A Bittersweet Finale For Discovery Space Shuttle 205
Julie188 writes "The shuttle Discovery re-entered the Earth's atmosphere for the last time Wednesday to close out the space plane's 39th and final voyage. And so marks the beginning of the end for America's shuttle program. Everything about the last flight felt epic, from how it overcame a down-to-the-last-second problem to launch on its final mission in February, to its sunny final landing this week. As it coasted to a stop, Discovery's odometer stood at some 5,750 orbits covering nearly 150 million miles, during 39 flights spanning a full year in space — a record unrivaled in the history of manned rockets."
Re:Bittersweet indeed (Score:4, Informative)
JPL isn't without its issues either, but at least they accomplish stuff. My brother worked for them for 5 years until the bureaucratic mess became too much. To hear him describe it, they have a serious brain drain issue where the lure of the private sector takes a lot of their best and brightest. Its a hearty bunch that stay for the long term and manage to get past the politicking.
Re:Alas (Score:3, Informative)
Yes. Plus, it also picked up the LDEF (Long-Duration Exposure Facility) launched by a previous mission and returned it as well (on a separate mission).
Re:Parasite / Host relationship (Score:4, Informative)
Re:I blame Bush (Score:4, Informative)
He'll be remembered as the anti-Kennedy for shutting down the US manned space program.
The Columbia investigation committee decided that the shuttle should be recertified if NASA wanted it to fly past 2010. No-one thought that going through that process made any sense, so that was the end of the program. Bush just happened to be President at the time.
The shuttles were only 35% through their rated lifespan.
There are concerns about aging of a number of parts which were never designed to be replaced because the shuttles weren't supposed to fly for thirty years; you'd have to take the airframe apart to replace them and then you might as well build a new vehicle instead.
Obama didnt help much by shutting down its successor.
That's probably the best thing Obama has ever done. If NASA replaces expensive NASA-only launchers with launch services purchased on the open market, they can concentrate on developing new technologies and travel to places beyond Earth orbit which commercial organisations won't be doing any time soon.
Re:Don't worry... (Score:5, Informative)
Good. That means we can focus our resources on real space science, while the Chinese discover for themselves that there's no valid reason to send humans into space for the foreseeable future.
I roll my eyes whenever I hear phrases like "real space science". Nobody in the world does it or has done it with a space program.
For example, there have been a number of robotic missions to Mars which have uncovered something interesting within a short period of the start of the mission, but which the mission did not have the tools to follow up on. For example, the Viking missions attempted to test for life with mixed (though thought to be negative due to the high risk of false positives) results. In particular, it's taken us about four decades to repeat the "labeled release" experiment.
Similarly, the Phoenix mission imaged some sort of white deposit on the legs of the vehicle which appeared to sublimate like water ice. But no means was available to figure out what the substance was. We'd have to duplicate the landing of Phoenix with instruments positioned to take that measurement. Who knows when that will happen?
Where are all the space telescopes? On Earth there are hundreds, perhaps even thousands of research quality scopes, just in visible light, and a significant number of instruments in radio frequency. According to Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], there are something like 35 active observatories (I count probes with multiple instruments in difference frequencies such as Swift Gamma Ray Burst Explorer, as many times as they appear in the list) throughout the spectrum, many operating past their expected life times and another 15 planned for the next ten or so years.
For my final example, consider the remarkable lack of space science on or around the Moon since the end of Apollo. It was twenty years before anyone tried to image the Moon again. Back in 1961, they first hypothesized there might be water in the polar regions of the Moon. Even now, fifty years later, we don't know the extent or accessibility of this water (and other volative compounds). And it's only now that any missions to investigate the polar regions of the Moon have been proposed (which I note will be the first sample return missions in forty years).
This is the problem with so-called "real" space science. We have simple questions which can't be addressed for decades or longer, because the probe doesn't have the capability to do more than a few little things. The investigators will die of old age before resolving some of these issues. We have small numbers of orbital instruments working in any given spectrum or role, so there is intense competition for access.
What humanity really has here, is minimal space science. This is what you'd expect to see, if space science were being managed almost solely for appearance's sake.
I see it as like most recent space related activities as being remarkably lacking both in ambition and sense. In the long term, you need to shorten decision cycles from decades to minutes or hours. If you have instruments with huge pent up demand, you need to provide more of those instruments.
Economic sense is lacking. Building one-off objects just makes a series of very expensive projects. Generally, if the scientific purpose was important enough to make one probe or observatory, it's important enough to make half a dozen. You can split development costs across a larger number of missions.
Some probes such as the Europa Astrobiology Lander or Hayabusa Sample Return, could literally be repurposed for dozens, perhaps hundreds of icy moons, asteroids, and comets throughout the Solar System. Imaging satellites could be used almost anywhere. There's no real reason we couldn't have dozens of small space probes voyaging forth to image every major space body in the Solar System out to say the orbit of Neptune, right now. The first probe might cost a lot, but the 50th pro