Re: NASA given two spy satellites
<div class="ubbcode-block"><div class="ubbcode-header">Originally Posted By: Griffin Armament</div><div class="ubbcode-body">You're not my brother, I have a damn good brother and he isn't a spoon-fed liberal NASA supporter.
<span style="color: #FF0000">I take offense to this. My grandfather was and my uncle currently is working with NASA. Neither were/are "spoon-fed liberals". While I don't like the amount of money they pour through nowadays, I do respect the contributions NASA has made to science and everyday life. I used to drink Tang everyday and loved it.</span>
People are always pointing at technologies NASA has brought us, but are <span style="text-decoration: underline"><span style="font-weight: bold">never making any cost comparisons for what private sector companies could have done with the same funding so this is a blind connection.</span></span> I really doubt the corporate side of the government is much more successful than the government at producing results within a budget.
<span style="color: #FF0000">If the comparisons were never made, isn't it just as ridiculous to claim that private corporations could do more with NASA's budget? </span>
This is the myth of the more recent NASA- putting a remote control car on Mars? What does it accomplish for us that justifies the 2.5 billion dollar price tag? The mission was to study rocks on Mars. <span style="text-decoration: underline"><span style="font-weight: bold">What was the return for American taxpayers?</span></span>
<span style="color: #FF0000">I agree. Short of finding an unlimited source of unobtanium and making Avatar sound less ridiculous, the benefits we're going to see here are minimal. </span>
Energy crisis? Putting sizeable portions of the population on other planets would add to the energy burden we already have.
Rather than believe in Sci-FI movies, we need to realize we're here for the duration. There are no life-sustaining planets within reasonable traveling distance of Earth. There are also no systems capable of transporting numerically significant quantities of people out of the atmosphere. Travel to other planets is not cost-effective. Rather we should be putting money where it helps us- missile defense systems, satellites, cost effective vehicles for launching and maintaining satellites, etc.
<span style="color: #FF0000">A lot of people believed Christopher Columbus would fall off the earth if he sailed west. It had never been done in their society but someone finally nutted up and did it. My point is while everything you say is true, I don't believe it will always be so. Mankind is constantly curious and we will always push the envelope be it how deep a submersible can dive, or how far we can travel in space. Hell, there are plans to ship people one way to Mars for reality TV.
http://news.yahoo.com/blogs/upshot/mars-one-one-way-ticket-red-planet-192011042.html Maybe we can send the Jersey Shore cast first....</span>
The Shuttle was put on display, but we don't know the background behind that. The vehicle might be beyond repair from years and years of use, or may have been deemed no longer cost effective to maintain. Certainly a vehicle that can be brought down by an in-effective O-ring must be a challenge to keep flight ready for decades as various thousands of synthetic components age and have to be monitored and replaced.
<span style="color: #FF0000">I can't think of a combustion engine that doesn't have at least one critical gasket that if ineffective would not cause the engine to fail.</span>
Do we need spacecraft like the Space Shuttle? Absolutely. Does that mean the Space Shuttle should have continued to serve that purpose? Probably not. No doubt technology has improved to the extent that satellites of the future may be smaller than those the Space Shuttle was designed to launch. So the Space Shuttle may be a poor choice of launch vehicle going forward.
<span style="color: #FF0000">I didn't think the Shuttle was a primary launch vehicle for satellites. I could be wrong but I thought the Shuttle was more for maintenance of existing satellites and just transport.</span></div></div>