posted
Space the final frontier, before was a place where no man has gone before, today it is an adventure for mankind and America is the chief pilot. There is beauty in space, and it is orderly. There is no weather, and there is regularity. It is predictable.......Everything in space obeys the laws of Physics. If you know these laws, and fancy them, space exploration is for humanity. And don't tell me man doesn't belong out there. Man and woman belong where ever they want to go-and they will do plenty well when they get there. Perhaps, one day, another African since the SouthAfrican will get the fat chance to become the second AFRINAUT.God knows who? America and her space program has done a lot good for mankind and our condelences pour out to those who perished last weekend. May your soul rest in peace. It is fair to say that you took another giant step to mankind. God Bless
Hail Biafra
[ February 05, 2003, 11:24 PM: Message edited by: Waypoint1Biafra ]
Posts: 1673 | From: Minnesota USA | Registered: Mar 2001
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posted
" This cause of exploration and discovery is not an option we choose; it is a desire written in the human mind... We are that part of creation which seeks to understand all creation. We find the best among us, send them forth into unmapped darkness, and pray they will return..."
------------------- President George W. Bush
These are fine words, indeed. In its simple and graceful delivery, it also communicates our hope and sadness. But we should never lose sight of the fact that while the five men and two women who perished in their descent to earth were very worthy of the journey we called upon them to embark on our behalf it does not diminish an essential fact: That the job was not worthy of them.
It is my estimable conclusion that NASA is patently engaged in bad science and bad engineering. And that its Shuttle program is a significant failure not only in its inability to impact science but also in its practice of economics.
quote:It is my estimable conclusion that NASA patently engaged in bad science and bad engineering..Shuttle program is a significant failure...inability to impact science/economics.-------> BENBELLA.
The above statement is probably an over-sight, burised emtions, or just pure negligence in retention. I am disappointed that Benbella with such acquired book knowledge would colonize NASA program as nothing but Pseudo science and jugernaut for economic waste. Perhaps, he does not realize that this communication via BNW in the comfort of his bedroom is NASA engineering .
NASA/SPACE BENEFITS Here are just a few of many contributions that NASA has impacted in both science and economics. Curiosity, motor oil, computers underneath your passanger seat, Speed, cell phone to the size of your palm, bullet proof vest, Air bags, gobal communication, HDT, shoes, track suits, medicine and so many others I could not name. The cold war ended compliment of NASA engineering. Infact one of the most significant developments of NASA or space exploration is the rise of general-purpose electronic computers during the second half of the century. As the use of computer expanded, new professions were created of personnel especially trained to work with these sophisticated machines. The most important of these new jobs was that of a computer programmer-a person who could work out the complicated mathematical programs needed to tell the computers what to do. Even rogue nation like Nigeria is enthused about space exploration. .
In conclusion, our kind of evolution depends on the cultural changes, on what we learn, on the things we build. In a scientific sense NASA is the evolution of humanity, science and economics. Perhaps more than any thng else, it's significance of artificial intelligence systems that determines our future as species. Copy that Benbella?
Hail Biafra
[ February 22, 2003, 08:58 PM: Message edited by: Waypoint1Biafra ]
Posts: 1673 | From: Minnesota USA | Registered: Mar 2001
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posted
I suspect Benbella merely asked if manned shuttle flights are worth the money and human sacrifice. In other words, can mankind engage in space exploration by alternative means e.g. unmanned, manned space stations etc. That does not amount to denial of gains of space exploration. Given that Russia with far less money is not doing particularly badly, it makes sense to ask if NASA is value for money.
[ February 22, 2003, 08:43 PM: Message edited by: CSE ]
Posts: 621 | Registered: Mar 2001
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I suspect you misunderstood my initial points. Of course, I am not opposed to the space exploration. Instead, I believe that NASA needs to do more. That they should have had by now a fleet of solar sailing rovers plying the interplanetary space, and returning soil samples from Mar, Venus and the asteriod belt for study on earth.
My difficulty is with NASA's persistence on sending humans to the earth's lower orbit at great risk to their lives to conduct experiments that robots can just as easily do. And relying on nineteen-seventies technology and with cost over-runs to carry out those manned flights. I am sure that you agree with me that this not the nineteen-nineties. Just as it is not even the nineteen-anythings. It is a time in which science and technology follows the path of letting software determine the hardware. Whereby, new machines are technologically more sophisticated and safer than the last one. The space shuttle does not fit this. They still rely on microprocessors that were made for computers less capable than the 386's of ten years ago.
They don't even get as much of the satellites lauching business to justify the cost of each Shuttle flight put at $500 million per flight. Single use rockets like the European Ariane, are mostly used for satellite launching.
It is interesting that the Shuttle program was sold with the argument that it woould be a safe, reliable craft that would make a round trip every week at a cost of ten million dollars each, and paying for itself by engaging in the satellite-launching business. Until the recent crash of Columbia, NASA was averaging five trips a year.
CSE:
You made my points better than I could have. I appreciate.
posted
This was in yesterday's issue of the Times. it essentially affirms some of our discussion here. Enjoy!
Scientists Question the Value of Shuttle Flights By JAMES GLANZ and RICHARD A. OPPEL Jr.
February 24, 2003 New York Times
or decades, NASA's prime argument for putting people in space has been the value to science. Space, the agency says, is a unique laboratory where humans are essential to test an array of things, including the way gases burn and how spiders spin webs in a weightless environment.
