Shuttle launch today

Watched it on HDNet during the party, it was awesome in HD, of course, blink and you miss it.
I would love to see one in person and I almost did.
Back in 93, I was in So. Fla. on vacation, found out about the launch the day before, rented a car, got a motel room in Melbourne, drove as close as I could to the Cape.
I'm sitting on the roof of my rental car, listening to the countdown on the radio, 10-9-8-7... waiting for that earth shaking feeling, heart coming out of the chest and then... 6-5, shutdown main engines.
That was it, scrubbed, and I wasn't going to be around for the next one.
Still sucks, 13 years later.
Someday I'll see one.

 

I'd actually prefer to host the SportsJournalists.com Rebirth Of The Saturn V Launch Party --- the old moonshots made shuttle launches look like cheap bottle rockets --- but assuming the current batch of bureaucrats doesn't take its ball and go home, why not?

You failed to note my original premise of "back in the day" when airplane travel was a calculated risk. "Flying on a damn airplane? Nah. Too damn many things could go wrong." A few decades before that, and you'd be the one bitching about horseless carriages because they weren't perfectly reliable and dadgum it, they'd scare the horses!

 

This is the ultimate apples and oranges argument. Since the space shuttles won't be taking ordinary citizens in bulk as passengers any time soon, there's no reason to go any farther with it.

 

Miles was about to be announced as the first journalist in space when Columbia disintegrated on re-entry, so he's got the space Jones. He's a pretty serious pilot, so whenever CNN has one of those stupid Airplane-Can't-Get-It's-Landing-Gear-Down-Let's-Watch-And-See-What-Happens moments, they get him on the phone stat.

 

Y'know, I try to avoid calling SportsJournalists.com posters names if I can help it, because it usually comes off as a juvenile way to make an argument, but I really, really, really feel the need to do so now.

DyePack, you are an utter moron.
If you post the things you do in an effort to rile up arguments, then you're a loser who diverts good people from good discussions about important topics.
If you post the things you do because you actually believe them, we need to reserve a room with rubber walls and a nice warm, tight white jacket for you.

There's been countless advances created through space travel, so many it's not even worth listing them here, and they've been well documented in the past. The reason why we're STILL going up, even with the shuttle program going away, is there's still work that needs to be done on the ISS, and there's still much we can learn from these missions, and connections with the ISS in the process.

Even if the ISS isn't a permanent fixture in space, it's teaching us more about the possibility and feasibility of a similar kind of structure. And to say that a structure like that isn't important is ignorance of the first degree.

And let's put aside the whole "explorer" and "curiosity" arguments and briefly address why we should be going into space, visiting other planets, etc. There's one very good reason: Because we should. It's the right thing to do. There's other worlds out there and the possibility of other life, even if it's beyond our solar system. There's so much we can learn and so much we can do by visiting space, that going up is like opening a treasure chest of possibilities.

Instead you'd rather sit in a corner, like some medieval leader, with your fingers in your ears as someone wonders aloud about the possibility of far-off lands and the likelihood of exploring said lands.

"We shouldn't spend money exploring out there when we aren't fixing things here!"

Uhm, it's possible to do both. And in the time when the shuttle WASN'T flying, it's not like this country had its ills cured. Stopping space exploration won't fix things at home, any more than banning gay marriages or fining someone for dropping an F-bomb on TV.

Of course, we all have our priorities. It's interesting that those of DyePack (and others, like Bobblehead and trounced) tend to be much more restrictive and leave a much larger portion of the population feeling much less involved.

Spending money on space exploration is a waste of time and money, but tapping people's phones is a good investment?

 

alley, I hope I'm not one of those idiots, but I don't get the whole space thing either. Never have.

 

I'm not saying a person's an idiot if they don't like the space program, but there's a certain segment of the population, DyePack included, who feel it's a waste of time and money and an unnecessary venture all the way around.

The fact is, it's not true. Scientific research needs to be supported and promoted, simply because we're at this point in life in large part due to technological advances through research that many people ridiculed. I mean, after all, who cares about orbits and apogees? Well, the people who provide your satellite TV broadcasts (sports, news, etc.) do.

I'm not on a mission to convert anyone to the space program, but the fact is it's legitimate science and research and exploration and it's something we need to continue.

Come to me with arguments about how we can do it better, or more cost-efficiently, and I'll heartily listen.

 

All I can offer is that these advances you speak of would have happened in their own time, with their own impetus, without our battle to put a man on the moon. That's all I can think of when folks talk about the things the space program has done for our daily life.

 

I am interested to see who receives the contract for the new shuttle. It is something that will be extremely interesting.

Now, to the subject of purpose... How was the cure to polio discovered? How did we learn that cutting up potatoes and sticking them in a big hot vat of oil would create french fries?

Sometimes you need to explore and discover before figuring out what worth there is.

There are many many things that are yet to be discovered and learned. We ought not to close ourselves off from them.

 

Perhaps they would have, but so many inventions we now see common in the world were made out of necessity in a "niche" market, so to speak. Would computers be as small today if not for NASA's efforts to find computers small enough to fit on a spaceship? They might be small, but if it hadn't been for the space race, that miniaturization effort could have been 10-20 years later, and then we're not having a discussion on something called the Internet.

Propulsion, medicine, math, science, etc. They've all benefitted from the space program, and while they might have on their own, the space race certainly help speed them up. Do we delay the advance of science because we feel the vehicle for this discovery isn't legit or even necessary?

 

Had a once in a lifetime with this....

On Tuesday when the shuttle lifted, I was on final approach on a Southwest plane landing in Orlando.  The pilot did a fantastic job giving us time updates and having everyone move to the left side of the plane to watch.  If I didn't know better, I'd swore he slowed the plane down so we could see.  I had seen the shuttle launch a long time ago in person, and this definitely was just as exciting. Awesome.