A stormtrooper has his helmet off while boarding a shuttle and turns to smile at the audience? I don't think these are the story writers you are looking for...

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Comment hidden because you are ignoring dag. (show it anyway)

Really great video and post-mortem on the shuttle program. Lots of clips and images that I've never seen before.

My money is on Musk and the Red Dragon to get people to Mars first.


*promote

1. I hate writing lists like this.
2. but only because I'm afraid I don't have enough cool stuff to put on them
3. I swear.. a lot, but I get away with it... in person, because I'm Irish, and in writing, because I'm an eloquent motherfucker
4. When I was a kid, I really wanted to be a space shuttle pilot. My entire room was covered in space posters, until I was eventually convinced this wouldn't happen in my early teens (kinda hard to be a shuttle pilot when you live in a country with no space program or even an airforce).... at which point....
5. I started listening to heavy metal and for years I wanted to be a touring musician. Played in a few bands, even recorded some stuff, but I was never really that good, but I did teach my brother to start playing
6.... who is now waaaay better than I ever was, has a degree in music and releases some of my favourite music.
7. I am by a long way the most level-headed member of my family.
8. I like to think I'm resourceful (read as "watched one too many episodes of macgyver as a kid") and set myself little challenges all the time (like trying to break into my own house)
9. I've been arrested once and spent a night in a cell
10. I love the mountains (snowboarding, mountain biking) but didn't realise this until my late 20s. It's one of my great regrets that I didn't start these things sooner.
11. I'm a 3rd dan (soon to be 4th!) black belt in Aikido, but....
12. I haven't been in a fight since high school.
13. A small immature part of me really wants someone to attack me so I can find out.
14. The rest of me isn't nearly that stupid.
15. I love to cook (especially BBQ), and will happily spend all day preparing a meal for my wife or my friends.
16. I don't have or want kids, but I get on great with them (I suspect they think I roughly as mature as they are).
17. I teach a kids Aikido class.
18. I'm very good at my job, but it's just a means to an end for me. If I never needed to work again, I wouldn't.
19. No-one will read this far.
20. I think people are basically good, but they're also stupid and easily manipulated... this goes for me too.
21. I really want to travel again, but life keeps getting in the way.
22. I'm a total geek.
23. I like to look at everything from all angles, but there are somethings I have no time for (homepathy, racism, homophobia, climate deniers, etc). I don't believe in debating these people.
24. I sometimes wonder if I should put my money where my mouth is and run for public office, but then I remember that that would seriously cut into my snowboarding/mountainbiking/aikido-ing time.
25. I am very tempted to delete this list.

I wish NASA did shots more like this. I always hated when the shuttle got past a certain point they always switched to that extreme zoom closeup view where you can see the shuttle great but could get no sense of perspective on it's height or the scale of the achievement at all.

doesn't seem as bad as my personal experience with Emirates...
a 40-minute flight was delayed about 6 hours, then cancelled, then re-routed, then had to stand in "customer service" line 4 hours, then got new flight (another 5 hours later), and they said they rebooked the final connecting flight, but when I landed - nothing. The connecting airline had zero record of me or my supposed-ticket. Stuck in HK airport another 6 hours.

At least I finally got there and didn't lose cost of flight ticket.

I did also have AA flight cancelled (in Barcelona), but to their credit they had entire plane (300+) rebooked within 45 minutes. And hotel+meal+shuttle.

I don't know about much of the stuff you've brought up, but they were pretty clear that the 3 day travel time was for a 100 kg capsule. They said that a shuttle would take longer (a month I think). It seems likely that this is due to increased mass, meaning that acceleration and deceleration times are included.

A subway system is very expensive to build and they are all over the world. Also, subway lines are single lined, so when a failure occurs, the whole line, or a full section between two nodes is halted.

There is an interesting project in Quebec to develop a kind of intercity high-speed monorail system : http://www.trensquebec.qc.ca
it is said to be cheaper than a high speed train. It would use shuttles and be installed above the expressway.

We want more monorails!

At the point of separation, the booster has jettisoned its entire payload and most of its fuel, so the energy required for the return leg should be significantly less than the initial burn.

