----- Original Message ----- From: "Joe Latrell" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: "Europa IcePIC mailing list" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Sent: Monday, February 03, 2003 10:10 AM Subject: RE: From tonight's NY Times editorial
> > As to your last comment, one of the sketches I have on my drawing board > (for later development) was a 3' long remote camera system for the ISS. > It could easily be adapted to fit in the shuttle bay. Put it on the > wall and launch it when needed. It runs around and takes pictures. > > The reality is what do you do if you find a damaged tile? Go out an fix > it? There are no provisions (or equipment) designed for in flight tile > repair. So now the crew knows they can't come home and there is no > rescue in sight. Orbital mechanics makes it impossible the get anywhere > else (like the ISS). > > This will sound harsh and it is not meant to. We should mourn our loss > and then get on with the task of making space safer. The shuttle is as > safe as it can get. We know that we will lose 1 in 75 launches (how > many flights have there been since the last disaster?). Let us accept > that and start creating the next spacecraft. Sterile conjecture only > sends us in circles. Only be doing something DIFFERENT that what we are > now will bring about change. The next great space advancement will not > come from NASA but from some guy probably without a degree who just > 'thought something up one day.' > > Sorry for the diatribe. I am a bit upset that the blame game has > already started. They should at least have decency to have the memorial > service before that crap starts. _____________ Joe, the "blame game", as you call it, had started decades before the accident -- and it was never a "game", and it was the opposite of "crap". Those of us who have been predicting precisely this (entirely predictable) event ever since the Shuttle resumed flying after Challenger -- only to be ignored, thanks to NASA's propaganda machine and its paid stable of Congressional whores -- are furious, and our fury is justified. And since when is keeping your mouth shut when you know people were unnecessarily killed by a corrupt business corporation or a corrupt governmental branch -- for its own financial gain -- a "fitting memorial" to the victims? Had I been on that Shuttle, I would have wanted anyone who had good evidence that my death was the result of homicidal irresponsibility by NASA to raise hell about it the moment it happened. I wrote my SpaceDaily piece accordingly (and refused pay for it). You're entirely right, though, that something completely new has to be done in order to solve this problem. Let me quote another E-mail I wrote this morning regarding what that something should be: "I haven't found a single point in my initial enraged [SpaceDaily] piece that I would change. The Shuttle is a very dangerous vehicle. Manned spaceflight is vastly less justified on scientific and commercial grounds than NASA has been making out for decades, and it has massively and deliberately lied about both the costs and the dangers of the Shuttle and the Station in order to milk huge amounts of funding out of the White House and Congress. In the process of those self-serving lies, it has killed 14 people -- ths sort of behavior that gets private companies sued into the ground. "The Station should be cancelled immediately; manned spaceflights should at a minimum be vastly cut down in number for a long time to come (simply because almost all the scientific goals proclaimed for them can be done vastly more cheaply, and also more effectively, with unmanned satellites, including reusable ones); and any future manned flights should be done either with a new, smaller manned craft which would be much cheaper and much safer during launch and reentry than the Shuttle -- or by equipping the Shuttle cabin itself with the ability to abort during launch and perhaps also to survive loss of attitude control of the main vehicle during reentry, even at the loss of considerable payload capability. (As for wings on any Shuttle successor: as Robert Truax pointed out in that 1999 'Aerospace America' article, wings for a runway landing not only make it far more difficult to control a craft during reentry than a capsule design would be, but they also massively cut its payload capability and thus its cost-effectiveness.) "Now that the federal government has finally been wised up to the outrageous lies NASA told to get both the Shuttle and the Station approved in the first place, if the Shuttle and Station actually are cancelled I doubt the money will be provided to develop a new manned craft of any sort until new technologies have massively knocked launch and flight costs down -- which, as Freeman Dyson says, won't happen for at least a couple of decades. The justifications for manned spaceflight are simply not remotely strong enough to justify another manned program until then." If all this sounds self-righteous of me, tough. I wouldn't write something like this if I wasn't absolutely convinced of its correctness. == You are subscribed to the Europa Icepick mailing list: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Project information and list (un)subscribe info: http://klx.com/europa/
