A Long Storied Journey

Posted on July 7, 2011 at 8:00 pm by JM Ashby


Artist – Jeff Parker

In other news, the House of Representatives Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, and Science voted to defund the spiritual successor to the Hubble space-telescope today, and a jobs report is due out tomorrow which is expected to bring news that at least 120,000 jobs were created in the month of June.

Update… Economist speculation on the June jobs report was WAY off. The real number is 18,000.

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  • mrbrink

    The House of Representatives Appropriations Subcommittee on Commerce, Justice, and Science voted to defund science?

    Briefly, Hal Rogers, the committee chairman, also voted to throw money and lives down the spiderhole of Iraq. Took money from Jack Abramhoff. Took big government federal funds in 2003 to pay off the construction bonds for the Daniel Boone Parkway…and then renamed it the Hal Rogers Parkway! He opposed the federal lawsuit against big tobacco which were “found guilty in August 2006 of conspiracy and racketeering in deceiving the American public about the health hazards posed by tobacco smoke.” Hal Rogers, like John Boehner, is a huge recipient of tobacco contributions. Since 2005, Hal Rogers, while chair of the House Appropriations homeland security subcommittee, funneled hundreds of millions of dollars worth of government contracts to friends and contributors to HALPAC.

    This is just the chair of the committee, which also seats kindred spirits like Jerry Lewis(R-CA) and smiling sociopath Jack Kingston(R-GA).

    You can almost hear the cries of, “science is the devil!” from this wingnut dominated committee.

    Republicans are good at one thing and one thing only. Fucking up government so much so that enough people agree that government is broken.

    It’s a pretty neat trick. Break it, and point out how broken it is.

    Adding, to be clear, Hal Rogers is the Appropriations Committee Chair which oversees the Subcommittee in question.

    • JMAshby

      I have no doubt that Kingston is all fire and brimstone, with a side of “squeal like a pig,” once the smile disappears.

      • mrbrink

        Like most off-to-glory-faced loons.

  • muselet

    The Space Shuttle was a kludge: designed on the cheap, nickle-and-dimed by Congress, repeatedly redesigned to be less capable and less reusable, possibly not entirely worthy of being man-rated, and yet …

    And yet. As NASA says:

    Starting with Columbia and continuing with Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour, the spacecraft has carried people into orbit repeatedly, launched, recovered and repaired satellites, conducted cutting-edge research and built the largest structure in space, the International Space Station.

    It’s easy to forget what the Space Shuttle Program has accomplished.

    Pretty damned impressive for a kludge.

    –alopecia

    • Scopedog

      “Pretty damned impressive for a kludge.”

      Agreed.

    • GrafZeppelin127

      The shuttle’s design was already outdated by the time of its first launch in 1981. So outdated, in fact, that NASA had to discard its plans to upgrade the prototype orbiter Enterprise for space flight and build Challenger out from a bare structural test article instead. There were so many design changes between Enterprise and Columbia, based in large part on the results of the former’s atmospheric test flights, that upgrading Enterprise would have required dismantling the orbiter completely and shipping its parts to subcontractors all over the country. Building Challenger was a cheaper alternative. Likewise, when Challenger was destroyed, instead of upgrading Enterprise, they built Endeavour literally out of spare parts.

      The shuttle, which was originally supposed to be part of a much more complex and ambitious space transportation system (STS), was based on the seemingly-reasonable but untested concept that a reusable spacecraft would be cheaper to operate in the long run than single-use rockets and capsules. They actually thought they could have weekly shuttle launches! (An egregious made-for-TV movie in the early ’80s, whose name escapes me, had the shuttle Columbia launch three or four times in about 30 hours, to rescue the passengers of a futuristic airliner that accidentally reached orbit.) Of course, things didn’t work out that way.

      The greatest benefit of the shuttle has been its comparatively enormous lifting and cargo-carrying capacity. In fact, its payload bay was designed to retrieve the Skylab space station in the late ’70s but they couldn’t get it ready to launch in time (Skylab fell and burned up in 1979). Its principal legacy will be the deployment and servicing of the Hubble Telescope, and the deployment and construction of the ISS.

      In the end, the shuttle accomplished a great deal even though it was not an ideal or perfect system. When you think about it, it’s really a miracle that a machine with over 3 million parts has flown to and from space 134 times over 30 years and had only two catastrophic failures.

      I would echo the caption above, “Thanks for the ride,” but I would include Enterprise along with the other orbiters. Before the shuttle could be strapped to its rockets and shot into space, NASA had to find out if it could fly. Enterprise showed that it could soar. I’ll miss the space shuttle, but hopefully I’ll get to see all four orbiters at their respective museums over the next few years.