Do you like the SPACE SHUTTLE?

[dhinojosa]

Do you like the space shuttle? Choose your reasons, the question is simple.



Personally, I think it's still sexy after nearly 25 years.

[MrBenchley]

1. Antiquated, more for show than go...

dangerous, and lacking a clear mission...

Other than that, it's swell.....

[amazona]

13. well, there's truth to that, but it's jobs and good ones

I voted "hell, yeah" since there was no way to vote for "I'm in favor of space shuttle but do have some quibbles with this program."

As far as the danger, the participants know the risk and if they didn't want to go, others would be lined up around the block. Heck, if no one else wanted to go, I'd be happy to take my chances, wouldn't you? :-)

We need some better missions and also some better studies about how repeated launches are affecting the atmosphere since we presume the ultimate goal is regular travel into space. If such travel is going to destroy the earth, better know it now and figure out something else. I read a claim years ago that three times a week launches of space shuttle as it is currently designed would completely destroy the ozone layer. So we need some good science on the ground and upper atmosphere as well as in space.

But ultimately it is good to explore our little corner of the universe, a much better use of intelligent monkey minds than dreaming up new ways to kill each other.

[MrBenchley]

31. a much better use of intelligent monkey minds

is robotic missions such as Voyager or Galileo...and they can be done at a fraction of the cost.

If we want a manned presence in space, let's have a national dialogue as to why and what we expect to get out of it...and how we're going to go about it.

[Canuckistanian]

2. Using the Shuttle is like driving a transport truck to go shopping

It's big, expensive, outdated and buggy.

[SteppingRazor]

3. I picked other reasons...

Because I say it's both too old AND too costly. We've made great advances in space science and travel since the first shuttle flight, a quarter century ago. We can now perform missions more efficiently and with better results without the use of the shuttle. I think it should essentially be mothballed as soon as we build a smaller vessel whose only purpose would be to send people into space for repair of unmanned missions.
In the mean time, spend heavily on R&D so that the next generation of manned missions, including the first interplanetary visits, can be made feasible.

[Minstrel Boy]

4. It's a mule for military industrialists.

And it's depressing that manned "exploration" has been stuck in near-Earth orbit for a quarter century. More depressing: that the early-70s may be its high water mark.

[ewagner]

5. Didn't like it from the get-go

I thought it was a bad, dangerous design when it was first proposed. The tiles were an obvious weakness and the cost of maintaining them is obscene....

The time, money and human energy spent on perpetrating this bad idea has slowed or inhibited research and pursuit of more efficient means of exploration.

JMHO

[Birthmark]

11. My thoughts exactly.

Remember how there was going to be a Shuttle launch every two weeks because it was going to be so cheap and efficient? LOL!

[xultar]

6. I was clearly junk on the drawing board. Already old on the first flight

and wayy too old to fly now.

We should have new technology instead of proping up this POS.

[Taxloss]

7. If people consider space exploration dangerous,

they should check out how many people died exploring this planet. Hundreds, at the very least; probably in the hundreds of thousands.

[The Witch]

8. I can't bring myself to dislike the space shuttle...

Despite the fact that people need homes and food... and despite the fact that there are so many other things that could be done with that money... something about space exploration just stirs my imagination and the dreamer in me just can't disapprove. Damn heart, interfering with my head.

And they're launching on my birthday!! :bounce:

[dhinojosa]

9. TODAY IS YOUR BIRTHDAY.....

You say it's your birthday
It's my birthday too--yeah (not really)
They say it's your birthday
We're gonna have a good time
I'm glad it's your birthday
Happy birthday to you.

Yes we're going to a party party
Yes we're going to a party party
Yes we're going to a party party.

I would like you to dance--Birthday
Take a cha-cha-cha-chance-Birthday
I would like you to dance--Birthday
Dance

You say it's your birthday
Well it's my birthday too--yeah
You say it's your birthday
We're gonna have a good time
I'm glad it's your birthday
Happy birthday to you.

[The Witch]

16. well tomorrow.

unless they launched it today w/out telling me. ;-)

[SteppingRazor]

27. Just like dhinojosa's post above said --

"You say it's your birthday! It's my birthday too, yeah!"

