Centerfield

Just stepped outside my office, which fronts A1A, to catch a glimpse of the shuttle's liftoff. It's hot and hazy here, so we only had a brief glimpse, but regardless, it still gives me chill bumps to watch. It's just kind of cool.

Lol. I was going to delete my post when I realized you had already started a thread...I think we were pretty much simultaneous, but I see there's already a comment, so I'll leave it.

If you're a space fan, you gotta love it. I nailed the kids in front of the TV and watched it on both TV and live net feed. Oh baby oh baby.

I guess for me it was kind of the growing up process in Florida. We were always let out of class to watch the launches. I remember standing outside with my classmates watching the Challenger blow up. It was a beautiful day, not a cloud in the sky. I've watched a night launch from my front yard...that's probably the coolest ones of all.

Yes, I still hold my breath when the shuttle lifts off, afraid that it's going to blow up again...

But it looks like they've got the hard part finished (no obscene comments from the peanut gallery, please. ;-) Now, if they can just land as well as they took off...

I'm curious to know if there are any skeptics here regarding the value of the Shuttle program. I'm not NECESSARILY one, but I'd like to here some thoughts before I become one just for kicks. (Space fans vs. Space Station fans, if you know what I mean.)

That's "hear." I'm such a child that I can't live with a mistake like that. Actually, I'd like to read some thoughts, but not in the psychic sense.

I lived at JSC during the Gemini/Apollo years, Abel. Literally--in the neighborhood across from the main gate on the other side of Highway 1. Great place to be a kid.

WHQ, the shuttle's a mediocre vessel, an orbital pickup truck designed by a committee. Because it's supposed to do everything, it's not all that good at anything in particular. And since we built it we've been stupidly wasting those main external tanks, when we could have been orbiting them and gathering them for future use. Every launch we spend the fuel to get them up to orbital speed, and then we throw them away, kicking them back into the atmosphere to burn up. Dumb. Really, really dumb. How big a space station can you build with one hundred and fourteen empty external tanks, each with much more cubic than the shuttle itself?

I love the shuttle only because it's what we have--but we should be making much better. We need good re-usable orbital cargo-and-crew carriers. But they don't have to be the same vehicle. Cargo can go up cheaper and safer in unmanned rockets. And a smaller re-usable orbital crew vehicle would also be cheaper and safer.

Good points Tully. I am somewhat skeptical about the shuttle program. I have been a space fan since I was a little boy--I even have vague memories of some of the Mercury flights and, of course, I remember watching the moon landing. To me, the space program represents human imagination, ingenuity, courage, and committment. That said, NASA sold the public a bill of goods about the space shuttle. Frankly, the space shuttle program was at least partially a result of bureaucratic politics; once NASA fulfilled its mission of going to the moon, it had to find some way of staying in business and it came up with the shuttle. It has never been a cost effective or particularly safe way of getting people and cargo into space and the science that is done on the space station is not of any great value. Most scientists seem to be believe that much more can be done with unmanned ships. The fact is the shuttle is a white elephant. It was based on utopian assumptions. I believe in human space flight, but NASA needs to develop a safer method of sending humans up; in addition, the shuttle is now decades old technology. If there is going to be a rationale for human flight, it seems to me that it has to ultimately be aimed at having people live on other planets--just sending people up to do science experiments, as interesting as they are, seems to be a waste of money.

But I'm sure glad it's up safely and I would love to see it some day.

"I believe in human space flight, but NASA needs to develop a safer method of sending humans up" - I read a fairly pursuasive article after Columbia (in Newsweek, I think), that challenged the presumption in that statement that it is NASA which needs to figure it out. Rather, since we can all agree that space flight requires a vast capital investment, and since most people can reasonably agree that the funds for that are never likely to issue forth from Congress, maybe the time has come to - at least in part - look elsewhere.

The contrast drawn was the railroads: the railroads were vital to the opening of the west, they were of critical importance to the development of the nation, yet their development was not hamstrung - as our development into space has been in many ways - by chronic underbudgeting, compromising, political bickering and the issues associated with NASA. Rather than having a government-funded national railroad program, instead, government merely offered incentives and assistance to the private companies which built, maintained and ran the railroads to immensely successfull effect. Q.v. Julian Zelizer, The American Congress at 285-297 (Railroad Policy, by K.Austin Kerr).

I'm not endorsing this view, still less arguing that NASA has no role in the future of space travel, just suggesting that it's an interesting viewpoint.

Beg to differ on the value of space station research, but no argument with the rest. Among other things, if the military hadn't insisted that the shuttle be capable of "place & retrieve" on milsats we might have had a much more useful design. And we've positively dragged our feet on developing a good replacement vehicle. There's some promising SSTO (single stage to orbit) and TSTO (two stage to orbit)designs we should have been working the bugs out of for years, rather than putting all our bets on that old pickup truck.

We've got some pickups. What we need are a couple of cargo trucks (reusable heavy lifters) and a mini-van (for crew moving). And a sports car would be nice!

The shuttle became just another cog in the wheel of Reagan's scheme to bring down Communism.

Those of you too young to remember, the Soviets built an almost identical copy of the shuttle http://members.lycos.co.uk/spaceprojects/buran.html after having been slipped the plans, most likely by the CIA.

It worked exactly as expected, it became a massive project to suck up Soviet resources, manpower and expertise.

It's just a cold-war relic and should have been retired a decade ago.