It looks like SpaceX will gain the pride of having the 8 by 12 inch American flag left by the last shuttle mission.
"The shuttle replica accompanied an expected presentation of a U.S. flag that was flown on the first and last shuttle missions. The 8- by 12-inch flag, which was revealed by President Barack Obama during his call to the astronauts last week, will stay on board the station until the shuttle's successor arrives.
"This flag represents not just a symbol of our national pride and honor, but in this particular case, it represents a goal," Ferguson said. "This flag will be flown prominently here by the forward hatch of Node 2, to be returned to Earth once again by an astronaut that launches on a U.S. vehicle, hopefully in just a few years." [9 Weird Things That Flew On NASA's Shuttles]
Both the model and flag were hung near and on the hatch where 35 space shuttle crews have entered the station and where the STS-135 astronauts exited for a final time soon after presenting the mementos."
Hurley is going to be the "Spacecraft Commander" as mentioned in the article. The parent comment also indicates that they will be bringing the flag/memorial/token back. I'm not sure what "large implicit assumptions" you are referring too.
He means that flight or its currently designated commander may not make it to the ISS for various reasons.
I don't think those are "large" assumptions, they're pretty standard things that can go wrong with every flight. Not that useful to have to enumerate them every time anyone talks about spaceflight.
- mission not being scrubbed for a variety of possible reasons
- mission commander not being changed
- rocket not blowing up on the pad
- rocket reaching correct orbit
- mission not being completed, for instance docking issues
- everything that could possibly go wrong on the return flight
Really, the ease with which everybody seems to assume that this will go off without a hitch is impressive, this is not exactly walking to the corner store to pick up a small parcel.
Friend: I'm going to grab more drinks from the store
You: There are several very large assumptions implicit in that sentence
Friend: ?
You: Your car can break down, you can get in an accident on the way there, the store can be robbed and you can get shot, you may get a call about your parents dying on the way, a meteor may strike and kills us all...
Why do you assume people assumed that? I mean, these are things that apply to every human spaceflight on any rocket in any country.
Imagine if anytime anyone spoke about spaceflight, they saw fit to include a giant disclaimer of everything that could go wrong. We'd all just end up sounding like drug commercials.
This is incredibly exciting. Watching SpaceX over the last few years has made me feel like a kid again (watching the livestream of the first Falcon Heavy launch, culminating with footage of Elon's Tesla in orbit, is a memory I won't soon forget). I wish them nothing but continued success, they are an inspiration to many.
Agreed. Getting payloads to interplanetary orbit is a decades-old trick now---still tricky, but we've become exceedingly good at it.
Having the machine that does that work realign with the angular velocity of the surface of Earth under its own power in any way other than "catastrophic disintegration" is arguably the harder task, and this new method of doing it is still very novel.
100%! I'm a HUGE SpaceX fan. Exploring space is by far the most exciting thing that humanity is working on right now, imo.
A thousand years from now, no one will remember the richest person, or who had the most fame or political influence. But, they'll remember the names of the first humans on Mars.
American astronauts on American rockets from American soil
Jim Bridenstine
Jim Bridenstine really knows how to talk politics. I must say I very impressed with his tenure so far, the NASA Administrator is not really all that powerful of a position but given how much opposition there was to him being a Trump selection he does do well.
This is such a vital step to make LEO a commercial domain. NASA is spending way to much money on LEO and to make any moon/mars future possible that needs to be commercial. NASA only want to launch max. 4 people per ship, but it can take 7. So the price could really be cheap pretty cheap to allow a fair amount of non-NASA groups to send up people.
Axiom Space got the contract extending the ISS and a more commercial ISS could operate more efficiently in the longer run.
Eventually, with the cost of Cargo Space transportation coming down, we could actually build Space Stations in Space and make them way bigger.
I think NASA is usually a politically safe place to be. Airplane crashes are unpopular and media-friendly. Rocket explosions or shuttle crashes (esp. with people on them) often result in an Oval Office address. Nobody wants to be on the short end of that stick. Funding is spread out across the U.S. esp. Texas and Florida to ensure broad political support (or at least apathy), and scientists and engineers don't make too much fuss. It's like the military's baby brother.
For a long time, I was cynical about even the principle of going to space before we solved problems down here, but now I'm more stoic and appreciative. It's a tangible, tractable hope that gets people out of bed in the morning, and consciously keeping that candle lit is the very best of being human.
