Astronauts found

Dale Amon (Belfast, Northern Ireland/Laramie, Wy) · Aerospace & Astronautics

The Washington Post reports that remains of all seven crew members have been found.

This will make it easier on the families. I hope they all get a missing man flyover.

February 3rd, 2003 |

6 comments to Astronauts found

• Dan Martinez

  February 3, 2003 at 3:20 am

  I hope they all get a missing man flyover.

  Hell, yes.

  I’m a little uneasy with the way the words “tragedy” and “disaster” are being thrown about in the press: this is a dangerous business, and people will get hurt, and treating it like the end of the world risks making us so timid that we no longer dare to be great.

  But whether or not the reportage of the accident itself veers dangerously close to sentimentality at times, we owe these brave souls and their families all the honor we can do them.

• Johnathan

  February 3, 2003 at 8:33 am

  Thanks for all the great posts on this awful subject, Dale.

  May they rest in peace.

• Paul Coulam

  February 3, 2003 at 12:06 pm

  Just to add a contrarian note to this debate I’d like to draw your attention to a hard anarho-libertarian view on this by Paul Hein at LewRockwell.com in an article called ‘Some Deaths are more Important’ (Sorry can’t put in a link as I’m not technically proficient at this).

  It seems to me that the whole NASA space enterprise is just a big tax boondoggle to aggrandize the state. If there is any merit to space exploration – let the market take care of it. Why should people be fleeced to pay for the fantasies of space heads?

• Dale Amon

  February 3, 2003 at 1:17 pm

  The problem I have with that side of the party is not the world they like to see, but their complete failure to realize it is not the world we live in. You can only get there from here in small steps and they must all make life better… because we are NOT the majority.

  Additionally, we are not the only nation around. Russia is already looking like it will be the major commercial player: but with largely state owned companies. They are cheaper and less regulated so many of our people go work with them. If you can the STS and ISS, then all the capital will flow to them.

  It’s not a bad thing necessarily… but if you want to go the route you suggest and you also want to go into space… you’d better learn Russian… or perhaps Chinese.

  The Chinese will do a manned launch perhaps this year, but certainly soon. They haven’t developed a safety-Nazi or the concept that litigation can reward Darwin’s errors. So they will most likely move outwards far faster than any one in the US imagines possible. They’ll lose a lot of taikonauts on the way, but hey, they’ve *loads* of volunteers.

  So I guess that future means passengers flying in a Russian state owned passenger rocket to visit the Chinese lunar settlement.

  Go for it if you wish.

• Anarchus

  February 3, 2003 at 7:27 pm

  This strikes me as a little pessimistic: “So I guess that [the] future means passengers flying in a Russian state owned passenger rocket to visit the Chinese lunar settlement.”

  I’m pretty skeptical that we’ll see a permanent settlement on our moon or on Mars in our lifetime, because the economics are unsupportable. If there is a huge untapped market there, and the Chinese or Russians are first, that’s not a disaster either. Lots of markets aren’t won by the company that creates them (look at poor Apple and Radio Shack in PC’s, for instance).

  The U.S. does desperately need an inexpensive and reliable booster rocket to put satellites and other useful stuff into space – and we might have one today if we hadn’t spent so much money on the Space Shuttle and the ISS. And the new, economic and reliable booster rocket can be used to put anything up in orbit or beyond: satellites, men, women, sheep, whatever.

• Dale Amon

  February 4, 2003 at 5:39 pm

  Not really, because I don’t believe the premise of that scenario has a chance in hell of happening. NASA is not going to close up shop tomorrow.

  Many of the existing ventures depend on NASA in some manner. Some as a target market: it looks better to investors. Or at least it does when there are any. They are a bit thin on the ground right now. Ask any of the non-internally funded launch ventures. Some need the shuttle capacity. Bigelow would like to have their inflatable go up that way.

  If the shuttle is not available, Bigelow and most others are already talking to the Russians to ensure they have a backup. Hell, some aren’t even looking at US based launch capabilities.

  If the Shuttle and ISS programs were to cease tomorrow, space tourism gets set back several years… at least until Mir II is put up by the Russians with American investment. US X-Prize contestants will probably keep going. For a number of them with secure funding and a suborbital tourist target market, the existance or non-existance of NASA probably has no effect; for those without secure funding, there will be less likelihood of getting it.

  But I don’t see it going that way. In the best of all possible worlds, NASA uses the 3 shuttles to complete ISS; private companies piggy back off their needs for crew rotation and cargo capacity to take the load off the aging shuttle; the ISS after completion gets turned over to a semi-commericial Port Authority and private companies like Bigelow start plugging in their inflatable hotel modules. By the time the ISS expansion capacity is no longer sufficient, a market has been proven and the next station is private.

  We then phase out the shuttle, push NASA into the old NACA model and perhaps let them think about going to Mars.

  I’m not to worried about them thinking about it, because once commerce gets a real foothold in LEO, the explosion into the solar system will come more rapidly than anyone believes possible.

  That’s MY win-win scenario.

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