To be honest, it's getting hard to find interesting stories these days.
The AX 4 mission is still on the ISS but I think it's in its last couple of days. Things I can trace say they'll stay on the station 14 days, but they docked to the station on June 26, and 14 days is June 40th, uh, July 10th. I don't know if those missions ever get extended and I don't see any word about "our mission ends on July x-didy x-th."
On This Day in 2011, the last Space Shuttle mission launched. I remember writing about it in my early days of blogging. It was really a day of mixed emotions; sorry to see the program ending but knowing it simply had to end - and probably should have ended years earlier. It was a spacecraft designed in the 1970s and flying for 31 years by then. I knew the program was over-hyped and never achieved the costs to orbit, the launch frequency, or the operational safety it was sold with.
I ended the piece with this:
It's no secret - chances are everyone who visits here knows the Endarkenment approaches. I know as well as anyone that the economy is on the verge of collapse, and the social order on the verge of disintegration. Knowing it's coming doesn't make seeing it any easier, and like some of the other folks I read, it pains me. The end of American manned space flight just seems like another sign of the approaching darkness.
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I imagine that this anniversary isn't getting spoken about much is partly these mixed emotions along with the fact that this is a 14 years anniversary not a 15, 20 or 25 year anniversary. It's a "tweeny" milestone.
And remember, in 2011, the Falcon 1 had only done a couple of test flights. The Block 5 Falcon 9 was years in the future, along with the first manned flight (Bob and Doug) from the USA in May of 2020, and dozens of other everyday things we're completely used to.
If we built the shuttle that NASA designed, instead of the shuttle that the DoD wanted, it probably would have worked better.
ReplyDeleteThat said, would you like a world where ever airliner was flown by the .gov? Or does it make more sense for airplanes to be owned and operated privately, for the most part? Yes, I know the .gov still owns planes, but I have never flown on one owned by the US government.
Rebuilding the shuttle and the pad after every launch sucked any 'savings' the program was supposed to give.
ReplyDeleteAnd in the whole shuttle design, it was never supposed to be 'Shuttle Only.' The shuttle system was designed as a whole family of space flight vehicles. All the Mars Direct, ARES Program and such were originally supposed to be part of the active program. Heavy lift vehicles using 2-4 SRBs wrapped around an extended tank with cargo at top and some J2 engines on the bottom. Long single-stack launchers like ARES1 made of SRB components.
Sigh. One big money pit.