I watched the space shuttle launch tonight.

Starman, I was talking to some NASA engineers down here who think Obama's going to scrub Ares V and the moon and Mars missions.

They'll keep developing Ares I, the crew vessel, because they'll need it for the space station.

But Ares V is cargo-only and necessary only for distance missions. Ergo, cancel the moon, cancel Ares V. They're pretty stressed about it.

patchs, if Vaughn and Favreau both burped and farted simultaneously, I'd probably feel that in my balls, too.

 

I've seen a couple, but never a night launch.
The brightness of the thing startled me more than the sound did. Even in the broad daylight, it's hard to look at the thing.
The coolest thing about the telecast is that they have a live camera on that big red fuel tank that broadcasts all the way until it jettisons.

 

Anyone wonder why Obama isn't getting more grief over his NASA plans?

I don't want to make this thread political, but it does seem like anyone else (Bush, Hilary, McCain) would get skewered for this.

 

Jones, with friends in the highest of places.

 

Two wars.
Crumbling financial infrastructure.
Crumbling physical infrastructure.
Health-care system in utter disarray.
Ambitious manned spaceflight's just going to have to wait in line.

 

Saw a launch as a kid. It remains, to this day, No. 1 on my list of "Holy shit" moments.

 

Jones, did you go to Ron Jon?
Second best thing to do in Cocoa Beach.

 

I remember the first few shuttle launches and how huge they were. We were in school, and we'd stop everything we were doing, the teacher would wheel in the old TV-on-a-cart, and we all watch in silent amazement.

 

I've seen a couple of night launches and both were amazing. I watched a day launch from Cocoa Beach once and that was a thrill. And, no, Maj. Nelson wasn't on hand.

 

One question: Are the launches now not televised on the networks because they are more commonplace, or are they not televised for fear of another Challenger explosion?

 

I don't think the networks care anymore, I'm sure CNN runs them.
I watch them on HDNet (Marc Cuban's HD channel), the picture is stunning.

 

They're actually less commonplace than they were in the late '90s -- they had gotten back on a pretty regular schedule by that time. The Columbia breakup threw that off the rails -- their best-case scenario now is to launch five per year.

Plus the Bush administration, after Shrubby's pie-in-the-sky "let's go to Mars" stunt declaration, has continually cut NASA budgets back, back, back, a trend which was going to continue if not accelerate as long as we continue to pour billions of dollars down the rathole in Iraq. The whole Ares program, just like the shuttle in the early 1970s, has been continually scaled back, scaled down, and cheapened-down to the point it probably won't be able to accomplish 3/4 of the objectives it was originally designed for. (The shuttle's duct-taped and bubble-gummed-together design and reliance on the solid boosters -- and the lack of an escape system, which sentences the crew to death if anything goes wrong in the first three minutes of the flight -- are a direct result of Nixon-mandated budget cuts and insistence on using 'off-the-shelf' components.)

Just as in the 1960s, when people used to kvetch about the starving children, schools, hospitals, etc etc which we could have paid for "instead of going to the moon" -- we spent more in Vietnam every two weeks than we spent in 10 years on NASA.

Just like now, we spend more in two weeks in Iraq than we spend on NASA.

Jones, if you're hanging with guys who are actually riding on the shuttle, I'm sure they know way more about it than I do, but everything I have read indicates NASA budgets may fare better under Obama than they would have under McCain (who fully intended to continue most of Bush's budget priorities). Of course everything depends on some kind of semi-solution to the economic crisis being found sometime soon -- if that doesn't happen, everything goes to shit, and we can forget about flying to Mars; we'll be lucky if we can fly to Miami.

One inescapable fact: unless we have a virtual back-to-the-stone-age worldwide crisis which reduces everybody back to the horse-and-buggy days, SOMEBODY will have to keep going up to the ISS every few months, if for no other reason to periodically boost the thing back into a higher orbit. I forget the actual figures, but I seem to recall that if not given a boost every couple of months, it would take about five years for the orbit of the ISS to decay to re-entry point.

That thing's as big as an aircraft carrier. If it were ever allowed to decay and re-enter on its own, half the world would have to live underground for months until it came in. It'd be the most spectacular artificial meteor shower of all time, but you wouldn't want to be within 1,000 miles of it when it was coming down.