Last Shuttle Launch

[kshe95girl]

Originally Posted by cruxan

ya i already know that dimwit,, now just imagine all the breakthoughs that would have come out of nasa if they had been working on energy RD for our everyday use.. we would be way more ahead than we are to day..


the space program is going to crumble just like our little trial and error economy. to bad they didn't spend all the money on trying to solve our energy problems..

you just keep smoking your pipe dream..

You called me a dimwit?
Really?
I just love it when all people can do is resort to personal attacks, how wonderfully erudite of you.....now if your post only made some kind of sense.

[Metro Matt]

Originally Posted by slimkay

Military spending is a blip compared to the behemoth that are Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid. Plus, the military sector jobs are high value and are very well paid. It is a sector that creates a lot of wealth for the USA overall.

The NASA is worthless now, losing what it was known for. Private sector will deal with space exploration a lot more better and it won't have to be paid with taxpayer money.

Obama has done the right thing by pulling the plug on an archaic program. .

Another Oblunder

RIP NASA

You were a huge pride here in Texas, the nation, & the world.

[Dane_in_LA]

Originally Posted by Metro Matt

Another Oblunder

RIP NASA

You were a huge pride here in Texas, the nation, & the world.

Wipe your eyes. NASA is still doing what NASA does best - robotic probes (nobody even gets close to them in that area of expertise) and leading-edge research in aerodynamics, rocketry etc.

Lifting human beings to LEO has been done for 50 years, it's not really pushing the envelope any more. Lifting satellites even less so. NASA should have been out of that business decades ago. As for Constellation, it wasn't working out. There was a lot of paper being generated and a lot of salaries being drawn, a lot of lucrative contracts handed out to friends and friend's friends. The hardware was in a permanent state of redesign, but nothing was actually being flown. It sounded like a great plan - just use Shuttle bits and pieces, but avoid the Shuttle's basic design flaws. As it turned out, they couldn't make the engineering work out.

In the meantime, SpaceX develops and launches man-capable hardware pretty much from scratch for less than what the single flight of the dummy known as Ares-1x cost.

The Constantine commission had it right.

Anyway, what would the critics have done? Pour more money into Constellation and hope to eventually see a rocket emerge? Keep the Shuttles flying until they fell apart?

[mwruckman]

Originally Posted by Dane_in_LA

And while GWB was very happy to talk about vision, no funding really came along to pursue those lofty goals. The only way Constellation could have progressed as planned involved a de-orbit of the ISS.

Not that he bears full blame - I'll gladly posit that the Clinton administration should have locked down a Shuttle replacement. Of course, NASA's manned programs are used for pork barrel politics to a disconcerting degree, and everybody's quite happy to keep things stalled until their district gets some of the action. (I'm looking at you, Utah.)

The Clinton administration did have a shuttle follow-on in mind. Remember the Space Launch Initiative? The X-33, X-34, X-37 and X-38. Two of these were prototypes for a SSTO launcher that was fully reusible and which at the time was deemed technologically possible. X-33 was the 1/3 scale prototype of a craft called VentureStar that Lockheed-Martin was going to build. VentureStar was a triangular lifting body that would fly a similar flight path to the Shuttle. VentureStar had a novel linear aerospike engine, was to use composite materials to greatly lighten the mass of the vehicle and use a new more robust thermal protection system, Orbital Sciences Co. was building X-34 an air launched reusible version of that companies Pegasus small satellite launcher. X-37 was a booster launched unmanned spaceplane that was intended for a new way of conducting orbital orperations. Vehicles like this are like the UAVs (robot planes) and can be used for reconnisance or even offensive operations. X-38 was a spaceplane designed to bring people to an from the ISS. Believe me there were people back then who were uncomfortable with using the Russian Soyuz. X-38 was based on an earlier NASA effort that produced the HL-20.

What killed this version of the future. The new broom that got its hands on NASA in 2001. The Bush team shut down the X-33, X-34 and X-38 projects. The excuse was the projects were either too risky or costing too much. Cost was the more likely issue since they also chopped the American contribution to ISS. The US Habitation module was cancelled along with TransHab an inflatable module proposed for cheaper future spacecraft or stations and bases. X-37 lived on since the Pentagon saw some value in this project and the orbital prototype the X-37B has flown twice since 2009. X-38 lives on in the DreamChaser which is using the design of the Hl-20 and the stored prototype of the X-34 has apparently been shipped to Sierra Nevada Corp which might use the X-34 Fasttrak engine in its vehicle.
As for fully reusible SSTO vehicles the real DC-3s for spaceflight. It might have been technical hubris to try to build this vehicle ten years ago. But a lot has been done with engineered composite materials (Boeing and Locjheed-Martin have built planes like the Dreamliner and F-35 almost completely out of composite materials). Several years after X-33 was cancelled Northrop-Grumman suceeded in building the prototype hydrogen tank intended to be used in X-33. So it might be more easily built this time and the payoff would be a major advance in space technology.