Very interesting: Twenty-four years after the Challenger disaster, new footage of the shuttle’s catastrophic explosion has surfaced, depicting the space shuttle’s disintegration over the Atlantic Ocean.
I find America’s space programs fascinating – it will be interesting to see how the recently planned budget cuts may affect the upcoming Constellation program.
The shuttle program is being phase out early 2011 and only a handful of missions are left. I’m planning a May trip to Cape Canaveral to witness this large piece of America history.
Excellent idea to visit while you can, now that you say it I’m not sure why it never occurred to me to do the same.
I think it’s important for any future program (and I’m not familiar with the Constellation program so I’m not sure that this wasn’t in place) to include a long-term plan or roadmap: for the Apollo program, for example, it was to get to the moon; the space shuttle program was kind of a perpetual science experiment with no real end goal other than it eventually being rendered obsolete.
The Constellation program does in fact include this long term plan. I would debate you on the Shuttle’s success; where there wasn’t an obvious achievement such as landing on the Moon, it did provide decades worth of research and a breadth of knowledge. In terms of logistics and power, the Shuttle program was a step back from that of the Apollo and Saturn 5 rocket days. The Constellation’s Ares Rocket is supposed to more power and flexibility for a return to the Moon, and beyond. They’re basically going to send two or three up at a time and have the crew rendezvous with multiple payloads.
True, I didn’t mean to imply the shuttle program wasn’t successful – it simply wasn’t as interesting to the American people and didn’t do as good a job convincing them those tax dollars were worth it. The shuttle (and space station, for that matter) missions were successful, just on a more subdued scale.