America's Next Shuttle?

Out in Jefferson County Colorado,  people have be seeing a strangely familiar  craft.  In fact this strange apparition is reminiscent of early prototypes of NASA's retired Space Shuttles.

What is it?  Its  Sierra Nevada Corporation's Dream Chaser.  A space going craft that would launch atop an Atlas V rocket and carrying up to seven astronauts to or from space, along with cargo.

Much of what makes the Dream Chaser unique is that its mission parameters are what was envisioned by NASA for its STS.  The craft is reusable,   quick turn around, plus something the shuttles could not do which was to use a variety of airport solutions because of its robust cross range making many airports useable instead of being locked in as the shuttle was. 

Here are some short videos of tests that SNC's  Dream Chaser recently completed


 

Here is the link to SNC's main site HERE

What are my bids for this 25 feet tall, 160 feet long and 135 feet wide and weigh around 8.2 million pound launcher?

What is are 25 feet tall,  160 feet long and 135 feet wide and weigh around 8.2 million pounds?

NASA's historic mobile launch platform, or MLPs, famous for holding Saturn 5s and the Shuttle as they made their way from the VAB to the launch area.  

 NASA presently owns 3 of these behemoths.  The agency is entertaining concepts for the potential use or divestment of three historic launch platforms that are not needed for the agency's current or planned future missions.  

Are you reading this correctly?  Key words.....Saturn, Shuttle.   I would add in unique and historic.

Can you say short sighted?  Irreplaceable?  Of course we have seen what Nasa considers mothballing or storage....

Read the NASA post here

Shuttle Discovery's Last Flight

Fromm NASA via Boing Boing & YouTube comes a short film of the last flight of Discovery. Lets take a moment to reflect on everything that means. There it is sitting atop the modified 747 flying over our nation's other monuments in Washington DC. It is a moving experience for sure. Certainly one worth documenting. But then people started clapping. Maybe I am being a bit too sensitive here, but clapping with joy as the past pinnacle of out once great space program flies off into the haze was not one of joy....

Don't get me wrong here! I do applaud the brave people who flew it and died with it. The great minds that went the extra mile even though they were hamstrung from the beginning. I applaud the engineering marvel that was the shuttle and the men who were tasked with making a potato fly. But applaud its passing? No, at the risk of melodrama...hat in hand, head bowed I turn away. oh and here is more at Discovery Air and Space

Watch the Space Shuttle: The Complete Missions' by Nature Video

Homer sends in this great link to the YouTube video 'Space Shuttle: The Complete Missions' by Nature Video. It's only eight minutes long but is a well spent eight. Check it out here or the video below

Shuttle Entering the Atmosphere

I was up early to watch the landing of Shuttle Atlantis. I remember hearing mission control say that one of the astronauts aboard the ISS had watched Atlantis as it entered the atmosphere from the stations Cupola viewing window. I thought, wow, now that must have been something to see and what do you think I found today on Gizmodo? A photograph of the Shuttle entering the Atmosphere! It may be the last ride but that is a sweet picture to go out on!

Thanks Gizmodo!

360 Degree VR view of the Shuttle Flight Deck

I found this real neat 360-degree virtual tour of the Space Shuttle Discovery flight deck on Boing Boing. It allows you to 360 degrees, zoom in and out and pan up and down! Mouse or keyboard operated, so there are no complicated commands just click and move.

The sim can be found here

NASA's Final Shuttle: The End of an Error?

Xnewsman sends in this great article from time that holds an unflinching eye on the last Shuttle flight and the end to the program.

From the Time article:

• Friday, the 135th and last shuttle mission is scheduled to be launched, ending a program in which five ships carried 777 passengers into space, traveling a collective half a billion miles

As the article points out, the shuttle program built the International Space Station, launched the Magellan, Ulysses and Galileo probes to Venus, the sun and Jupiter. Plus the truly shining accomplishment has to be placing the Hubble Space telescope in orbit and returning to service it several times.

But then there was also these.... The $500 million price tag every time one took off, the months of maintenance and prep work needed between flights, the thermal tiles the ships would shed like dry leaves and finally the loss of 14 astronauts.

The shuttle was envisioned as a way for workers in space to commute to work, it was supposed to reduce the cost of delivering material to orbit to a tenth of the cost and each shuttle was supposed to last 100 launches. The truth is it never became a commuter anything, cost over runs and delays plus losses managed to increase the cost of launching to a point that the only customers to use the shuttle was NASA and the military. Shuttles never can close to the overly optimistic 100 flights. Discovery which was the most flown managed only 38 trips in 28 years.

Any system has it good and bad traits, the venerable shuttles were no exception.

There is some wonderful history and photography in the Time article. Read more by clicking here

Gabrielle Giffords Well Enough to Watch Shuttle Launch

ABC News has learned Arizona Congresswomen Gabrielle Giffords has been given the go ahead by her doctors to go to Florida, where her husband Mark Kelly will command the shuttle Endeavour for it's last mission.

From the ABC news site:

• Giffords has been recovering (and) undergoing rehabilitation for a gunshot wound to her head.
  
• Kelly's mission, STS 134, is the second to last space shuttle flight for NASA, and will deliver the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer to the space station.

William Shatner Narrates a Tribute to The Space Shuttle

William Shatner Narrates

Where Shuttles go after they Retire

NASA.Gov has release the final resting place of four shuttle orbiters.

At the conclusion of the Space Shuttle Program - Shuttle Enterprise will move from the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum to the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York. Discovery will reside at the Udvar-Hazy Center. Endeavour, which is preparing for its final flight at the end of the month, will go to the California Science Center in Los Angeles. Atlantis, which will fly the last planned shuttle mission in June, will be displayed at the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida.

