To Be Decided in Open Debate

Having a manned space program was always the problem. But funding a manned space program was more popular than funding an unmanned space program.

>all this "fugg manned let's build gundams XD XD"

Enjoy your rust bucket with radar slapped on launched once per 20 years, if the funding's right. Because that's all the "science" you'll be getting and it'll get worse as time goes and the public loses even more interest.

STS was a PR flop, sold from the beginning to the public as" An exciting delivery truck to space! Making space travel amazingly routine!" And then NASA is surprised when the public immediately loses interest...

Then of course it was sold to the government funders as this economic miracle, because it was reusable rater than those wasteful single-shot throw-away rockets. -- and of course it was the single most expensive way to put a given mass into orbit ever built.

Top that off with how it killed off two crews, in either instance it killed more people than all other losses of spacecraft in flight combined.

Oh, and it was a "bridge to nowhere," unable to go anywhere but into low Earth orbit.

It is not relevant because this is not a discussion about whether manned space flight is "good." It is about the impact of STS on the program.

Is there anybody on Veeky Forums who thinks it was a net positive for NASA's manned space program?

>thinks earth's problems can be fixed when niggers still exist.

...

>Overpopulation
All humans could literally fit inside of Texas alone, the lack of resources is due to non white countries being retarded when it comes to resource management. I mean fucking hell how can African be starving with all that megafauna around them just boggles the mind.

>all of humanity can fit inside of Texas
"Hello, my name is user, and I think the only resource humans need to survive is living space."

Not an argument

We must build a wall between earth and space. There are too many bad alien dudes outside there, for sure!

this isnt the 70s, idiots who can't conceived of sweet fucking robots colonizing space are dying like flies from generational attrition

the part about having tech go to alpha centauri since the 70s is straight bullshit

voyager 1 was built in 1977 and is going 17 km/s. The fastest spacecraft ever(on a receding path) and would take 82,900 years to reach alpha centauri A. I highly doubt it will last that long.

He's almost definitely referring to the possibility of a nuclear pulse propulsion engine, which is perfectly viable and has working prototypes but has never been fully constructed due to the Partial Test Ban Treaty

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_(nuclear_propulsion)

You could fart out A-bombs and toss even an incredibly large spacecraft out to 5% to 10% of lightspeed.

>Atlantis landing at KPC, for last time.

While the program itself had many flaws, let's admit that it was a beautiful piece of engineering.

implying we had the technology to do this in the 70s is an extreme exaggeration especially considering that we still don't have the technology to do this today

there is just a huge gap between an untested physicist's concept and a practical engineering implementation

You could turn the rest of the continents into enormous farms.

for example by the standard of concept=working technology
we have had the technology to do tokomak fusion since 1950s

30 billion dollars later, it turns out that implementation is extraordinarily hard for reasons that physics couldnt predict

Sooner or later, and eventually inevitably, biosphere goes *poof*, regardless of the number of problems you've solved on Earth.

It's also not as if there aren't enough people and resources to work on both. Best not to sacrifice a long term necessity for a short term patch when there's no need to.

It isn't the answer to society's ills and never will be: this much is obvious.

Anyone who is actually scientifically literate would not doubt the need for space program because they understand how technological progress works

And to everyone here hating on Shuttle, you are a bunch of uninformed cynical faggots. Just because it wasn't perfect doesn't mean it wasn't a success

I'm not sure STS was supposed to be the answer to society's ills, though.

it was far more expensive than its direct competitor, while offering no substantial advantages

>And to everyone here hating on Shuttle, you are a bunch of uninformed cynical faggots. Just because it wasn't perfect doesn't mean it wasn't a success.

Cool, can you make a case for that? It would be more convincing without the gratuitous insult, but to each his own...

Shuttle = $18,000/kg to LEO
Delta/Ariane = $13,000/kg to LEO
Space X = $6,000/kg to LEO

If we had invested in rockets instead of shuttle we could have had spaceX prices twenty years ago

And not just prices...

Spacecraft and launch vehicles perhaps going somewhere.

>all these stupid fucking pipe dream reasons for going to space

>not the actual reason to go to space

satellites are useful for practical applications. GPS alone has absurdly huge economic applications, and imaging of earth has done wonders for weather reporting and mapping

>Just because it wasn't perfect doesn't mean it wasn't a success
It wasn't just "not perfect", it was absolutely a failure.

The main purpose of the shuttle was to reduce costs, but it cost more than any system that was being used when it was undertaken. Only the Saturn V arguably cost more per launch, and only because it flew fewer times (the Saturn V program could have been continued at lower cost and more flights than the shuttle program, but the Saturn V development and facilities cost was amortized over only 13 flights, so the cost per flight of the total program was higher), and it could carry five times as much into LEO than the shuttle, and efficiently send payloads far beyond LEO, for only about twice the price (about 4/5ths the price if they continued flying it).

