President "Bush Delivers Remarks On U.S. Space Program

[Razor04]

2) You can't launch electrical space propulsion systems from the surface of the moon, but you can launch them from ISS
3)So we're stuck on the moon now and we have our spacecraft assembled already. Then we're launching it again against gravity (another waste of resources and money)...

BTW you are missing something, something called the atmosphere and the moon doesn't have much of one, thus you could use a rail gun type thing to launch capsules off it, that is electricity used to power the launch, and yes it really would work quite easily, the reason it doesn't work well here is the atmosphere creates to much drag and as you know the escape velocity is much lower on the moon.

Anyone catch the article on USAToday.com about the Hubble being scrapped? While I don't want to see it be scrapped I do understand the reasons and as long as the window between when it fails and the replacement for it is launched is small it won't bother me too much. Have to move forward at some point right?

 

[RussSchultz]

Its not being scrapped, its not being serviced for the final time. (The shuttle program will have wound down by then).

It should last until 2008, and the next observatory will launch is 2011. (or planned to, anyways)

 

[Brent]

This is all very exciting to me, I love seeing renewed interest in the space program. Its been so flat and dull for so long, we need to get some momentum going.

I've been keeping up with every aspect of the Mars missions and look forward to keeping up with future space missions. I like the idea of finally retiring the shuttle, it needs to happen, it should have happened 10 years ago really. I remember back in High School writing a report on one of the experimental spacecraft X something or other, it was designed to launch, fly and return much easier than the shuttle and be able to do it more frequently costing less money. Then it got scrapped

So seeing a goal to retire the shuttle and finally build a brand new CEV is awesome, its been a long time coming, but its still 5-10 years off.

Getting the ISS finished is also a long time coming, which needs to get done.

Just doing those three things, finishing ISS, retiring shuttle and building a CEV will propel us into the first steps of finally really exploring space.

Where we go from there, a moon base, and eventually a manned mission to Mars is inevitable, it’s just a matter of time. And I for one hope to see it in my lifetime, it would be extremely awesome in every sense of the word.

 

[Snyder]

Actually, in SI "grams" is the core unit of mass, not weight. The unit of mass in English measurements is "slug", which at sea level weighs a hair above 32 pounds, and the core unit of force/weight in SI is "newton." That being said I will treat "gram" as a weight equal to the force exhibited by one gram of mass at Earth's sea level, since I'm more comfortable with those units than newtons.

Of course - that was the reason why I forgot to consider gravity. A classical mistake.

Moving constants outside and solving the rather simple definite integral gives me ~28500 metric tons. Note that I have not taken Calculus I since HS junior year 96-97 so I might easily be wrong.

Looks good (my last Calculus classes at university have been at about 97-98, but i remember even less...*sigh*, maybe one student party to many. ) , but as Russ pointed out: rotational forces are unaccounted for in these calculations...

 

[epicstruggle]

I wish we could somehow bring back hubble and put it in a museum. It sure has increased our knowledge of the cosmos.

later,
epic