But in the aftermath of the Columbia disaster, many scientists outside the space agency have concluded that the scientific payoff, by itself, is nowhere near enough to justify the program's huge cost and risks.
The scientists do not necessarily favor abandoning human spaceflight. Some say long-term space exploration is a worthwhile goal. They note that experiments on the long-term effect of weightlessness can be studied only on flights.
But with remarkable unanimity, the scientists reject NASA's assertion that the research being done by astronauts can be carried out in no other way. They add that unmanned probes and robots could do most of the experiments.
Dr. Gary S. Settles, professor of mechanical engineering and director of the gas dynamics laboratory at Penn State University, said: "In order to spend that money and take the risk of a national tragedy if lives are lost, there has to be a very powerful justification. And that justification hasn't been proved."
Dr. Paul D. Ronney, a professor of aerospace and mechanical engineering at the University of Southern California who had a major experiment to study flame balls aboard the Columbia, said, "If you're looking strictly for science bang for the buck, then I think you would just have unmanned vehicles."
The space agency dismisses such assessments. In a news conference on Thursday, Sean O'Keefe, the NASA administrator, said the International Space Station, to which the shuttle ferries astronauts and parts, "is the most extraordinary scientific and research capacity that collectively this many countries could ever have dreamed up doing."
Mr. O'Keefe added, "It's just an astonishing capability and one that you simply can't duplicate here on Earth."
The human space program also has powerful allies in Congress. Lawmakers and aides note that the program, particularly human flights, has deep support from lawmakers in states that have substantial investments in it. The House Republican leader, Tom DeLay, represents a district near Houston that is home to many NASA employees.
"I don't see that we have an option to scale back" human spaceflight, Mr. DeLay said in an interview. "That would be admitting defeat and it would be denying our thirst for knowledge. You won't have the same rewards and return on investment if you do it by robotics."
Recent efforts in Congress to curb the human space program have been soundly defeated, he said.
"I personally would like to see us return and colonize the moon," Mr. DeLay said. "I think we ought to be pushing the envelope and traveling to other planets. All these kinds of things will energize and excite the American people."
Senator Bill Nelson of Florida, a Democrat who was a crew member on the 24th shuttle mission in 1986, said Congress would ultimately support human and unmanned flights. "You can get science on both kinds of missions," Mr. Nelson said, noting that it took shuttle-borne astronauts to fix problems with the Hubble Space Telescope.
Yet some in Congress now think the shuttle may be too dangerous. "I don't believe we can just do business as usual," said Representative Joe L. Barton, a Texas Republican who is on the space and aeronautics subcommittee. Mr. Barton says he wants to continue manned missions, but not with the risks that come with shuttle flights.
Perceptions of the space program will also be influenced by findings about the Columbia disaster. A 10-member board led by retired Adm. Harold W. Gehman Jr. is investigating the crash. Mr. Gehman is expected to meet with lawmakers in Washington this week, and he is likely to be encouraged to include in his final report broad findings about the safety of the space program.
Even after the Columbia disaster, the space program retains what one senior Congressional aide described as an inertia that could only be overcome by "something that has the force of a shock wave."
Adding to that sense of inertia is the huge investment in the International Space Station, which is yet to be completed and is expected to cost close to $100 billion, with at least a $30 billion contribution from the United States.
"I do not foresee a circumstance where the investment we have made in the space station will be flushed into a black hole," said Representative Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican who is chairman of the House subcommittee on space and aeronautics. "As long as we have a space station, we'll rely on people."
The weeks after the Columbia disaster are not the first time that scientists have questioned the worth of research by humans in space. In early 1986, just before the Challenger explosion, James A. Van Allen, a University of Iowa astronomer noted for discovering the radiation belts that surround Earth, wrote that the station would "seriously diminish the opportunities for advancing space science and technology."
Unmanned spacecraft would meet those goals far more cheaply and safely, Dr. Van Allen wrote in Scientific American.
That argument holds true today, said Gerald J. Wasserburg, a professor emeritus of geology and geophysics at the California Institute of Technology. Although proponents of human spaceflight dispute those assertions, even they concede that the soaring costs of flying experiments aboard the shuttle and the dubious value of some of the early research by shuttle astronauts have made the program much harder to defend.
But rigorous scientific reviews have greatly improved the quality of the experiments, said Peter Voorhees, a professor of materials science and engineering at Northwestern University who led a National Research Council study of NASA's microgravity science last year.
The study did not determine whether the results were worth the costs, Dr. Voorhees said. But he cited Dr. Ronney's work on the spherical flames, called flame balls, that occur in a weightless environment as valuable research on the shuttle.
Flame balls can burn much more faintly than ordinary flames, an effect that Dr. Ronney says may one day help researchers learn how to build combustion engines with higher efficiency and fewer pollutants.
The flame balls lighted by the Columbia astronauts last month were some of the faintest produced; an ordinary birthday candle is 100 times as bright as some.
Dr. Ronney said that just after the disaster, he was shocked when people would ask whether data from the experiments had been beamed to the ground, since the questions seemed pointless with seven people killed.
But he has since had a change of heart, and says he sees the research as the last work of the seven astronauts, something he says he hopes will be significant.
"To a large extent," he said, "I feel as if seven graduate students in my lab were killed."
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