Space Forum / Shuttle / January 2004

I can't believe the shitty quality of the mars photos, I can take better
photos with a $200 digital camera and they had $900 million to play with, no
wonder nasa is in such a mess

Did the designers take pointers from the people who design the control
panel of commercial airliners, as the layout is similar?

Does anyone happen to know how much drag the atmosphere contributes to
a shuttle launch, and the delta-vee that might be possible without it?
(assuming for the moment that you can light it off in vacuum)
Trying to get a number for a graph on size vs drag.

After a string of failures, from the Shuttle Challenger disaster in
1986, and the Columbia disaster more recently, it is very refreshing to
see the unmanned Spirit rover succeed.   Of course, it looks like
unmanned flights are the wave of the future, for now.  First we send the

Putting aside the budget for design and building:) Its job description would be
to do essentially what todays shuttle does, only at low cost. Lets assume a
cargo ONLY variant for really heavy lifting.
But the basic jobs would be the same. Taking as many as  10 astronauts to

Lynne Cheney, too?
http://www.corpwatch.org/news/PND.jsp?articleid=5968
How much of this is Fort Worth seeing, so far?

http://www.slam.ca/CNEWS/World/2004/01/15/313544-ap.html
Yep, just more of that good ol' US imperialism at work.
Poppa

MOON ROCK for SALE
LUNAR ROCK, RETURNED TO EARTH BY THE UNMANNED LUNA 16 EXPEDITION
http://www.e-guns.net/bujonline.htm

The cost of one manned mission to Mars ($400.00 B ) is equivalent to a
thousand robotic missions.( $0.40 B) We could put dozens of scientific
satellites in ordit around not only all our solar system's planets but also
all their major moons. In addition we could send dozens of  ...

Maybe with the change in leadership this fall it opens up
the possibility to use voting power to get Congress to
order Nasa to service Hubble. I know that's pretty far
fetched, but is it completely impossible?

So, what on mars is going on on this planet, that could apparently cause so
much trouble to spacecraft? I was saddened to hear that the rover  is now in
sulk mode. Sounds like memory corruption, but I'm sure this was thought of
and some reset of memory should occur after a given ...

I was wondering,  now that NASA is planning on going back to the moon,  are
we likely
to see a new space vehicle which could be say parked at the ISS,  and then
flown off

Presumably, the Shuttle could increase its performance during its last
missions by not recovering the SRBs. It would be interesting to learn
how many SRBs actually will exist at the end of the program, how much
the Shuttle payload would increase if the SRBs were not recovered, and

Well, will they be allowed to fly the Shuttle now, after one got killed?
I personally feel that the agency is running so scared of an accident at the
moment that it will be a wonder if they let pigs fly....
Brian

Anyone have an audio file of Bush's Jan. 14 speech or know where
there is one that I can download?  I want the actual file, not just
a link to one that plays, that I found, and couldn't figure out how
to save it.