July 13 is truly a great day. Happy B-Day to both of us, Witch! :)

[Ready4Change]

15. Exploring space is a reason to live.

Waging war is not.

[amazona]

18. aerospace workers deserve home and food too

Every time there is defunding at NASA, real people get hurt who have invested a great deal of time in their education and their science or engineering. This is an important industry for the Gulf Coast. No one is asking for a hand-out. They just ask that they be allowed to use their gifts. So don't feel bad about supporting the space shuttle.

I can personally guarantee that not one dime of taxpayer money has ever been invested in the First Bank of the Milky Way and not one aerospace job has been outsourced to the Martians -- it is all spent right here on earth!

Happy Birthday, BTW!

[Kraklen]

10. The Space Shuttle sucks.

It's like a poor guy with a camaro. It's a piece of shit car that's always falling a part and he keeps spending all of his money keeping it running because some people think it makes him look cool.

[Drifter]

12. Clearly an amazing piece of Hardware ...

but compared to what it was supposed to do ... it is a complete failure. This has nothing to do with the accidents and loss of life.

The shuttle was supposed to be able to reduce turn around time to about 2 weeks. With multiple orbiters, it would be conceivable to launch nearly every week.

I don't think it ever managed to accomplish this. I would be interested in knowing what the fastest return to space was for any of the vehicles.

Don't get me wrong, the Shuttle is a stepping stone technology, that we could never live without.

Cheers
Drifter

[Coexist]

14. Hell Yeah! One of the great things about living in Florida is ...

I CAN GO WATCH IT!

I can actually see it from my house when it takes off - but it is just a streak of white in the sky. Everyone is always standing in the street watching it go up when it takes off.

But I am going to be there this time. It is so cool - the ground shakes. I wish I knew how to post photos - I would share them with y'all.

We are leaving soon to go see it - hubby is packing the car as we speak.

[supernova]

17. I like it

because I like the mission of space exploration. I like that we dare to explore and all the things that we learn from it.

Having said that, it is an antique now, in techonological terms, and we had best be getting on with developing its replacement. And yes, I am concerned about the safety of tomorrow's launch.

Oh yea,and I'm made about Hubble too!

[mrfrapp]

19. Compromised Design

The Space Shuttle as it exists was poor from the get go. The idea behind the shuttle was good but the intial design was better. Instead of making the case for more money to be allocated to the project they instead come up with the shuttle we see today.

[rman]

20. Ill-managed waste of money, kinda like a SUV

The sooner it gets replaced by something safer and cheaper, the better.

[pansypoo53219]

21. i may have loved driving

67', 72', 73' cars in the 90's, but i wasn't going to space.
but DO fix the hubble.

[Massacure]

22. The concept of the shuttle is cool, but NASA should build new ones.

An average household computer is more powerful than the computer on the shuttle.

There is something like 150 miles of wiring that need to be inspected after every flight because they are insulated with kapton which degrades over time.

The heat shield needs to be taken apart and inspected after every flight. <- This takes a lot of time, and thus money.

The Solid Rocket Boosters should be switch to liquid fuel because that is less dangerous.

The Soviet Union did a good job with their Buran. Too bad they collapsed before they got significant use of it.

Edit: Oh, and I bet NASA could make good use of new composite materials now that weren't available in the 1970s.

[T Town Jake]

23. 1970's technology that should be decommissioned.

(n/t)

[Junkdrawer]

24. The only thing a Shuttle can do that a 'Single Use" vehicle can't...

is to bring something big (like a broken or foreign satellite) back.

Has that ever been done? :shrug:

[Massacure]

26. It also brings big things up.

Hubble wouldn't have fit on anything other than the Shuttle.

[Junkdrawer]

28. Really? A Saturn 5 couldn't launch the Hubble?

Remember, we could have built a lot more Saturn 5s with the shuttle budget.

[Johonny]

30. Yeah

But we can't build a Saturn 5 anymore. The shuttle was suppose to solve our heavy lifting problem. But it never flew often enough or was cheap enough. So the US has developed 2 new heavy lift rockets.

