Try pulling and rebuilding a car engine with rusty stripped bolts, at the bottom of a deep swimming pool sometime. That will give you a small taste of what they are dealing with. And if their wrenches slip, or they tear their suit on a sharp edge of a hatch, it is a lot harder to deal with than a bloody knuckle under a car in the driveway. The work wouldn't be that bad on the ground, but in orbit, nothing is easy. The deep divers that work on the legs of oil rigs and bridge piers are probably the only people not in orbit that can truly appreciate how hard the procedures they are doing actually are.
ALL of the crashes could have been prevented if NASA had not become so corrupt, cost-oriented, and over-confident that they allowed Challenger to fly DESPITE the engineers' pointing out that weather was too cold. O-Ring. Case Closed. BTW does anybody remember seeing the late, sainted, Richard Feynman blowing away that whole investigative panels of fat-assed idiots by doing his little ice-water, O-ring demo on TV? That was WAY kewl!
Columbia, same deal: lazy, over-confident; flying that ancient junker w/o worrying about foam panels detaching; has happened before; past shuttles flew OK, so what, me worry?
Price paid for both disasters: Lost some of the finest human beings to walk the earth, or sail the skies. Plus the enormous wasted training costs). Indescribable grief to their families. First Israeli astronaut, loved by all, died in that hell. Take a look at the ISRAELI documentary; VERY different from the kiss-up US documentary(ies) on that loss.
Yes, Obama called for an independent review and we don't know exactly what that will bring. But nothing in that suggests a cutback or moving away from manned flight. Obama's actual actions regarding NASA go beyond what he said as a candidate. His first budget from a couple months ago, increased NASA funding to $18.7bil, up another $2.4bil and stated a commitment for manned flights back to the moon.
"Obama's NASA budget supports shuttle retirement, return to Moon BY WILLIAM HARWOOD STORY WRITTEN FOR CBS NEWS "SPACE PLACE" & USED WITH PERMISSION Posted: February 26, 2009 The Obama administration's proposed 2010 budget provides $18.7 billion for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Including $1 billion that went to NASA from the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the new budget proposal represents a $2.4 billion increase over 2008 funding levels, according to the White House Office of Management and Budget.
The budget blueprint continues to support the Bush administration's directive to finish the space station and retire the shuttle in 2010 and to return astronauts to the moon around the end of the next decade."
Certainly a small percentage are (were) housed at the two places you mentioned. But I suspect we don't have enough facilities for them all. Probably have to kill them in situ.
For an overview of the issue, check an essay by Thomas Barnett in today's Esquire.
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While the article is about the futility of a "nuclear-free" world, many of the observations apply to space-based weapons as well.
Barnett wrote "The Pentagon's New Map" which changed the way a lot of people - including me - think about future wars. In it, he divides the world into "The Core" and "The Gap." The "Core" includes countries with a relatively high standard of living, rule of law, democracy (or close to it), international trade, long life-expectancy, content citizenry, etc. The "Gap" countries lack almost all these attributes.
Core countries don't initiate wars; Gap countries do.
For example, there is zero chance China, an emergin Core country, would initiate war with anybody over almost anything, including Taiwan.
But, to assuage the concerns of some, we don't really tactically need "space-based" weapons - other than the ones we already have (GPS is a space-based weapon, or at least spaced-based support of weapons). A spaced-based weapon's utility - like nuclear - is primarily the pucker factor.
I was thinking of one time about running for president just so I could appoint him SecDef. Brilliant. His lectures on the subject are also very entertaining. If he had been able to get his stuff in before Iraq, part deux. Would have had a much better force structure for what we faced. The Cliff Notes version is at
Yep. I got a kick out his assignment to devise a 50-year strategy for the Navy. After a month of work with a couple dozen flag officers, they gave up and the officers returned to their commands. Barnett and his small staff started over.
He looked at the first PowerPoint slide: "The mission of the United States Navy is to gain control of the world's sea lanes." Then it hit him. The first slide - and all that followed - were WRONG.
The goal of the United States Navy is not to "gain" control of the world's sea lanes - the goal of the Navy is to MAINTAIN control of the world's sea lanes. No other nation can project force like the U.S. Heck, the U.S. Coast Guard is larger than any other country's navy!
We've got planes that can take off from Minot, South Dakota, or Missouri, fly to any point on the globe drop 25 tons of precision munitions, and return to base. In WW2 it was multiple sorties per target; today it is multiple targets per sortie. We've 24 aircraft carriers, twelve Nimitz-class (each with 60-75 aircraft). There are twelve teeny carriers in the rest of the world (Russia has one carrier approaching the Nimitz class).
Erm, I don't think that started in January - might want to look back to the Fall of last year and a previous administration for the beginning of that "solution".
You have no clue what you're talking about. Zilch. Have you undergone the same sort of training these men and women have? Do you have any clue as to the conditions they are working under?
Put on a pair of ski gloves and then try taking apart your PC, and you'll only BEGIN to get a GLIMPSE of the difficulty the astronauts are facing. Add to that they're working in micro-gravity with no real way to brace themselves, and it gets a LOT harder. They're also not working on an industrial piece of equipment, but a precision instrument with very fine tolerances of what is and isn't going to render it several tons of useless orbiting junk.
Then let's talk about the fact the astronauts are trying to access a part of the Hubble that was never designed to be accessed or repaired. The panel they had to remove to get to the STIS power supply that blew had 111 screws, with Torx and Allen heads. Have you ever tried to keep track of 11 screws on a project? Imagine nearly 10 times that number of screws and inside an instrument designed to look billions of light years away and cannot afford the smallest grain of anything getting in the way.
How about that handle that had a stripped screw and had to be broken off by brute force? And it took NASA engineers on the Hubble mock-up back on Earth to come up with a way the astronauts could safely do it without kicking debris into the internal workings of the telescope.
If you want to use a terrestrial analogy, these guys are precision watchmakers working on the world's largest watch, in zero gravity, in bulky space suits, with the risk that at any minute any one of a billion things could go wrong and they would die.
It's not that the shuttle is in more danger, just that the options are more limited.
Usually the shuttle is either in a mission to ISS Alpha or in a relatively similar orbit, so if something goes wrong on the shuttle they can make a transfer orbit to Alpha and the crew can "lifeboat" there until they're rescued.
On the other hand, Hubble and ISS Alpha are in such different orbits (altitude and angle relative to Earth's equator) that Atlantis could never make a transfer orbit to rendezvous with Alpha.
So you came up with a slightly different analogy. The fact is, they are, as I said, fearless auto mechanics. I say that to make the distinction between them acting as scientists or test pilots or what have you. The big deal about this mission comes down to us having sent some mechanics into space to repair the shuttle. Not saying it's not difficult but it's hardly "science", similar breathless news stories could be done about Rusty Wallace adjusting the camber on his race car during a pit stop and going on to with the big race.
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