New Mars Forums

GCNRevenger:

You wrote, "Blah blah 'killed for nothing' yadda yadda..."  Were any of the seven Americans who were killed yesterday your sister or brother, mother or father, aunt or uncle, or cousin?  Your cavalier attitude toward the senseless death of American soldiers is part of what drives the United States to engage in spurious preemptive warfare.

President Harry S. Truman had the courage to end and win the Second World War as soon as nuclear bombs were available.  George Bush could have eliminated whatever threat Iraq posed to the United States without losing the life of even one American soldier.  Instead, George Bush chose to feed thousands of Americans into a meat grinder.  George Bush is a coward.

QUOTE 
This near-true color view from Cassini reveals the colorful and intriguing surface of Iapetus in unrivaled clarity.

This image shows the northern part of the dark Cassini Regio and the transition zone to a brighter surface at high northern latitudes. Within the transition zone, the surface is stained by roughly north-south trending wispy streaks of dark material. The absence of an atmosphere on Iapetus means that the material was deposited by some means other precipitation

This oblique view of Iapetus from high latitude shows how the dark, heavily cratered terrain of Cassini Regio transitions to a bright icy terrain at high latitudes.

In this mosaic of two high resolution images taken during Cassini’s New Year’s Eve 2004 flyby of Iapetus, the direction toward the north pole is approximately 15 degrees clockwise from right. At the equator, just beyond the upper-left limb of Iapetus in the mosaic, terrains are uniformly covered with a dark mantle of material that has a reflectivity of about 4 percent. At latitudes poleward of about 40 degrees, the dark deposits become patchy and diffuse as the surface transitions to a much brighter, icy terrain near the pole. The brightest icy materials exhibit visual reflectivity over 60 percent.

Superposed on the bright terrain is a subtle, ghostly pattern of crudely parallel, north-south trending wispy streaks. The streaks, which were discovered during this flyby of Iapetus, are typically a few kilometers wide and sometimes tens of kilometers long. Their appearance and orientation may be connected with the emplacement of dark materials that cover Cassini Regio.

http://ciclops.lpl.arizona.edu/media/ir … 1411_1.jpg

No offense GCN but your obsession with nuclear thermal engines makes you sound like Stanley Borowski.

Yes cost effective is a must for any space activity.

The shuttle will be kept very busy after its return to flight, there is much science to catch up on and experiments to do.

Yes the max number of flights to finish the ISS.

So what science has been neglected or is this science that can only be done on the shuttle and not the ISS?  ???

A former NASA engineer fears the panel charged with evaluating NASA's progress returning the space shuttle to flight will issue a final report to a space agency that remains closed to a crew escape system.

The Stafford-Covey Task Group, set to meet in Huntsville today, is an independent group of space experts judging NASA's plan to return the space shuttle to flight. The panel is headed by former astronauts Tom Stafford and Dick Covey.

The lack of an escape system "will lead to the loss of another crew," said Don Nelson, a 36-year NASA veteran engineer who worked at Johnson Space Center and closely with Marshall Space Flight Center engineers during his career. "I have no doubt about that," he said.

And 2,000 of my countrymen are still reported "missing".

LO
Unfortunately,the number of scandinavian as well as the number of french tourists definitively missing will overpass many hundreds.
There is an unprecedented private people as well as public institutions mobilisation for money gifts to Red Cross and other humanitarians.

280 miles (450 kilometers) above

But even from that height, you can get a sense of the waves' power.

http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/j/msnbc/Compo … ...rge.jpg

typical image of the coastline at Kalutara in southwestern Sri Lanka is shown at left, taken by DigitalGlobe's QuickBird satellite in January 2004. At right, a Quickbird image of the same area shows the devastation left behind by the Dec. 26 tsunami about an hour after the first wave hit. Click on the image to see larger views from NASA.

Thousands of jobs destroyed, thousands of families homelesss in Thailand, Indonesia...
Many foreigners also killed

With a large proportion of Asia's populations under 18, U.N. officials have said up to a third of the victims could be children.

"There is no food here whatsoever. We need rice. We need petrol. We need medicine," said Vaiti Usman, an Indonesian woman in Indonesia's devastated Aceh province where tens of thousands died. "I haven't eaten in two days."

In many areas, health experts said the relief operation looked woefully inadequate with shortages of coffins, equipment and medicine, while emergency workers struggled with power outages, destroyed communications and badly damaged roads.

In parts of India's Tamil Nadu state, officials gave up counting the dead in their hurry to bury them in mass graves.

Fresh television pictures on Wednesday gave some idea of the unforgiving force of the killer wave, dragging terrified family members from each other's clutches, sweeping trucks and buses through buildings, flipping ships on to land.

1,000 Germans, 440 Norwegians and 200 Finns. By Wednesday, more than 1,200 bodies had been recovered at southern Thai beach resorts, but officials said the toll could be more than 3,000.

U.S. embassy officials continued to hunt for 2,000 to 3,000 Americans who remain unaccounted for, and asked travelers to check in with families. At least 12 Americans are known to be dead.

Norway's government said the tsunami threatened to become one of the worst disasters for its nation in modern times.

At Khao Lak beach, where officials say up to 3,000 people may have died, Thai and German rescuers searched the wreckage of a half-built luxury hotel on Wednesday after villagers said they had heard calls for help from people trapped inside.

In Washington, one U.S. official said Thailand's death toll was likely to be much higher because rescue teams had yet to reach some areas.

On Wednesday, the U.S. Pacific Command, the military command that operates in that part of the world, also said it is deploying 20 ships from docks in Hong Kong, Guam and the island of Diego Garcia.

