Yay!
Looks like the Shuttle is back in service if just for a little while. This is of course a mission to the space station, but they are also testing out some tools to try to make the shuttle a bit safer. Unfortunately it is not a construction mission as all progress on the station has been canceled in favor of going to the moon and mars. Positive spin, that obviates the need for the shuttle, which is expensive and dangerous. Negative spin, we actually have a space shuttle, and everything else is just vaporware until I see it flying. I had my hopes up far too long on the Venture Star to have any faith in new space ship designs until I see hardware.
Stupidest comment of the launch… ‘”Liftoff of space shuttle Discovery, beginning America’s new journey to the moon, Mars and beyond,” said George Diller, the voice of shuttle launch control.’ But the shuttle can’t go out of low earth orbit. *sigh* In fact keeping it running goes against that program, unless they start testing technologies for those missions on the space station. (Which addmitedly they are. One of the big purposes of the station is life sciences. How do people live for long periods in space, that sort of thing.)
And finally, I really like that CNN doesn’t charge for their video any more. Watching the shuttle launch on their web site was awesome.
July 26th, 2005 at 12:05
My interpretation of “beginning America’s new journey to the moon, Mars and beyond” was not that the shuttle would be leading us to the moon and Mars but was something like “Whew! We really can get back into space, and we’ll be working on getting further out real soon now.”
July 26th, 2005 at 14:41
I agree with Alain’s take on the “back to the moon” comment.
As to the ISS, I thought I read just the other day that they were still going to add to it, but that priorities had shifted; the particular example was not sending up a new bio lab, because they wanted to send up a better emergency crew recovery vehicle. Of course, I don’t remember where I read that…
July 27th, 2005 at 19:51
Well we’ll see. I think they should at least finish out the core construction flights but much after that I don’t know about. Lots of components aren’t even on the extended list at all now. Getting to the core is only three more flights for each of the remaining shuttles which can travel to the station, so I think that we should be able to do that. But it comes down to, can we have two manned programs at the same time in a bloated government bureaucracy? My bet is only one will survive.