Mattelius presents: NASA's SPACE SHUTTLE FLEET TRIBUTE VIDEO Every launch from STS-1 to STS-131
Shuttle fleet's retirement days are closing in, so i wanted to honour these magnificent vessels by constructing a video collection of every succeeded launch, starting from STS-1 (launch date 12 April 1981) to STS-131 (launch date 5 April 2010).
Thanks alot Discovery, Atlantis, Endeavour, and SPECIAL THANKS GOES TO Challenger & Columbia - our heart will be with you!!!!
Originally posted by dj_alfi
no kidding, exploration of space is probably the single most important thing our race will ever do!
How so?
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Once bread becomes toast, it can never go back to being bread again.
May-05-2010 23:00
Lews
Platipus And Prog Addict
Registered: Feb 2007
Location: Hugging Whales And Saving Trees
Oh come on. This is not the end of U.S. manned flights. There is no fucking point in the space shuttle anymore. It costs about half a billion dollars to launch one of them up, spending 50 million per head to send astronauts up with the Russians is WAY cheaper. SpaceX is quickly advancing their own technologies to having their own craft available to get Americans up there as are many other companies.
While I'm actually really mad that Obama is ending Constellation, it needed A LOT more money than it had for it to be feasible. We really just can't afford that shit at the moment, not with what American's priorities seem to be. I'd love for us to be on the moon in 10 years and on Mars in 20, but it's going to take a lot more money than most people are willing to spend.
That said, I hope Congress will approve more money for manned space exploration soon.
Registered: May 2008
Location: The Pacific Northwest, of course
we really need to investigate alternative launch methods ASAP.
If we do not do it some other country, like China, will and they will corner the market on space and make it so cheap that competition from other nations will be hard to make.
Something like a Launch Loop or Space Elevator could pave the way to massive human colonization of space and the US needs to get on the ball before China or maybe even India does it first.
May-06-2010 03:44
Cpt.Cocaine
Supreme tranceaddict
Registered: Dec 2008
Location: Montreal, Quebec
What about a catapult?
___________________
Once bread becomes toast, it can never go back to being bread again.
May-06-2010 20:06
Joss Weatherby
Banned
Registered: May 2008
Location: The Pacific Northwest, of course
quote:
Originally posted by Cpt.Cocaine
What about a catapult?
Catapults have been on the table for a long time, but the idea has always seemed to apply to the moon (to launch craft easily into escape orbits).
Rocket boosting mag-lev catapults (basically think a giant rail gun with a sled that has rocket boosters on it) on earth would work, but the payloads would be so much smaller compared to a bigger system like a launch loop or space elevator.
I think the launch loop is the most realistic idea as its structure remains in the earths atmosphere, the materials needed to build it are here today, and the energy required to do it could easily come from nuclear plants built out at sea (where the loop would be built). It has the ability to regularly (like many times per day) launch multi-tonne cargos into LEO and with boosters into HEO or parking orbits, as well as to build larger craft outside the atmosphere to go to other plants or eventually to other stars.
Really it comes down to who wants to gamble on this and sink the billions into it. The estimated cost for a launch loop is $35 billion... which really is not that much money compared to a lot of domestic programs in the US and to international organizations spending.