The shuttle can't fly high enough to actually do much satellite work anyways. Even the Hubble pushed the shuttle beyond it's designed flight height. The shuttle is very expensive and rather uninteresting.

[Junkdrawer]

32. My post took the perspective of the "build the Shuttle?" decision point...

in the 70s. Yours is from the perspective of "where do we go from here?". But basically, I think we're on the same page.

The wild card, however, is whether the Shuttle designers envisioned any Glomar Explorer type spy missions - snag one of those Ruskie satellites and give it a good going over. I wonder if that wasn't part of the decision parameters that isn't discussed.

[Massacure]

35. That was always in the back of the Russians mind, not sure about the U.S.

The point of the shuttle was to have a very quick turn around time, thus making it very economical to launch. It never worked out like NASA planned, the heat shield does not allow it. The heat shield has to be taken apart and inspected after every landing, which eats up large amounts of money in the form of labor. NASA also had difficulty dealing with Congress. Congress axed Saturn V because it was too expensive. Budget fights spilled over into the shuttle program as well.

The Soviet's Buran probably came closer to reusability than NASA's shuttle did. Too bad the Buran fell victim to the Soviet's economic collapse.

[Johonny]

39. Clearly

The Air Force was going to use the shuttle. But after the cost realities of the shuttle became known the Air Force went in another direction.

[ryan_cats]

42. I remember reading somewhere

I remember reading somewhere that we actually destroyed the plans for the Saturn V, does anyone know if that's true?

Kind of like Dick Cheney ordering the jigs to build the F14 destroyed under Bush I. Big hand for Dick! Now we need to spend money to replace the F14 instead of building more F14's.

[wli]

25. listen to the experts

AFAICT the experts neither need nor want manned expeditions, by and large for the basic reason of cost efficiency. They say they can get more done with the same budget doing other things.

Also, in case no one noticed, there isn't much out there for people to do. We sent people out, it cost a lot of money, and it didn't get much bang for the buck, apart from symbolism. We need to get it through our heads that it's a big huge vacuum out there for the most part, and where it isn't, it's actually even more hostile than that. We are rooted to the spot for a reason.

[Hard_Work]

34. defeatist

"We are rooted to the spot for a reason."

I'd say that attitude is why we are rooted to the spot. It is not in the best nature of Man to stay in one spot. We are explorers. We NEED to see what is over the next horizon...not want to see, but NEED to see. This is the essence of our greatness, our curiosity. These higher ideals are often dismissed in the day to day fight for survival, but they are never forgotten.

Edit: not casting a vote.

[Johonny]

40. But we are

seeing it. For far less than a shuttle mission that can reach nothing but near earth orbit we are currently driving around Mars and orbiting Saturn. Robotic missions are the future in space and always have been.

[Endangered Specie]

29. It really needs a replacement

one that is completly reused

[GliderGuider]

33. It desperately needs replacing

When I think of all the altenative designs - the Big Dumb Booster, the flyback first stage, Single Stage To Orbit - that make more operational sense, would be cheaper and could provide a longer system life, I suspect the Shuttle wasn't built so much for the space program as for the companies that made it.

Yes, it's a sexy-looking little thing. And I'll never forget John Young taking off his reading glasses for the post-landing walkaround inspection on Columbia's maiden flight. but it's time to move on to more sensible vehicles.

[Goldmund]

36. It's like Jordache jeans

[wuushew]

37. The shuttle consumes something like 70%+ of the NASA budget

I would like to spend that money on a manned Mars mission myself.

[bemildred]

38. Other: unmanned probes are a much better scientific investment. nt

[ryan_cats]

41. I love the technology

I love the technology, I'd love to fly it but really, what have we learned that justifies its existence? I'd fly it tomorrow but with so many problems down here, pointing to velcro and saying SEE, that's a result of the space program is a little low on the ROI side.

The danger doesn't bother me, there will always be danger and people willing to take the risk. What bothers me is that the people willing to take the risk on Challenger never knew of the debate raging about its launch.

I'll NEVER forgive Reagan for pushing for the launch so he could mention it in his State of the Union address.

I definitely recommend, "Challenger, a Major Malfunction" as a great read on the Challenger disaster and indeed the whole shuttle program.