Funding is spread out across the U.S. esp. Texas and Florida to ensure broad political support
Heh, maybe now. But when NASA was created, the reason Texas was involved at all was because Senator Johnson (future President Johnson) was the head of the committee that pushed the bill to create NASA.
Technically it made no sense for mission control and training to be in Texas. It would be far more efficient in Florida.
Florida was chosen because it is the best spot to launch rockets in the US from a physics perspective (closer to the equator is better) that still had easy access from the rest of the US (which is why Hawaii was ruled out even though it would be technically better).
But yes, as a side effect of the political posturing to get NASA funded, it ended up spreading the money around the country nicely.
(which is why Hawaii was ruled out even though it would be technically better)
Hawaii wasn't even a state when NASA was created. So there was never any serious consideration for using hawaii as NASA headquarters or launching site. The same goes for puerto rico which is much closer to the equator ( and the lower 48 ) than hawaii. It's not a state, so you can't put something as important as NASA or a launch site on puerto rico.
It's strange, but NASA is older than the state of hawaii.
Technically yes, NASA predates Hawaii by 13 months, but it was well on it's way to statehood by then. The statehood act passed congress in the early 1950s, before the discussions about NASA began.
Technically yes, NASA predates Hawaii by 13 months, but it was well on it's way to statehood by then. The statehood act passed congress in the early 1950s, before the discussions about NASA began.
Cape Canaveral was chosen as a launch site before the discussions about NASA began, too; the first planned launch was planned before those discussions (it was postponed) under the auspices of the early space program coordinated by NACA Special Committee on Space Technology prior to the proposal to build NASA to incorporate and replace NACA.
Remarkably, a spot in the close vicinity of Cape Canaveral was chosen by Jules Verne as the launch site for the moon travelers in his 1867 book From the Earth to the Moon.
And I wouldn't say it was well on its way to statehood. There were lots of racial, political, historical, etc issues at play. Were it not for the desire to grant alaska statehood, it's likely that hawaii would still not be a state given their demographic.
That was the last statehood act. The first one passed the House in the early 1950s but never made it through the Senate (because of the aforementioned racial issues).
The first one passed the House in the early 1950s but never made it through the Senate (because of the aforementioned racial issues).
So it didn't pass congress ( house and senate )? "The statehood act passed congress in the early 1950s"
Also, it's my understanding that bills get considered by congress and once passed by congress, then it becomes an act ( law ). So as far as hawaii goes, there has been one and only one statehood act. But I may be wrong here.
And because all the talent they need is there now because mission control was there. It's still closer to the equator than where Russia or China launch from, so it's still an advantageous site in that regard.
Yup. Right now we're seeing LEO technology move from "only well funded nation states can do this" to "BigCo will sell this to you as a service".
A similar transition happened in the 1500s when we went from only nation states (though they weren't called that back then) being able to justify the cost of transportation to the Americas to any old bunch of Christian extremists being able to afford to make the trip.
I really hope I live long enough to see state sponsored and then commodity travel to places other than our planet.
NASA Administrator is such a bland boring title. I wonder if that's intentional, to indicate the focus shouldn't be on management but rather on the engineers, scientists, and astronauts.
It's common in federal departments. Each department has an "Administrator" who then represents the entire department to those closer to the President, and represents the President to those farther away.
"President" was supposed to be the most boring title. It was chosen because the role was supposed to be simply that: To be present, while the rest of the federal government did its thing.
As the government evolved, the title gained more meaning. I sometimes wonder if the leaders of younger countries that use it understand its original meaning.
Maybe you meant centuries, and not millennia? English, even it's oldest forms, hasn't been around for millennia. Anyway, as your own etymology link demonstrates, the word's first use in its present meaning, as an executive leader of a republic--especially of something the size and importance of a nation state--is first in the US Constitution. Prior to that it generally meant leaders of more modest organizations: "heads of religious houses, hospitals, colleges and universities."
There have been a handful of companies that have proposed this, but fortunately once everyone does the math, they figure out how pointless it would be.
Why? He's head of a company that is too big to fail. A company that the federal government has refused to demand a stake in, in order to bail out. No matter what he does, he's going to make $10s of millions of dollars. I would LOVE to be CEO of Boeing right now.
And oh, by the way: since he started in Janaury, he can blame literally everything on the previous leadership. Probably one of the most cake jobs in America right now.
