Did the USA just lose the space race?

[Purple-Days]

On Thursday, July 21st, space shuttle Atlantis landed at NASA's Kennedy Space Center, wrapping up the final mission of NASA's space shuttle program. At 08:27:48 UT, just 21 minutes before the deorbit burn, astrophotographer Thierry Legault captured what might be the last picture of Atlantis in space--and it was a solar transit:

pic and caption from spaceweather.com

So we are going to Mars, heh? Sure we are.

I expect to see a permanent Chinese outpost on the Moon, before we (USA) ever set one foot on Mars.

Some of us around here remember Mercury as more than just a planet name, Gemini as more than a zodiac sign, and Apollo as more than myth...

The shuttle was a stupid 30 years waste of effort, into low earth orbit. All to build a ISS that has done exactly what? And will be decommissioned in 2020...

BTW the ISS isn't even in a useful orbit for staging extra-planetary trajectories. ie. you wouldn't build anything there and plan on sending it to the Moon or Mars or anywhere interesting.

 

[djonkoman]

yeah I never got the point of the ISS either, sure you can do some interesting zero-gravity experiments, see how astronauts' bodies react to the environment of space and train them for other journeys, but for just that it's pretty expensive

I think it would yield quicker results to just focus on unmanned travel at first, no complications with lifesupport, degrading muscles, spaceradiation etc and a much bigger reach for exploration, just focus on technologies involved in sensors, longitivity of the probe, quicker signals back to earth etc

I'm sure there are aliens out there and some of our earier unmanned probes are already pretty far, if we send out some probes with better sensors we might catch a glimp of the life that's out there
and gather data and construct maps for when we're ready for more manned ships

 

[tuttle]

I think the Shuttle's greatest achievement will go down as the launch then recovery / repair of the Hubble telescope. The amount of science that has come out of that thing has been astounding. The amount of lifting it did for the ISS is also very impressive, but perhaps not as scientifically rewarding. We certainly did learn a lot about building in space, and that will be important for deeper human space exploration.

As a space truck, it didn't do such a bad job. It really hard to design a car that handles like a F1 on the streets, has the off road capabilities of a 4x4, can carry like a pick-up, and gets 200 mpg; and that is what essentially what was asked of the shuttle program.

The Orion has what, $3.6 B left in allocated budget? So they can keep designing and building for a while, but they still don't really have anywhere to go with it. I guess we'll get a better idea once (if) the debt and budget negotiations settle. I for one would still like seeing my tax dollars go to human space exploration. You can still do really good science without the human passenger, but as the NASA proverb says, "No bucks without Buck Rogers."

 

[wilf789]

One of the Space Station's greatest achievements is the fact that it's international IMO.

If you went back to the early Cold War era when the Space Race first started and told people that by now the Americans, the Russians, the Europeans and the Japanese among others were all working together on a collaborative project like this you would have been laughed at or accused of being a spy!

It may not go down in history as the most technologically/scientifically useful endeavour but it will go down as one of the first truly international feats. A big pat on the back for the globe as a whole is in order, especially considering the amount of bickering that still goes on between nations.

 

[Surf Monkey]

yeah I never got the point of the ISS either, sure you can do some interesting zero-gravity experiments, see how astronauts' bodies react to the environment of space and train them for other journeys, but for just that it's pretty expensive

I think it would yield quicker results to just focus on unmanned travel at first, no complications with lifesupport, degrading muscles, spaceradiation etc and a much bigger reach for exploration, just focus on technologies involved in sensors, longitivity of the probe, quicker signals back to earth etc

I'm sure there are aliens out there and some of our earier unmanned probes are already pretty far, if we send out some probes with better sensors we might catch a glimp of the life that's out there
and gather data and construct maps for when we're ready for more manned ships

The ISS isn't even in zero gravity. It's in micro gravity. The ISS orbits so low that it's barely in space at all.

The Shuttle was a compromise from the very beginning. It was supposed to fly over 60 times per year and cost around ten million per flight. It ended up costing over a billion per flight and launching less than 15 times per year. Additionally, the idea of making a spacecraft into an airplane was misguided to begin with. It resulted in the most complex and delicate machine every made by humans.

Moving forward, NASA is going to refocus on their original mission: pressing the bounds of human achievement and exploration. The ISS is cool, but it was really just a case of NASA spinning its wheels due to being committed to a launch system that no one ever had a great deal of confidence in. The future of NASA's human space flight is the Orion crew module and the Ares lifting body. These systems are the direct descendants of Apollo, are vastly cheaper to build and maintain than Shuttles and are safer by an order of magnitude.

Human spaceflight is necessary because there are countless things that people can do in space that machines can't. With Orion and Ares NASA will have a system that can project humans to the moon and beyond. Good riddance to Shuttle. Space planes are a novelty, not a serious means to explore the solar system.