Read this for more about what the shuttle was supposed to do, and how obvious it was even before it flew that it wasn't going to do it:
freerepublic.com/focus/news/835107/posts

The shuttle was supposed to be a very high-flight-rate vehicle to pay for its large development and fixed program costs that had to be paid regardless of flying, but it peaked at 9 flights in one year, in 1985 (a rushed schedule leading up to the Challenger disaster), and averaged 4.5 flights per year overall.

It was supposed to have a lower incremental cost for cargo launches than an expendable rocket, but due to its huge size and mass-sensitive nature, the expendable external fuel tank cost more than a complete Proton rocket capable of launching approximately the same amount of payload.

>averaged 4.5 flights per year overall
...for those keeping count, since there were supposed to be 4 shuttles, that's a little more than one flight per year, per shuttle in the fleet. Even on successful missions, they came back so beat up it took most of a year to get them ready to fly again. That's longer than it takes to build a whole expendable rocket.

And I left out the bit where the shuttle was supposed to be ready on time for a mission to Skylab, to maintain and reboost it. But it was years late, so Skylab's orbit decayed, and that precious space station, launched by the final Saturn V with a capability they no longer had, was destroyed.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spin-off_technologies

Golly, I guess OP is a faggot.

>Golly, I guess OP is a faggot.
one of our Veeky Forumsientists claims to have originated the proof

Nonsense.

How many of those technologies are specific to STS? Are any of them? A quick skim of the source you gave didn't see any, the vast majority at least are older than STS.

Further, would a more productive and aggressive program than the STS space-truck-to-nowhere have resulted in more spinoff tech? Of course that is impossible to state for sure, but it certainly seems reasonable to assert that, IF the STS was a poor option for NASA's manned space program, it reduced rather than enhanced the spin-off tech that was produced.

So your argument does not address the question at all -- it merely states the obvious, that R&D generally produces some sort of benefits.

Only because the space shuttle soon devolved into complacency and risk aversion.

>probes do a job
unmanned spacecraft don't do a damn thing besides take pictures and relay transmissions.

and operate precision scientific instruments and take samples and manipulate actuators

Ctrl + F is so hard
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spin-off_technologies#Light-emitting_diodes_in_medical_therapies
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spin-off_technologies#Firefighting_equipment

> space-truck-to-nowhere
so you don't like the space stations either?

I take the position that not only is that untrue, but it was a great boon for manned space missions. It proved to the public and the politicians that going to space regularly and staying in space for extended periods are feasible endeavors.

>It proved to the public
only because NASA and the astronauts themselves hid many of the health side effects from the public

Cool So two spinoff items.

> space-truck-to-nowhere
>so you don't like the space stations either?

Where did you get that? Space stations can be either worthwhile or not, depending on what you do with them. And what I think of them is nothing to do with the question of whether STS was a good idea for NASA. Classic straw man, though.

The feasibility of that had already been proven by earlier programs: Gemini launched 5 flights per year, the STS averaged around 4, Mir crews stayed in space for months.

On the other hand, the routine repetitive non-explorational flights of the STS proved to Congress that the public remained uninterested in space flight. Not a good thing for budgets at NASA.

You said that the space truck goes to nowhere.
They were designed to go to the ISS.
ISS is not nowhere.

Nuclear pulse propulsion is not an intricate or complex technology.

The concept was devised in the first place after an A-bomb test accidentally threw a 900kg steel plate into orbit

It wasn't even a very impressive nuke - a downright anemic payload of 300 tons TNT equivalent.

>They were designed to go to the ISS.

My memory was that they were designed for a multiplicity of roles, with the ISS coming along as one of them. The "Swiss Knife of Spaceships" approach was one of the problems with the program.

I will clarify -- by "Spaceship to Nowhere," I was referring to how relying on STS as out only manned spacecraft trapped us in LEO for 30 years. That the shuttles could reach the ISS (or Mir, prior to that) or satellites in LOE is of course true -- they were, however, a monstrously expensive and dangerous way to do it. Spenfoing way less on those wasteful "throw away" rockers would have allowed us to reach LEO much more cheaply, while freeing up money and interest for other projects.

>Nuclear pulse propulsion is not an intricate or complex technology.

I dunno, there seem to be obvious complexities in how to use it in practice, as opposed to in theory. Keeping acceleration down to where you don't kill everybody aboard springs to mind, as does the issue of how many atmospheric nuclear bombs you want to set off in a given year.

The theory is obviously sound -- the technology may be more complex than you imply, unless all you want is some steel plates in orbit.