Complete NASA article here

Left & Right SRB Recovery Mission

Here is something that we all hear about but I have never seen - the NASA SRB recovery ships in action? Huh? If you are interested in all aspects of a shuttle mission you will like this, or if like me your interested and live in a coastal fishing village and you just like to see the boats in action...check it out:



Check out NASA's youtube video site

Good bye Discovery

Well I am sure you know what 3/9/11 is all about. I can't imagine that anyone reading this right now has to have STS 133 explained in detail. However just to put a small cap on it.
From Space.com:

• Discovery landed for the final time here at NASA's Kennedy Space Center at 11:57 a.m. EST

Having that melancholy moment again are we?

And just so Space.com can nail it home for Discovery one last time:

• after 27 years and 39 flights, Discovery's wheels rolled to a stop for the very last time under the warm sun at the Florida spaceport's Shuttle Landing Facility.

Not to lessen the fact that the shuttle program was fraught with engineering failures, cost over-runs - despite the fact that it was never even close to as fast, cheap or safe as it was promoted as becoming - It still was a damn fine space craft of a fleet of supremely capable machines. The people who designed, maintained and flew the system were and are the best in the world at what they do. I know, it's just a machine, but at the risk of anthropomorphizing it - it was a damn fine one!

Space.com article

STS - 133 Wake up Call!

Shuttle flight STS - 133 got one of the best wake up calls ever! Courtesy of William Shatner in full blown Captain James Tiberius Kirk persona doing the Star Trek opening but updated for the shuttle.

Come on....just for a second...fess up... you had that feeling just for a split second...thought so...softie!

Space Shuttle launch, shot by a camera phone

Now this is what I call a great amateur photo! Here we have a shuttle launch captured by a cell phone of all things. Whats better though is that the camera wasn't on a plane but much much higher - in the equipment pod of a helium weather balloon!

Here is the info from the IO9 article:

• Quest for Stars, a non-profit educational organization co-sponsored by Challenger Center for Space Science Education has launched weather-balloon-hoisted cameras into space before, but this time around, the group of students and educators wanted to capture the actual Shuttle launch from space. So they put together Robonaut-1..... and sent it up 100,000 feet.

As you can see, they were spectacularly successful!

Check out the complete IO9 article here

NASA underestimated shuttle dangers

In a recent USA Today article I read where NASA's Shuttle Program Safety and Mission Assurance Office at Johnson Space Center in Houston did a risk assessment of the dangers of shuttle missions.

As much as I hate to NASA bash, the initial results are disturbing to say the least.

When NASA start flying the shuttles in 1981, NASA managers thought there was only a 1-in-100,000 chance of losing a shuttle and its crew. Engineers thought the probability was closer to 1 in 100. The frightening fact is that those early missions had odds of less than 1 in 10!

From the article:

• Consider this: There was only a 6% chance that NASA would fly its first 25 shuttle missions without losing an astronaut crew, the assessment shows.
• Moreover, on the 88 shuttle missions flown between the Challenger and Columbia accidents, there was only a 7% chance disaster would be averted.

NASA realizes that to be more successful they need a " very robust test program" and collect as much data as possible.

In fact after two major accidents and many near misses shuttle now is 10 times safer than it was during the first flight in April 1981. The odds of a catastrophic failure now are 1 in 90.

Challenger's Last Rollout

Hey tell me that this is not a haunting picture. Show is the shuttle Challenger slowly working its' way towards pad 39-B and history. As we all know, on January 28, 1986, the spacecraft disintegrated 73 seconds after lift-off.

As history, this picture speaks volumes. But now I see Challenger forever rolling through the mist to 39b

Robonaut due for launch to ISS

Dan brought in an article reminding me that NASA's new robotic platform Robonaut is due for launch to the International Space Station November 3 2010. The station already has robust robotic arms from Canada and Japan, but what makes Robonaut different is that it can carry out tasks without human intervention where the present robotic equipment requires trained operators to operate them at all times. Another milestone for the platform is that it is the first humanoid robot ever sent into space. The "R2" unit, weighing in at apx. 300 pounds is just the upper half of a complete system, however with two arms and two five finger hands, it is very well suited for space operations. The unit has 350 sensors throughout its body. The gold visored head contains 4 nomal light cameras and an infra-red camera behind the forward facing grill. NASA hopes to have a reliable leg sub-assembly delivered sometime next year which will bring Robonaut to complete functionality.

Robonaut will fly on Discovery's 39th mission which is the next to last shuttle mission (although NASA is reserving one additional flight if needed) .

Wiki site

End of a Dynasty....

IO9 reports that nearly 1,400 space shuttle workers laid off in Florida and Texas, preparing for the imminent demise of the Space Shuttle program.

NASA contractor Space Alliance laid off 1,394 workers or about 15% of the contractor's workforce.

Somehow the rest of the story where Space Alliance thanks all those people for their commitment to getting people into space and hoping they find employment quickly, has exactly the opposite effect the sentiments were to engender.....As a matter of fact it leaves me feeling very empty.

HD Tour of the I.S.S.

Here is a great HD Tour of the ISS I found over on Crunch Gear thanks to Dvice

Last Night Time Launch of a Shuttle video

Here is a YouTube video of Endeavour and the the last night time launch of a shuttle. Endeavour will deliver the last module for the space station - Called Tranquility, the module will be connected to the Unity node. It will provide with an additional dock port for other crew spacecrafts. It will also bring an attachment called Cupola, a huge view port (the largest window ever taken into space) with seven windows, six on the sides and one on top - which will all astronauts to control the robotic arm by sight and also allow off duty personel a spectacular view of Earth.