You may be right, because there are rare cases, but I find it unlikely. Not many human beings go into life aiming to just rip people off and not achieve anything, or aiming to fail at a lot. Especially someone who becomes the CEO of a huge corporation. You have to be quite drive to succeed, not just at your bank balance, to get there. You don’t become CEO of boeing overnight, it probably took a lot of work.
I doubt the CEO feels all that good about life right now.
And even if you are right, that fact that you’d want the same says a lot about you.
If he wants to run the company into the ground it is a cake job. If he wants to recover the company to the glory days of making things that capture the imagination of the world he has a hard job.
The salary of a CEO would be nice but I wouldn't want the jobs. CEOs tend to be workaholics with a poor family life. Even the bad ones spend a lot of time working.
First I am not aware that these three astronauts are the only people required to launch that rocket. And it feels very much like "do as I say not as I do" from the government. How is it an essential activity?
Essential as in the first and so far only permanent manned orbital station with countless research projects ongoing & likely tens of thousand of people supporting the project directly and indirectly by their jobs ?
ISS is not really designed to operate unmanned for any length of time & you could easily loose it due to some simple failure that the crew on board can easily address.
We can't just leave the people up there to fend for themselves. The US needs a capability to get it's people back that doesn't rely on the Russians, and protect it's national interests on the station.
Comments
It looks like SpaceX will gain the pride of having the 8 by 12 inch American flag left by the last shuttle mission.
"The shuttle replica accompanied an expected presentation of a U.S. flag that was flown on the first and last shuttle missions. The 8- by 12-inch flag, which was revealed by President Barack Obama during his call to the astronauts last week, will stay on board the station until the shuttle's successor arrives.
"This flag represents not just a symbol of our national pride and honor, but in this particular case, it represents a goal," Ferguson said. "This flag will be flown prominently here by the forward hatch of Node 2, to be returned to Earth once again by an astronaut that launches on a U.S. vehicle, hopefully in just a few years." [9 Weird Things That Flew On NASA's Shuttles]
Both the model and flag were hung near and on the hatch where 35 space shuttle crews have entered the station and where the STS-135 astronauts exited for a final time soon after presenting the mementos."
https://www.space.com/12335-shuttle-astronauts-flag-model-sp...
Doug Hurley was the pilot on the shuttle crew that left the flag on the ISS, and will be the commander of the crew that brings it back to Earth.
There are several very large assumptions implicit in that sentence.
Hurley is going to be the "Spacecraft Commander" as mentioned in the article. The parent comment also indicates that they will be bringing the flag/memorial/token back. I'm not sure what "large implicit assumptions" you are referring too.
He means that flight or its currently designated commander may not make it to the ISS for various reasons.
I don't think those are "large" assumptions, they're pretty standard things that can go wrong with every flight. Not that useful to have to enumerate them every time anyone talks about spaceflight.
- mission not being scrubbed for a variety of possible reasons
- mission commander not being changed
- rocket not blowing up on the pad
- rocket reaching correct orbit
- mission not being completed, for instance docking issues
- everything that could possibly go wrong on the return flight
Really, the ease with which everybody seems to assume that this will go off without a hitch is impressive, this is not exactly walking to the corner store to pick up a small parcel.
You must be real fun at parties.....
Friend: I'm going to grab more drinks from the store
You: There are several very large assumptions implicit in that sentence
Friend: ?
You: Your car can break down, you can get in an accident on the way there, the store can be robbed and you can get shot, you may get a call about your parents dying on the way, a meteor may strike and kills us all...
I would love to party at jacquesm, we could talk about all the ways that civilization is a rube goldberg machine.
Why do you assume people assumed that? I mean, these are things that apply to every human spaceflight on any rocket in any country.
Imagine if anytime anyone spoke about spaceflight, they saw fit to include a giant disclaimer of everything that could go wrong. We'd all just end up sounding like drug commercials.
* You could sprain your ankle and not make it
* The parcel might have been stolen by a robber
* The corner store might be on fire
* Feral dogs might chase you to the other side of town
You forgot falling space debris
I feel like you missed the biggest risk these days: failure of preflight quarantine.
One (unmanned) mission has already been accomplished without a hitch.
This is incredibly exciting. Watching SpaceX over the last few years has made me feel like a kid again (watching the livestream of the first Falcon Heavy launch, culminating with footage of Elon's Tesla in orbit, is a memory I won't soon forget). I wish them nothing but continued success, they are an inspiration to many.