 

[lepstadder]

loose? as in "Not firmly or tightly fixed in place; detached or able to be detached"

 

[Vicki]

This is so depressing for me, in so many ways. We know people that "worked" for United Space Alliance, and that makes it even closer to home. Thousands have been laid off, with no other options for jobs to speak of. I just hate all of it.

http://www.orlandosentinel.com/news/space/os-shuttle-atlantis-landing-20110721,0,1694862.story

 

[Purple-Days]

Thanks, Surf Monkey, for detailing some of the reasons the 'Space' Shuttle and the ISS were just wheel spinners (and political trophies) . . .

Look familiar?

Nope, that's not an Apollo module, it's the Orion capsule in water landing tests. ie. we are back where we left off in 1972. A bit bigger, for sure, but the same basic form. Wernher von Braun is probably having a chuckle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Werner_Von_Braun

von Braun had no problem thinking LARGE, read the section : Popular concepts for a human presence in space

+++

Side note, Pammy came in, asked what I was reading about, said, Werner von Baun, she asked, "and his all girl orchestra?"


+++

I don't come down on either side of the Buck Rogers thing.

I think (IMO) our current missions on and around Mars and the up-coming rover mission are great. Opportunity and Spirit (now partially dissabled) are far out performing the expectations of a 90 Sol mission http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opportunity_rover ... The Juno mission (to Jupiter), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Juno_(spacecraft) , should be better than Cassini which was beyond all hopes.

I'm honestly hoping for polar landers on the moon. Free electricity and probably water (not enough to last forever, like we thought oil would... I consider using lunar water as reaction mass etc. a dumb idea, way too precious a resource.) What a head start? All the energy you could want, not talking solar either (in the normal sense), though some locations are nearly perfect for that too. It is only 3 days away !!! A tiny gravity well. What a perfect spot for the next human goal? Partial gravity ( a huge plus), shelter from solar blasts (a huge plus), easy re-supply, no weather such as Mars. Having just been through the Phoenix Haboob it would be no fun to clean blowing dust out of everything. At least the lunar dust isn't blowing.

 

[KushLover]

NASA cancelling the Shuttle program is no more a concession of the race than the New Orleans Saints replacing Jim Haslett and Aaron Brooks with Sean Payton and Drew Brees.

Damn, I'm vaped, my previous statement is only half true. We still need the Drew Brees part. Analogies aside, boxing the shuttle was the right thing to do. The inception of the shuttle program was pure, but the implementation fundamentally flawed. Politics doomed it (and over a dozen astronauts) in the cradle. The program is a modern day cautionary tale against doing things half-assed. There will be shuttles in the future. I have confidence the replacements will safer, cheaper, and more performant. Apollo > Gemini > Mercury && ISS > SkyLab , right? Plus, some scientist is going to discover something in the inner Solar System which some entrepreneur is going to figure out a way from which to profit. Hence, the Free Market will intervene and when it does, the non-politically constrained/mandated, incredible funding of international corporations will enter the race. When this happens, the rate of progress aught to accelerate dramatically.

If the treaty banning nuclear detonations in space is amended to allow nukes for propulsion then within the right window the travel time should be reasonable. But I think planning a strategy to win the race to Mars might be letting the cart get ahead of the horse. I have to ask: what can we learn or gain from personally going to Mars that we can't be from either returning to Luna or building a robot todo for us? If patriot pride is the only reason then I say this is unwise, unless you're planning on tricking a rival nation into a fiscally ruinous fools errant like putting sending humans to the surface of Jupiter or Venus.

Unless there's a specific scientific / economic / military / vacation reason unique to Mars itself, I can only see one practical purpose of humans going to Mars. That is: once we've finished researching most of the prerequisite technologies for interstellar travel, then some trips to other terrestrial bodies will surely benefit the engineers in implementing the vehicles, equipment and stuff. But again, this is only valuable if the expertise accumulated is kept fresh and in practice for when the time comes for wide scale use.

Until we can build FTL capable spacecraft, I'd rather see NASA focus moar and bigger Hubbles so astronomers can find us some habitable planets. Because right now, the only destinations are gas giants and terrestrial cinders (they all appear to be like planet Char from StarCraft). We can't go explore / colonize / exploit other planets if we don't know where they are, so there's no motivation for anybody to do a Manhattan Project style project to create a warp drive. First time somebody finds a terrestrial body with liquid water then that will light a fire under everybody's ass to get moving. That will be the race that really counts.

TL;DR: it's too soon to go to Mars anyway, NASA should do more important things first.

 

[Purple-Days]

+++ to all you said , specially, "it's too soon to go to Mars anyway, NASA should do more important things first." .

The new Mars rover appears to have a nuclear power source... Not sure about the source of power on ?Vesta? ...

Don't forget Mir, the Soviets have a great deal of low orbit hours to draw data from. There were a couple of other long term orbiters, not realy space stations.

 

[Purple-Days]

Here is a shot I've never seen, of course the last of it's kind.

Re-Entry of Atlantis as seen from the ISS.

 

[djonkoman]

if we would just be united as a planet, space would be a small step
sadly I don't see that happening untill we meet aliens...(as a common enemy, even if they are friendly the knowledge that they are out there will unite us I think, then it won't be white human vs. black human anymore but human vs. alien)
maybe best would be if we made first contact, and then the aliens left again, or kept the contact very low so that the negative effects will be minimal