…was the cause of the failure. Ultimately, I suppose so. But I’m not sure about this:
On the positive side, Phobos-Grunt’s aluminum fuel tank holding 8.3 tons of toxic fuel is likely to safely burn up during re-entry. “Aluminum has a very low melting temperature and rarely survives,” says space debris expert Nicholas Johnson of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston.
That’s assuming that the propellant isn’t frozen. Do we know that?
Clark Lindsey takes on the ongoing idiocy of thinking them equivalent, or comparable.
Ummmmmm…no. Here is a case where a little, but not enough knowledge of orbital mechanics is dangerous.
It’s actually the only way that makes sense right now:
The hard part, he says, isn’t subsisting in a hostile environment millions of miles from home but changing the Space Shuttle-era culture of timidity.
It would be easier to just ignore NASA than to change it. I’m working on an issue paper on risk aversion and reward, and how we have to stop fretting so much over killing people if we want to open up space.
Does anyone from Boeing know the sequence of events of the formation of USA? At the time it was created, was it known that the company was going to purchase Rockwell’s space divisions, and were the legacy Rockwell people part of the new contract? USA was formed in September of 1996, I think, but the purchase didn’t occur until late in the year. I’m assuming that, since Rockwell wasn’t one of the initial parents, this must have been part of the purchase negotiations, but am curious to know how it all worked.
Forty years ago today, President Richard Nixon announced that the nation would build a reusable vehicle, that would be used to fly all of the nation’s payloads into space. It first flew a little less than a decade later, and flew its last flight last summer, after a little over thirty years of operations. We are only starting to recover from the policy disaster.
[Update late morning]
The Space Shuttle, in happier days (flyback booster, no SRBs, no ET).
Clark Lindsey has an overview of the past year.
Short answer: with the exception of Newt, they don’t. On the day of the Iowa cauci, a survey from (Iowa native) Jeff Foust.
…from Leonard David.
I have a preview up over at Popular Mechanics.