The landing was way more exciting than the car in space in my opinion.
Agreed. Getting payloads to interplanetary orbit is a decades-old trick now---still tricky, but we've become exceedingly good at it.
Having the machine that does that work realign with the angular velocity of the surface of Earth under its own power in any way other than "catastrophic disintegration" is arguably the harder task, and this new method of doing it is still very novel.
Definitely. Both thrusters landing simultaneously was incredible. They truly made a part of scifi reality with that milestone.
The Tesla in space was cool but in the end it wasn't more of an accomplishment than placing any other satellite out there.
SpaceX recently released new 4k footage of the first stage returns to the landing zones:
https://youtu.be/fbbSCqaeWyA
It's a pretty cool orbit though: https://www.whereisroadster.com/
100%! I'm a HUGE SpaceX fan. Exploring space is by far the most exciting thing that humanity is working on right now, imo.
A thousand years from now, no one will remember the richest person, or who had the most fame or political influence. But, they'll remember the names of the first humans on Mars.
Jim Bridenstine really knows how to talk politics. I must say I very impressed with his tenure so far, the NASA Administrator is not really all that powerful of a position but given how much opposition there was to him being a Trump selection he does do well.
This is such a vital step to make LEO a commercial domain. NASA is spending way to much money on LEO and to make any moon/mars future possible that needs to be commercial. NASA only want to launch max. 4 people per ship, but it can take 7. So the price could really be cheap pretty cheap to allow a fair amount of non-NASA groups to send up people.
Axiom Space got the contract extending the ISS and a more commercial ISS could operate more efficiently in the longer run.
Eventually, with the cost of Cargo Space transportation coming down, we could actually build Space Stations in Space and make them way bigger.
I think NASA is usually a politically safe place to be. Airplane crashes are unpopular and media-friendly. Rocket explosions or shuttle crashes (esp. with people on them) often result in an Oval Office address. Nobody wants to be on the short end of that stick. Funding is spread out across the U.S. esp. Texas and Florida to ensure broad political support (or at least apathy), and scientists and engineers don't make too much fuss. It's like the military's baby brother.
For a long time, I was cynical about even the principle of going to space before we solved problems down here, but now I'm more stoic and appreciative. It's a tangible, tractable hope that gets people out of bed in the morning, and consciously keeping that candle lit is the very best of being human.
Heh, maybe now. But when NASA was created, the reason Texas was involved at all was because Senator Johnson (future President Johnson) was the head of the committee that pushed the bill to create NASA.
Technically it made no sense for mission control and training to be in Texas. It would be far more efficient in Florida.
Florida was chosen because it is the best spot to launch rockets in the US from a physics perspective (closer to the equator is better) that still had easy access from the rest of the US (which is why Hawaii was ruled out even though it would be technically better).
But yes, as a side effect of the political posturing to get NASA funded, it ended up spreading the money around the country nicely.
Hawaii wasn't even a state when NASA was created. So there was never any serious consideration for using hawaii as NASA headquarters or launching site. The same goes for puerto rico which is much closer to the equator ( and the lower 48 ) than hawaii. It's not a state, so you can't put something as important as NASA or a launch site on puerto rico.
It's strange, but NASA is older than the state of hawaii.
Technically yes, NASA predates Hawaii by 13 months, but it was well on it's way to statehood by then. The statehood act passed congress in the early 1950s, before the discussions about NASA began.
Cape Canaveral was chosen as a launch site before the discussions about NASA began, too; the first planned launch was planned before those discussions (it was postponed) under the auspices of the early space program coordinated by NACA Special Committee on Space Technology prior to the proposal to build NASA to incorporate and replace NACA.
Remarkably, a spot in the close vicinity of Cape Canaveral was chosen by Jules Verne as the launch site for the moon travelers in his 1867 book From the Earth to the Moon.
The statehood act was passed in March 1959.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaii_Admission_Act
And I wouldn't say it was well on its way to statehood. There were lots of racial, political, historical, etc issues at play. Were it not for the desire to grant alaska statehood, it's likely that hawaii would still not be a state given their demographic.
That was the last statehood act. The first one passed the House in the early 1950s but never made it through the Senate (because of the aforementioned racial issues).
So it didn't pass congress ( house and senate )? "The statehood act passed congress in the early 1950s"
Also, it's my understanding that bills get considered by congress and once passed by congress, then it becomes an act ( law ). So as far as hawaii goes, there has been one and only one statehood act. But I may be wrong here.
