Re: Oh joy! The next 20 years of...ancient chemical rocket travel
- From: wsnell01@xxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Wed, 19 Aug 2009 03:31:43 -0700 (PDT)
On Aug 18, 11:35 pm, Davoud <s...@xxxxxxx> wrote:
Rich:
They've gone backwards. The Shuttle gets replaced by a lumbering
1960's style rocket. What the F--- is wrong with NASA?
MitchAlsup:
The problem is not NASA or Congress, but that the American people
don't think it is wise to dump the kinds of money into NASA that NASA
requires to truely operate with manned safety levels at the cutting
edge of technology.
There's a very quick cure for that. Stop sending tourists into
space--eliminate the manned program now that we have demonstrated
conclusively that the human skeleto-muscular system deteriorates in
zero G regardless of exercise regimes,
What would happen in 1/6 G? I guess we might not find out.
and have also demonstrated what
we already knew, that exposure to radiation causes cancer. Instead,
send robotic spacecraft, which can carry tons of science equipment
rather than tons of life-support gear.
Did they ever get that robotic Mars rover unstuck from the sand?
Second, it might surprise you that it costs more to launch and service
a shuttle after flying than it would to build a new expendable each
flight--and safer to boot.
The Shuttle must have seemed like a great idea to those who like to
"reduce, re-use, recycle."
Third, as long as we are using chmicals, H2+O2 is the best one can
use, and current engines are within a couple of percent of as good as
can be done. Thus, making the vehicle lighter adds performance or
payload, having the whole vehicle reuseable adds weight and subtracts
from performance; and as we've seen in the shuttle program, expense
and danger.
See above.
"First of all, I wanted to say that all of this work‹the Hubble Space
Telescope, the MAP satellite‹all of this has used satellites produced
by Earth nations, but that are unmanned; there are no astronauts in
these satellites. They are not needed, everything can be done
robotically, and furthermore, astronauts would get in the way. They
bump into things, they radiate heat‹you don¹t want people where you¹re
doing real science--except on the ground.
"Unfortunately, there is a kind of puerile fascination with people in
space that is causing countries‹Russia, the United States‹to spend vast
sums on putting people into space. The President of the United States
has a new initiative to go back to the Moon and then go on to Mars at a
cost of hundreds of billions of dollars‹perhaps nearly a trillion
dollars. Well, this may have some justification in terms of excitement,
I mean, after all, we support football and the Olympics, all sorts of
things, but don¹t call it science. Don¹t confuse it with science.
That¹s the Disney version of science. Real science consists of people
on Earth sending unmanned satellites up, or doing observations on the
surface of the Earth and at their desks painfully working out the
implications of this. People can be sent up into space and hit a few
golf balls around on the surface of the Moon...that¹s all fine if you
like that kind of spectacle, but it has nothing to do with scientific
research." -- Steven Weinberg
Davoud
I suspect that without a manned space program, technology would not
have progressed as fast as it did, and there might not have been as
much popular interest in unmanned programs.
.
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