The space shuttle's 30 year legacy: lame or legendary?

[Darren Dirt]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-14173630

[Mr. Analog]

Well, on one hand it was a failure as a pure lift vehicle but on the other hand it was a flying fixit shop. Being able to guide where it landed with precision was a big plus as well, no random ocean pickups (I don't know how much it costs to commit a vessel to pickup duty but I can't imagine it's much cheaper than retiling the shuttle).

It's going to be up to SpaceX to pick up the slack now, because you can bet your ass that the Russians are gonna be jacking up the price per kilogram on Soyuz launches.

[Darren Dirt]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk seems to be basically a RL version of the eccentric billionaire played by John Hurt in Contact

[Thorin]

Maybe they should put together the Rocket-A-Day program: http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/rocketaday.html
(long read, but an interesting treatise)

[Darren Dirt]

Maybe they should put together the Rocket-A-Day program: http://www.fourmilab.ch/documents/rocketaday.html
(long read, but an interesting treatise)

September 27, 1993

still relevant?

Too Long; Didn't Read (yet) -- but the author seems very well read(!)

[Thorin]

The basic point of the Rocket-A-Day treatise is that it shouldn't be so damn expensive to launch stuff into space, and that there appears to be a chicken-n-egg problem (people don't launch a lot because it's expensive / it's expensive because people don't launch a lot).

I think it's still relevant.  I found his points totally resonated with problems that we're still having 18+ years later - the cost of lifting stuff into space has tripled or quadrupled since he wrote that.

[Lazybones]

The whole reason to to do it seems to be a good argument for doing things that are easier and cost less.

Figure out how to profit from going to the moon, I would imagine if useful stuff could be mined on the moon and shipped back it would create a lot of volume.

Then again there is a whole set of other problems trying to do that.

[Darren Dirt]

profit from  the moon

Then again there is a whole set of other problems trying to do that.

[Mr. Analog]

There are two reasons why the Chinese space program is aiming for the moon:
1. Prestige
2. Assess feasibility for the mining of Helium-3 (tralphium)

Why is Helium-3 important? There is a form of fusion that uses Helium-4 ions, which are produced by combining Helium-3 with deuterium. It's expensive to generate this kind of power because Helium-3 is expensive to make, but thanks to solar wind it has been naturally accumulating in the lunar regolith since the dawn of time.

Imagine hybrid fission/fusion power plants keeping the home fires burning rather than coal. That's pretty attractive no matter how you cut it.

I say let us go to the moon, not because we can but because there's stuff there we want.

[Darren Dirt]

video montage of all 100+ shuttle launches
http://vimeo.com/27505192

audio warning: at the start it quickly gets loud, but ends on a more tender note.