Sunday, October 30, 2005

Once more into the jungle of Columbia...

I seem to go about this particular subject once a month... and this last bout with it I learned some more (scary) and interesting things that I thought I would share with everyone :D

About Columbia (STS-107/OV-102):

Columbia's construction was started on March 25, 1975 and she was transfered to Kennedy in 1979. She flew her first flight in 1981 (STS-1, the very first space shuttle launch). She was 24 years old when she broke up over Texas after 28 flights.

The average age of a Boeing 737 pasanger jet is 26 years old (I personally have flown on 737's that were older than me... built in 1967...), and have flown 400+ flights. This I found (Rather alarmingly) on the FAA's website (http://av-info.faa.gov/GetFleetAge.asp).

Fokker flies some ancient aircraft in their fleet, we won't even talk about the Russian Aeroflot...

Columbia was damaged by foam falling from the External Fuel Tank (EFT) which was built just 2 years prior (2001) in Louisiana. The foam damaged the spacecraft (Which, it also damaged a brand-new section of wing used by NASA to test the theory).

I am hearing an awful lot about the "Age" of the shuttle fleet. Yes, they are old, Yes, they need to be replaced. No we should not ground them eternally.

I know the names of the five men and two women who died on STS-107 (As I know the names of the five men and two women who died on STS-51L, Challenger). I don't think their memory should be set aside by any means.

But this is reactionism at it's worst.

The CEV (Which you can bet money I'm gonna be blogging about here in a bit) won't be available until 2010 (Which is in NASA years, it'll really be 2012 for us normal people), which means we won't be going back to space normally until 2015-2020...

Maybe Burt Rutan stands a chance of putting a private spacecraft up after all...

Space is dangerous, the Saturn V (Moon missions) rocket had the equivalent of 200 tons of TNT... if it had blown up on the launch pad, it would have turned most of Cape Canaveral into a crater...

We can hide ourselves and freak out, while China starts their move to the moon, or we can suck it up and move on.

Okay, enough ranting about the STS. I'll get to the CEV here in just a bit!

---Me.

2 Comments:

Blogger Aabh said...

Really just letting off steam to some degree... because of the fact that most people are woefully underinformed about the space program in general, but seem to be ready and willing to produce an opinion at the drop of a hat... and NASA is willing to listen to that uninformed opinion and act on it... It gets under my skin, quickly...

But I'll go on about the CEV for you in the next post (I have far more to say about that)... the long and the short of it is; it is NASA's replacement for the shuttle. It stands for "Crew Exploration Vehicle"...

3:23 PM  
Blogger Aabh said...

Why thank you, my dear. I really appreciate the compliment... I'm not sure how to handle it... but I really didn't want to dither... so... um... thank you, I do appreciate it. :)

6:36 AM  

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