Re: NASA Space Shuttle - The Real Problem

Morpheal wrote:
>
> The real problem in regards to the Space Shuttle program at NASA seems
> to have been ignored. Let's look again. What do we see ?
>
> We see technology that is, for the most part, more than 30 years old.
[snip]

It would require another quarter century to Six Sigma qualify new
hardware. The Space Scuttle is not meant to be a heavy lifter. The
Space Scuttle is an exercise in politics. It has succeeded beyond
anybody's wildest bugetary and political porkbarrel dreams.

> We are not alone in the cosmos and we must
> never allow our species to remain Earthbound for one day longer than it
> takes to meet our destiny of reaching out to the exploration of new
> worlds, and to bettering our species chances for competitive survial.

Bullshit. The moon makes a nice low-gee hard vacuum platform Nothing
else anywhere in the solar system is worth visiting unless you can
literally move mountains. First, you'd need an entirely different
physics to pull it off. Second, you'd need a way to keep your
ass-tronaughts from frying in the radiation field. Whether you lived
in Mir or ISS FUBAR, you came home to radiation cataracts - the
atmosphere is equivalent to nearly a meter thickness of lead radiation
shielding (14.7 lbs/in^2 of mass). A year outside Earth's atmosphere
*and* magnetosphere would cook you medium well-done.

Here is a complete list of Near Earth Objects with which NASA plans to
diddle as they graze the local neighborhood, paying most of the
carfare with their own nickel: None.

--
Uncle Al
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/
(Toxic URL! Unsafe for children and most mammals)
http://www.mazepath.com/uncleal/qz.pdf
.

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