As far as I know boosters would normally have some fuel left at separation, so the question is really how much more fuel is required for the return than the normal safety margin?

If the answer is "none" then you get your booster back almost for free... any higher amount is a tradeoff of cost of booster vs reduced payload.

Every account I've read suggests that if it can be made to work then it's a large cost saving, but then they said that about the Space Shuttle too.

100 lbs to LEO for $1M: that's $10k/lb. Cheaper than the space shuttle, but a fair bit more than what the private launch folks (will eventually) launch for. Also the video doesn't show de-orbit or passivization of the 2nd stage, meaning this is a potential source of a lot of new space junk. Furthermore, since this is Darpa/military, it strikes me as a cover story for further weaponization of space.

ha ha..thanks man.
i lived closer to the coast.
off oakland and andrews.worked at yesterdays on the intracoastal and marks in los olas,i also dj'd (and bounced) at the crazy horse off A1A.met motley crue there a couple of times.

the concentrated wealth was a tad further north from where i lived, boca and west palm.

you may have been a bit west in places like davie...fairly rural and yes..conservative..but money talks and davie does not have that kind of clout.
i saw the same practices when i lived on miami beach.though the criminalizing is a new thing,before they just shuttled the homeless and undesirables away.

icky homeless people are bad for tourism

i think we pretty much agree across the board.when a hard line conservative talks about "pulling yourself up by your boot straps" we know that is bullshit speak for 'fuck you poor person,i got mine" but i have a problem with a supposed "liberal" who talks the language of compassion and humanity but dont actually practice it in a hands on way.

the hardliner shows disdain for the poor,and while repugnant,at least it is honest.
but when a liberal,who wrings their hands over the plight of the homeless,yet pushes through ordinances that criminalize the very thing they are saying that is heart-wrenching for them..i find hypocritical.

i remember i was an event co-ordinator for the hilton fountain blue and did a bee-gees (yes..you read that right) birthday party on their west palm home.i dorve a beat up toyota tercel( i have always lived simply,like a hippy) and i was asked to park it 4 blocks away at a u-store it facility.

no valet for me!

do you know what its like to walk 4 blocks in august?in florida? in 300% humidity?
i was a wet rag by the time i got to their mansion.
i literally had to sneak a shower while my clothes were drying!

but..i did get 10% of everything,and that party cost a cool 250.000.

soooooooooo

WORTH IT!

i live just north of tampa now.new port richey.the number ONE place for painkiller/xanax deaths in the country!

we are so proud.

Its NASA Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. Almost all launch facilities weather they be in the US, Russia, China, India, French Guiana have service buildings close to the launch site. You are probably used to watching shuttle launches at the massive facility in Florida where the launch structure dwarfed any such service buildings.

For the launch all personnel are evacuated to a safe distance. If the range officer is on the ball a self destruct would be sent to the vehicle before it strayed out of its saftey zone.

So in a movie where they have shuttles the size of mini-buses that can achieve orbit, his problem is the economics?

Fuck actual physics, an arbitrary human convention that describes the behaviour of other humans is depicted in a manner that is kinda implausible! Oh teh noes!

The subject of innovation vs jobs is an interesting one, but poorly addressed in this video.

Here's a much better take on it
*related=http://videosift.com/video/Humans-Need-Not-Apply

yes, he is comparing only against manned space craft.

Even though this test flight will be unmanned, Orion is meant to take astronauts into space - a replacement for the retired Shuttle program.

2 things that weren't clear from this video - 1) can it take large payloads, or only what can fit into the capsule? 2) can it dock to the ISS ?

Minor (admittedly pedantic) nit: the plane on display on the Intrepid is an A-12, not an SR-71 Blackbird. The SR-71 is slightly longer and heavier, and can carry a larger sensor payload while the A-12 can fly faster and higher, but they are otherwise fairly similar (the Blackbird is a refinement of the A-12).

Still the closest many of us are ever going to get to a real SR-71 though.

And I second ChaosEngine's recommendation: if you are an aviation buff, the Intrepid is definitely worth a visit. The shuttle is really impressive up close too; it's amazing they got something so big and truck-like off the ground.