Kurt Vonnegut wrote about how the shuttle sucked shit in one of his books. The monstrous beast barely gets out of the atmosphere. I remember hearing a shuttle launch when I was 13 or 14. The commentators were bragging about how the shuttle was travelling at 25,000 miles an hour and it occurred to me even then that if they were going so fast, they must have been in a very low orbit.
They're lucky one of them dealies never scraped tiles off of Mount Everest.
Fortunately, there are reliable and MEGA-CHEAP alternatives to the shuttle. That Space Bus may have been good enough for twenty years of PR stunts, but there is no way the US military was going to sit idly by and become dependent on that chunk for their needs.
They have good people at NASA (I imagine), but they have it in their head that unmanned missions can't catch the public's attention.
You remember that episode of The Simpson's where Homer is in space and in trouble and the General asks, "How is the Shuttle doing?" and the Scientist answers, "I dunno, all this equipment is used to measure ratings."
But you'll recall that the unmanned mission to Mars was a PR Bonanza for NASA. They should have been doing that sort of shit in 1980. They had plans for that sort of shit in 1980. Hopefully they'll get back on track.
In '86 there was lots of talk about big, dumb rockets replacing the shuttle. They are better than ever now. But frankly by now the US is behind in that kind of technology. And now we need to "honor the fallen heroes" by plowing ever more money into the shuttle. You know how it goes. In for a dime, in for a trillion dollars. Never, ever admit that the original decision was fucked up. Paul Krugman has a good column today saying all this stuff and patiently explaining that until we have better propulsion systems, say in another 10 or 20 years, it makes much more sense to rely entirely on unmanned missions.
They were doing missions to Mars in the '70s, witness the Vikings. But they couldn't do that and plow money into the shuttle/space station. Of course, as a plan to catch the public attention, the manned missions have not quite worked as expected either. They're either routine, in which case no one pays attention to them, or they're catastrophes, and they get all the wrong kind of attention.
(Although, those Mars probes didn't all pan out either, and it's embarrassing to try to explain that the thing missed its orbit because some idiot thought you were using inches instead of metric. Which actually happened. (http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,31631,00.html))
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2003-02-04 12:19 pm (UTC)They're lucky one of them dealies never scraped tiles off of Mount Everest.
Fortunately, there are reliable and MEGA-CHEAP alternatives to the shuttle. That Space Bus may have been good enough for twenty years of PR stunts, but there is no way the US military was going to sit idly by and become dependent on that chunk for their needs.
They have good people at NASA (I imagine), but they have it in their head that unmanned missions can't catch the public's attention.
You remember that episode of The Simpson's where Homer is in space and in trouble and the General asks, "How is the Shuttle doing?" and the Scientist answers, "I dunno, all this equipment is used to measure ratings."
But you'll recall that the unmanned mission to Mars was a PR Bonanza for NASA. They should have been doing that sort of shit in 1980. They had plans for that sort of shit in 1980. Hopefully they'll get back on track.
Re:
Date: 2003-02-04 12:52 pm (UTC)They were doing missions to Mars in the '70s, witness the Vikings. But they couldn't do that and plow money into the shuttle/space station. Of course, as a plan to catch the public attention, the manned missions have not quite worked as expected either. They're either routine, in which case no one pays attention to them, or they're catastrophes, and they get all the wrong kind of attention.
(Although, those Mars probes didn't all pan out either, and it's embarrassing to try to explain that the thing missed its orbit because some idiot thought you were using inches instead of metric. Which actually happened. (http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,31631,00.html))