B was launched on 5 March 2011 with the mission designation USA-226."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boeing_X-37 [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USA-212 [wikipedia.org]
http://en.wikipedia.org/w [wikipedia.org]
I Was Onboard Figuatively (Score:2)
Before the first launch, I did software design and quality testing on backup software for the shuttles. This was a rush-rush job for the U.S. Air Force because the powers that be at NASA didn't realize until almost too late that, with human lives at risk, some sort of backup for NASA's computers was necessary.
I was much more involved in the design and testing of software for some of the satellites that rode into orbit via the Shuttle. I think every one of those satellites could have been launched via unma
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In Florida... (Score:2)
I answered in Florida... which is true, though I live here, and can see the launches (at quite a distance) from the windows in the back of my house... and despite the poll rules. Whatever happened to our Cowboy Neal options!?
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Cowboy Neal is an option not spoken of in the "new" /.
Played a Rush tune: Countdown (Score:1)
Version cued to video [youtube.com].
What other rock band would do a song about a shuttle launch with real NASA chatter in the background? You sure can tell Rush are a bunch of geeks at heart.
Oblig Missing Option (Score:2)
Thank you NASA (Score:3)
I've grown up with the Shuttle. I tried to make it down for the last two launches, but it just didn't work out. One day I will take my son to see an orbiter at a museum, and I'll tell him all about it. He'll know all about Challenger and Columbia, the same way my parents told me about Apollo 13 and CM-012. We'll take a trip to the Cape to see a launch of whatever they're firing into orbit in ten years. I'll teach him to watch for the ISS if it's still in orbit by then.
I don't care about the politics or the money; it was still only a fraction of the defense budget. We have learned a lot from the STS. It's a beautiful machine, and an incredible achievement. Dangerous and expensive? Sure it was.
It's still very early days for us as a spacefaring people. We're talking Vikings crossing the Atlantic early. My only regret is that I have less than half a century left to live and probably won't see much more in the way of big progress in space.
Thank you America and NASA. I know you'll get through the current political and monetary challenges to lead once more.
Are missing options deliberate? (Score:2)
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Yeah, I just didn't watch it. I knew it was happening, and I support human spaceflight, but I don't need to see the thing go up. If anything, I wish these spaceflights were so routine and frankly boring that they got no coverage at all. In other words, we should be sending up one of these every day.
Ultimately though, the space shuttle was a terrible program, as is the ISS. We retreated from the moon, and got stuck in near orbit as a species for far too long. What's more, we viewed Challenger and Columbia as
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Getting into Earth orbit is the hard part of the problem. Once we have a way of getting lots of stuff there and back down again safely and cheaply, we can use solar sails or ion engines or simply the good old interplanetary transport network [wikipedia.org] to get anywhere on this solar system with relative ease. Once you can reach orbit realiably, our current (actually, 60's) technology ev
SpaceShip One (Score:2)
SpaceShip One is a sub-orbital hopper. A little vomit comet. While I wish SC/VG all the best, comparing it to the shuttle, or any proposed shuttle replacement, and shouting at NASA for not supporting it, just makes you look foolish.
I was working (Score:2)
No time to watch or listen to it, unfortunately.
Wow! 484 on board! (Score:5, Funny)
Wow - there were 484 people on board the space shuttle AND they get Internet access.
And they used it to post on Slashdot.
It's a good thing us guys on Mars don't like to brag about where we are posting from.
STS-135 launch (Score:3)
I think they missed the option "I was there, and shot my own video of it. [youtube.com]" option. :)
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They also missed " I work at KSC and I watched it from the VAB parking lot."
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Umm, Holding your breath to ET separation would have been interesting. MECO was at T+08:24. :)
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Congratulations, you've decoded Slashdot's email obfuscation.
I was there on the Causeway at KSC (Score:2)
Missing Option (Score:2)
Is there still hope? (Score:3)
If Fred (?) Hoyle was right:
"It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on Earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing high intelligence this is not correct. We have, or soon will have, exhausted the necessary physical prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high-grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high-level technology. This is a one-shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned. The same will be true of other planetary systems. On each of them there will be one chance, and one chance only. (Hoyle, 1964)"
How close are we to failure?
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Given Hoyle's other nutty ideas http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fred_Hoyle [wikipedia.org] , I take many of his ideas with a grain of salt. You should question his various assumptions.
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Frankly said, it is fairly unimportant to the question which puppet Americans put into the White house. The US has the biggest lead besides Russia, so it would make sense that the US should continue exploring and settling in space, but if the economy doesn't play along somebody else will have to take over. Also the shuttle programs end isn't that big a loss, NASA may become more efficient that way. The trade-off for the US was get access to resources or risk decline, the US went to Iraq and in the consequen
In Training (Score:2)
Seats 1000 (Score:3)
963 people were on board? I really don't understand why the US would scrap the thing; that's an amazingly efficient design.
Watched with my 5yro son. (Score:2)
Other (Score:2, Insightful)
I knew about it.
I looked at pictures and read articles about it.
almost 50% of slashdotters don't care? (Score:2)
Damn Clouds (Score:2)
There were a great number of folks to went outside to watch the launch from our current locations, but due to much cloud covered skies we could not see it from our vantage point. But we were true fans, each and every launch, we step outside and watch the launch whether we can see it or not. This time we could not and being that it was the last shuttle launch, our minds were sad for the loss of the visual memory, but our hearts are full and proud of our Shuttle program.
We will miss the launches that drew s
Obvious missing option (Score:2)
[x] Was aware of it, but chose not to watch.
So just to be cheeky, I selected "on board". It's the geek version of being "on the bus".
Extras (Score:2)
Missing options? (Score:2)
I was at work, so couldn't listen or watch live, yet I did pay attention more than "there was a launch?" or "waste of dollars".
"I was on board." 1772 votes. (Score:2)
Crowded up here, innit?
Missing option (Score:2)
Sad that it's over, but didn't watch or listen to the launch...due to missing it, being at work, etc.
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Yeah, but we've got to bring those damned geologists back. It's one of those little perks they negotiated early on in the manned space exploration days. And it sure does add to the mission cost.