291–300 of 350 posts
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original plan was smaller, but military had a mission in mind that required it be bigger, so they went bigger to get military buy in. And of course the imagined mission never happened. I wonder how much money would have been saved!
What was the intended mission? I’ve read about the classified missions that went ahead, iirc one of them did use the full capacity.
HEXAGON KH-9
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The point of SLS is that it's a politically motivated boondoggle. This is also what the shuttle was. Nixon ok-ed it not because it was a good idea, but because of aerospace votes in California.
What is that based on?
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As someone tuned in to queer twitter I can say that if you know someone’s pronouns you should use them, so ideally for Obama you would use he/him. But also we’re all using they/them a lot more for people when we’re not sure and that can bleed in to people even when we do know their pronouns, and generally that’s not a big deal. Only becomes a problem when a trans person has a clear preference for she/her or he/him (o…
OT: I use they/their by default, unless I know otherwise, but what to do with other common gendered terms such as Mr./Ms./Mrs, Sir/Madam/Ma'am/Miss? These aren't avoidable problems: e.g., in the greeting for a business letter ('Dear ...'), or when getting the attention of a member of restaurant waitstaff whose name I don't know, etc. Someone needs to come up with a plausible set of gender-neutral terms. They/their/th…
Some people use Mx as a gender neutral but I don’t think that would fly with a more conservative minded person.
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The space shuttle blows my mind every time I see one. It's huge - the size of an airliner - and would glide back at Mach 25. It's a humbling level of accomplishment.
original plan was smaller, but military had a mission in mind that required it be bigger, so they went bigger to get military buy in. And of course the imagined mission never happened. I wonder how much money would have been saved!
No, we never got the Vandenberg polar launches we were promised.
And I don't think anyone anticipated just how quickly miniaturization and automation were going to advance when it was designed in the 70's or even as missions began in the 80's.
Even autopilot was a controversial cutting edge technology that was excluded because of the focus on human centered missions.
But back to military- it's not a coincidence that Hubble fit so perfectly in the shuttle cargo bay.
(Hubble being a spare keyhole spy satellite body, with borrowed mirror fab tech.)
But it would be interesting to know just what else the military had in mind, besides their not-so-secret ambitions for militarized manned space stations.
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I think it would be nice if English evolved to only ungendered pronouns. Eliminates accidental offense while also reducing everyone's cognitive load. Also, you reminded me of a quote from yesterday: "The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore."
I don't disagree with you, but I think it's worth pointing out that there is a pragmatic benefit to gendered pronouns. You can think of pronouns as sort of like `$?` in bash or `_` in Python's interactive shell. They give you a short way to refer to a previously mentioned noun. When you have more than one of these "special variables", you can use them more often as long as they conveniently get uniformly distributed…
Actually in that example, you still don’t need gendered pronouns to resolve ambiguity: “they enjoyed the gift”.
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original plan was smaller, but military had a mission in mind that required it be bigger, so they went bigger to get military buy in. And of course the imagined mission never happened. I wonder how much money would have been saved!
re military mission never using the size, there could always have been classified payload launches that ended up using it.
So the "classified DOD project xyz" tasks are listed right there on the published official mission lists and schedules, and quite easy to look up on both Wikipedia and straight from NASA.
But the thing not achieved was Vandenberg launches, which would allow more N-S polar orbits that are often more useful to the military.
The less official but still obvious thing not achieved was the Airforce building a manned military space station (as far as we know...).
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original plan was smaller, but military had a mission in mind that required it be bigger, so they went bigger to get military buy in. And of course the imagined mission never happened. I wonder how much money would have been saved!
The shuttle had plenty of military missions, and most are still classified. No, we never got the Vandenberg polar launches we were promised. And I don't think anyone anticipated just how quickly miniaturization and automation were going to advance when it was designed in the 70's or even as missions began in the 80's. Even autopilot was a controversial cutting edge technology that was excluded because of the focus on…
I assume Hubble was built that size because it would fit? No coincidence indeed. And what does that have to do with the military?
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Buran was also superior in capabilities; greater lift capacity, ability to transport more people, and attain higher orbits. It could also perform a mission entirely autonomously. The US Space Shuttle was the (heavy) inspiration, but the Soviets put their own spin on it.
It had one test flight. Hardly comparable to a system which had (six?) models fully deployed and operational.
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They specifically avoid earth's shadow because they use solar panels (by shadow here, I mean penumbra, they're too far away to be in total shadow).
I've been wondering about that same issue and someone suggested that as a possibility. Do you know where NASA actually states it?
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original plan was smaller, but military had a mission in mind that required it be bigger, so they went bigger to get military buy in. And of course the imagined mission never happened. I wonder how much money would have been saved!
The space shuttle is a sad story. On the one hand the military’s money made it possible but they also influenced the design in a very bad way.