SpaceX ironically is building its launch site for the future in Texas. Probably because the cap is already taken.
And because all the talent they need is there now because mission control was there. It's still closer to the equator than where Russia or China launch from, so it's still an advantageous site in that regard.
Yup. Right now we're seeing LEO technology move from "only well funded nation states can do this" to "BigCo will sell this to you as a service".
A similar transition happened in the 1500s when we went from only nation states (though they weren't called that back then) being able to justify the cost of transportation to the Americas to any old bunch of Christian extremists being able to afford to make the trip.
I really hope I live long enough to see state sponsored and then commodity travel to places other than our planet.
NASA Administrator is such a bland boring title. I wonder if that's intentional, to indicate the focus shouldn't be on management but rather on the engineers, scientists, and astronauts.
It's common in federal departments. Each department has an "Administrator" who then represents the entire department to those closer to the President, and represents the President to those farther away.
"President" was supposed to be the most boring title. It was chosen because the role was supposed to be simply that: To be present, while the rest of the federal government did its thing.
As the government evolved, the title gained more meaning. I sometimes wonder if the leaders of younger countries that use it understand its original meaning.
President doesn't come from the word "present" [1], and has been used for millennia (2ish) more than you're implying.
[1] https://www.etymonline.com/word/president
Maybe you meant centuries, and not millennia? English, even it's oldest forms, hasn't been around for millennia. Anyway, as your own etymology link demonstrates, the word's first use in its present meaning, as an executive leader of a republic--especially of something the size and importance of a nation state--is first in the US Constitution. Prior to that it generally meant leaders of more modest organizations: "heads of religious houses, hospitals, colleges and universities."
I meant linguistic usage - it has had a very similar definition (head of something) for millennia.
Wait until somebody wants to send giant advertisement signs to LEO.
When money is involved, somebody will find a way to ruin it.
There have been a handful of companies that have proposed this, but fortunately once everyone does the math, they figure out how pointless it would be.
Another loss for Boeing on top of the 737MAX debacle and Covid-19. I would hate to be their CEO right now.
Why? He's head of a company that is too big to fail. A company that the federal government has refused to demand a stake in, in order to bail out. No matter what he does, he's going to make $10s of millions of dollars. I would LOVE to be CEO of Boeing right now.
And oh, by the way: since he started in Janaury, he can blame literally everything on the previous leadership. Probably one of the most cake jobs in America right now.
You may be right, because there are rare cases, but I find it unlikely. Not many human beings go into life aiming to just rip people off and not achieve anything, or aiming to fail at a lot. Especially someone who becomes the CEO of a huge corporation. You have to be quite drive to succeed, not just at your bank balance, to get there. You don’t become CEO of boeing overnight, it probably took a lot of work.
I doubt the CEO feels all that good about life right now.
And even if you are right, that fact that you’d want the same says a lot about you.
If he wants to run the company into the ground it is a cake job. If he wants to recover the company to the glory days of making things that capture the imagination of the world he has a hard job.
The salary of a CEO would be nice but I wouldn't want the jobs. CEOs tend to be workaholics with a poor family life. Even the bad ones spend a lot of time working.
Correction, he can blame most things on the previous leadership. He can blame everything else on the coronavirus.
Their stock is up 12% today.
Agreed, i'd rather be the last CEO that caused all of this and still got a golden handjob worth 60 mil.
It’s a shame no one will be allowed to watch it :-(
Isn't it the stupidest thing to do in current situation ? Endangering lives of crews, operations and families.
We just launched three astronauts last week. They have quarantine process they've been using for years even before COVID-19 came up.
First I am not aware that these three astronauts are the only people required to launch that rocket. And it feels very much like "do as I say not as I do" from the government. How is it an essential activity?
Essential as in the first and so far only permanent manned orbital station with countless research projects ongoing & likely tens of thousand of people supporting the project directly and indirectly by their jobs ?
ISS is not really designed to operate unmanned for any length of time & you could easily loose it due to some simple failure that the crew on board can easily address.
We can't just leave the people up there to fend for themselves. The US needs a capability to get it's people back that doesn't rely on the Russians, and protect it's national interests on the station.
I think NASA and SpaceX can quarantine a crew safely, and can manage the operations.
They've been quarantining astronauts before launch ever since that incident in the Gemini program.
Why, going into space is the social distancing in its ultimate form...