Wednesday, August 10, 2005

Great tile work!

The shuttle landed safely, and without incident!

woohoo!

Its a bit sad to think that the shuttle design many of us have grown up with is soon to be replaced (although another flight is planned in September, if this insulation foam issue is resolved - isn't foam meant to be soft?).

Hopefully the next shuttle design will start to look a bit more like the Enterprise :)

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Chris, I'm not sad to see it go; compared to what our parents had (Apollo) the Shuttle is pretty uninspiring; what we've learned over the last 35 years is that there's not that much useful for people to do in low Earth orbit.

I'm looking forward to what the next 20 years promises us - back to the Moon, and on to Mars, boldly going where no one's been before :)

8/10/2005 01:58:00 PM

 
Blogger macca said...

Absolutely - bring on the next 20 years!

At least low Earth orbit exploration has told us a substantial amount about just how far up shit creek this planet is.

8/10/2005 04:02:00 PM

 
Blogger macca said...

Incidentally - Just prior to the landing, I took a look at a description of just how these shuttles come back to Earth. It is incredibly complicated. The ship goes belly up, then backwards, then forwards with its nose pointing up, then descends into the atmosphere. After re-entry is complete, it then banks sharply to slow down, and then continues to desecend at 19 degrees towards the Earth, breaking the sound barrier in the process ...

.. and their biggest worry was some dodgy tiling ?!

8/10/2005 04:49:00 PM

 

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