The ships, many of which will take several days to arrive, are loaded with medical equipment and mobile hospitals, 41 helicopters, 2,100 Marines, 1,400 sailors and the capacity to generate 600,000 gallons of fresh water daily.

death toll from the devastating tsunamis topped 87,400.

Worried officials in the area believe disease could double that figure.

More than a million people have been left homeless by the disaster, and hospitals have been overwhelmed by at least 100,000 injured.

European leaders were also preparing their citizens for a grim New Year.
419 Danes, 263 Finns, 200 Czechs and 294 Singaporean tourists are among those reported missing.
German Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder has said hundreds of his countrymen probably died in the disaster.
A deputy foreign minister said on Thursday 33 Germans were confirmed dead, while more than 1,000 were missing

Thousands of tourists enjoying their Christmas holidays at Indian Ocean resorts, principally in Thailand, could be among the victims. Some 1,500 Swedes, 1,000 Germans, 600 Italians were missing.

It's very sad, the news just keeps getting worse every day for these people. Let's hope enough help can be given to them

Clark, when I heard that Reeves had died, I felt saddened. I remembered the first time I saw him in a movie. I was around 13 and it was the movie Superman. I always saw him as Superman.

Then I started thinking there are those who will use his death to push their political agenda, and I was saddened again.

Let's begin by looking at the Shuttle program - the program that obviously is of most concern to you.  At first blush, the President's proposal terminates the Shuttle program in 2010.  That is a wise decision.  There is simply no way to affordably fund new initiatives without tapping the money now consumed by the Shuttle program. 

Moreover, it is time to develop a safer, more efficient, more up-to-date, more versatile vehicle.  Finally, the White House was simply and understandably unwilling to spend the billions necessary to recertify the Shuttle to fly after 2010 - a requirement laid down by the Columbia Accident Investigation Board and accepted by NASA.

But it turns out that the Shuttle decision is a little more fluid than it first appears.  NASA says the Shuttle will continue to fly until the construction of the International Space Station is completed, and 2010 is simply the target date for that milestone.

Can the Station be completed by 2010?  That seems like a stretch.  As we all know, the Shuttle now is not scheduled to resume flight until at least next March.  (That's a decision I applaud, by the way.  Administrator O'Keefe has kept his word that safety and safety alone will determine when the Shuttle launches again.)  That's already a delay in the schedule on which the 2010 date was developed.

Nearly two years after Columbia shattered in the sky, NASA still has no way of repairing the kind of holes that could doom another shuttle, space agency officials acknowledged Monday in their latest status report on the return-to-flight effort.

The development of patches for the shuttle wings and other vulnerable locations is proving far more difficult than imagined just months ago and, along with devising a way for astronauts to inspect their spaceship in orbit, represents "one of the most challenging and extensive return-to-flight tasks," the 268-page report said.
The Space shuttle was originally supposed to push us out further into Space, it was to be cost effective, do wonderful groundbreaking science and fly every two weeks. It already had serious safety questions, it began costing over $450 million per launch, not enough science was done and it only went up about four or five times a year.

As the shuttle begins its return to Space there are people who have questions about the current space programe. NASA still has to get its management right, get the budget books in order and answer those questions of saftey. Some people like myself hoped that the Shuttle would be gone and NASA would have come up with a new and fantastic functional space craft.

The shuttle will be kept very busy after its return to flight, there is much science to catch up on and experiments to do. There is also the current problem with Hubble and the possibility that shuttle will be used to do this work. The shuttle will also need many other trips and will be required for the ISS, estimates are that about 25 ( minimum ) shuttle flights will be needed for NASA to finish its work and the shuttle can then bow out of service by 2010. Some think that 25 flights and pushing the shuttle until 2010 could be quiet dangerous and risk lives. I have been reading on some top scientists and astronauts ideas on how the ISS station could have provided safe haven for the Columbia crew while everybody scrambled to launch a second orbiter to bring them all home safely. Some think that this plan of an ISS safe haven cold be very important for the shuttle return.

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) -- Many NASA workers feel unappreciated by the agency and are still afraid to speak up about safety concerns.....

The astronaut Buzz Aldrin who has been helping commercialisation, privatization of space-flight, push space-tourism, written much material and made very important comments on NASA has also had some good views on the current situation. Buzz has had many fantastic insights into the future of Space, the Apollo 11 moonwalker Buzz Aldrin has been calling for rejuvenated space efforts, steeped in market economics. Aldrin had said how the shuttle was expected to be a lot more robust but Buzz Aldrin told the reality of the shuttle in flight is that it is "not robust" on launch and "hazardous". Buzz, the second man on the Moon also explained what NASA will have to do saying we may need to have some risky shuttle flights for a limited period of time, or we are going to stand down and fly Soyuz spacecraft. Buzz has already explained how future shuttle flights should be required to be lofted into an orbit that is compatible with that of the space station, so if problems came up or inspections/repairs were needed, shuttle crews would find safe-haven at the station. I hope everything works out fine and everything goes ahead safely.

Excellent. Now we just have to wait til Jan 14th. I'll make sure to clear my schedule that day.

And say the ESA does do the mission... it suceeds in sliiightly nudging a big rock, enough to detect but nowhere near enough to avoid collision... what will be the reaction by the science-illiterate public?

"Hey wow, somthing practical from space science besides weather/comm/GPS satelites! Those wiley, clever, smart Europeans... its so simple, you just hit the rock with a big block of cast iron! Why can't NASA do stuff like that? Why didn't they think of it? Can't they do anything but take pictures? They can't even fix the Space Shuttle! ...And they have six times the budget.