The shuttle Discovery seems to have made it through liftoff. Thank Dios. Let's hope for an uneventful flight.
The shuttle is certainly a glorious machine. Perhaps the most glorious that mankind will build for the forseeable future. (But God I hate that name "shuttle", it turns space adventurers into glorified bus-drivers.) Hopefully the shuttle will be followed up with... something. And hopefully that something will be simpler and cheaper to fly. As things stand, the shuttle is so precious and so expensive and so demanding of man-hours that loss of one of them is intolerable. Add the inevitable self-destructiveness of a political and media culture in which any deviation from absolute perfection is interpreted as criminal negligence, and NASA (along with the American public) have become almost pathologically risk averse. I still remember being a kid in the sixties. My mom would get me up before dawn, and we'd all sit there watching the Mercury astronauts on our old B&W TV. When the engines lit, we didn't know if the thing would blow up or spin crazily out of control. It was dangerous as all hell and we were fully aware that we might see a man die that morning. The moon landings weren't a sure thing by any means either. America was willing to embark on adventures in those days. It was willing to risk failure. I don't think that we are today. Maybe what America needs now are a larger number of smaller, simpler, less expensive vehicles. Vehicles that individually represent less national investment. Vehicles that, callous as it sounds, are a little more expendable. And the public needs to be reaquainted with the idea of adventure, with the concept of taking risks and enduring loss. My vision of future manned spaceflight would look like this: Create some simple crew orbital vehicles, maybe several different kinds. They could range from small space-planes riding new design boosters to simple 60's (and soyuz) style crew capsules built to ride existing satellite boosters. Put out bids and let private industry design them to maximize simplicity, re-usability and low cost. And at the same time build some large umanned cargo lifters, capable of lifting at least the shuttle's weight in pure cargo, perhaps based on the shuttle's existing booster technology. Then use the space station as an orbital shipyard. Launch component modules and fuel with the lifters, and assemble them in orbit into one or more space-only vehicles capable of moving between higher and lower earth orbit and up to lunar orbit. Then put one or more reusable lunar landers up into lunar orbit for them to visit. But do it incrementally, in multiple afforable steps, with the ability to tolerate failure at any point without destroying the whole program. Create the possibility of upgrades and substitutions. Don't place all bets on one single vehicle or system, no matter how glorious it is. And perhaps the US could invite the Europeans, Russians, Chinese, Japanese and anyone interested to participate, making space exploration into a truly international effort undertaken by the planet as a whole. (But hopefully not burying it under a horrendous UN-style bureaucracy.)
Is MANNED space flight even necessary? Granted, Hubble's success in part is due to repairs completed while in orbit, but look at the REST of our unmanned program. Lots and lots of success, lots and lots of new experimental and observational data, and all without anything like the cost of a crummy shuttle flight.
EU?? Eewww! We shouldn't let those Russians touch the space station either... except that for the last two years they were the only people that could get up to it. We had to beg'em for rides. (To say nothing of the fact that they built part of it.) I understand that this latest shuttle flight had a Japanese and an Australian on board.
What Space Travel's Little Guys Are Up To "British entrepreneur, Sir Richard Branson, has teamed up with aerospace designer, Burt Rutan of Scaled Composites to form a new aerospace production company. The new firm will build a fleet of commercial suborbital spaceships and launch aircraft. Called The Spaceship Company, the new entity will manufacture launch aircraft, various spacecraft and support equipment and market those products to spaceliner operators. Clients include launch customer, Virgin Galactic—formed by Branson to handle space tourist flights." This was announced yesterday at the Experimental Aircraft Association's annual gathering at Oshkosh (by gosh!). The tentative design is for 9 seater (7 passengers, 2 crew) suborbital vehicles called 'SpaceshipTwo' and for a new launch aircraft called 'Eve'. The vehicles will be based on scaled-up redesigns of last year's SS1 and will use the same kind of hybrid rocket engine that powered that little wonder into outer space. http://www.space.com/news/050727_branson_rutan.html
Unfortunately the high inclination orbit of the ISS makes it unsuitable for launching moon or Mars missions. This orbit was a political choice to allow Russia to participate with their rockets.
Foam I guess people have seen the latest. More foam insulation peeled off and future flights are grounded. They haven't found any damage to Discovery yet though (crosses fingers).
