A sad day for us 80s kids who wanted to be astronauts. . .

[82_28]

I just got home from work and turned the TV on 2:45 AM PST. NBC broke in with the the Atlantis landing live. It brought tears to my eyes. Adios Space Shuttle. You captivated me since I was 5 years old. I can't believe that's it.

What's next? I don't even want to think about it. It has never made any sense why the US would cease its space shuttle program. I grew up believing it was all for good science deeds meant to enrich us all. I've read and seen enough in the last 30 years to know this probably was never the case -- especially in the last 10. However, you will be missed, shuttle program.

[Stephen Morgan]

You know they stopped making concorde, too? Technology seems to have jumped the shark and is now on the down-slope, mired in crass commercialism.

[Pele'sDaughter]

I was done with the entirely preventable Challenger disaster. That was another eye-opener.

[NeonLX]

AS-204 (or "Apollo 1") pretty much did me in. I was a real space shot junkie in the early to mid-1960s; passionately watched all of the Mercury and Gemini missions, built models of the rockets & capsules, & even dreamed of being in space myself some day.

The Challenger disaster made me physically ill.

[sfnate]

Outward reaching, or "extroverted," technologies that promote human exploration are being eclipsed by reality-processing machines that convert sensor inputs into densely rendered internal landscapes inhabited by ghosts and other spectral post-human beings. The controlled implosion of the real into an expertly engineered multiprocessed simulacrum is our generation's "Final Frontier," in the sense that it is a perfect expression of finality: a black Kubrick-ian slab of superconductive nothingness, the event horizon of the flesh.

The body has now achieved a terminal inertial state.

It may turn out that this last expression of human exploration will only fly again in the dream-reality of a being whose sentience is unmoved by any nostalgia for the body.

Anyone who retains even a vestigial humanity will have experienced this passing of the age with a sadness that borders on madness.

[Laodicean]

^Wow...you said it, man.

[justdrew]

^^^

and another one:

[barracuda]

The seductive crypto-militarism of the space-age fueled a billion fantasies, yet in the fifty years of rocket-fueled propaganda, less than 600 humans ever entered "space". (It's not really clear if you can even consider the low earth orbit of shuttle flights and the ISS as entering "space" per se.) The military almost undoubtably has a black shuttle program, one which will remain in force performing the duties of policing and weaponizing space for generations, all the while the space-age fan boys pray to catch the occasional glimpse through the shadows. Meanwhile, we keep dumping garbage in the exosphere til it looks like the Calumet River.



Forget space travel. Space belongs exclusively to the military now, and really always has. Supporting this crap is just like supporting any other invasion or occupation. Barring some incredible - literally uncredible - technology, the challenges of space exploration are best left to robot craft and telescopes. The great and inspiring notions regarding human exploration of the moon or other planets has always been couched in colonial terminology, and the jargon of conquest. Fuck conquest. Sending a hominid to Mars or Jupiter is the dumbest idea I can think of in terms of importance to the world at present. Let's spend a hundred million dollars trying to master how to properly take a shit in space. Great idea.

The great ages of earth exploration have been assumed as dead for a hundred years or more, but realistically the majesty of our oceans' depths lay unexplored, unclaimed and open to the corporations for exploitation. For now. The great mysteries of our own planet are what we need to promote, the mysteries of peace, sustainable resources and technologies, the mysteries of feeding and housing everyone in dignity and grace, the mystery of keeping our planet alive, the mystery of the inner depths of the planet under the crust. Time to swim down and dig in. Fuck space. Fuck the militarized shuttle con-job. They were never gonna give you a seat in a million years.

[Pele'sDaughter]

Well said, barracuda. A-fucking-men.

[2012 Countdown]

.

sfnate for the win.
-----

Okay, you all are gonna make ME post it I guess...


I just saw them last month, for the 40thsomething time.
Kicks ass.

I saw a few launches too, at night. Its indescribable.

===

But for balance...

[Laodicean]

There was a demon that lived in the air. They said whoever challenged him would die.

[8bitagent]

Yeah it seems like the line of progress from JFK has gone backwards...imagine where we'd be had the trajectory kept on going post moon landing?(that was always one of the conspiracy theories that bugged me, given the exhaustive evidence we went to the moon on a number of occasions) However, I do recognize it as a financial black hole. And yeah, NASA has definitely been a military black ops front since its inception, no doubt about that.

But I saw the Challenger explode live on tv, and pretty much the dream was shattered in my mind. It blew up on it's way to space, and then 17 years later the Columbia blows up re-entering earth. Symbolic perhaps, but the shuttle ran its course.

I myself am content to live through cinema like 2001 for my space fix

[StarmanSkye]

"Yeah it seems like the line of progress from JFK has gone backwards...imagine where we'd be had the trajectory kept on going post moon landing?(that was always one of the conspiracy theories that bugged me, given the exhaustive evidence we went to the moon on a number of occasions) ."

Yow 8bitagent -- that sure touches a nerve. Seems the legacy of JFK would have been a more united, peaceful, innovative progress for ALL of humanity, not the awful regressive, oppressive, corporate-militaristic homogenized neoliberal dystopian monopolistic gangster-globalism Police State bureaucracy promoting greed, injustice, exploitation, war and fraud. The republocrat racketeers embody the REAL spirit of scheming duplicity behind the ant-war quip, "Love it or leave it." But its been our traitorous pols and their corporate/MIC/Banking et al clients who have conspired to defraud, shortchange, divert and hijack America to create THEIR version of American Dream for the priveleged elites AND according to the strictist formula of spoils to the Victor.

Community solidarity and regional self-reliance are foreign concepts for the scum who engineered and benefitted from the JFK-coup, who led the nation along the path to Imperial domination and exploitation, keeping developing nations dragging-along instead of achieving great results just so America could reign supreme, rich on lucre and tribute, unchallenged.

I think following JFK's brilliant, humanistic leadership we could & would have made great strides in developing spaceflight for peaceful purposes instead of diverting mega-trillions on war and violence and funding the militarization of space for purely offensive capabilities.

We have gone SO far backwards, its like the human species has regressed, with world events so calamitous there's no easy way to get back on-track.

i wish the warmongers, conmen cheats, corporate pillagers, religious zealots and other fraud republocrat idealists all would have either Loved It or left it, rather than trying to change it to their perverted, corrupted and paranoid-defective version of a securitat/military/mercenary nightmare-utopia. Their legacy is a compounded disaster that may undo us all yet.

[MinM]

The seductive crypto-militarism of the space-age fueled a billion fantasies, yet in the fifty years of rocket-fueled propaganda, less than 600 humans ever entered "space". (It's not really clear if you can even consider the low earth orbit of shuttle flights and the ISS as entering "space" per se.) The military almost undoubtably has a black shuttle program, one which will remain in force performing the duties of policing and weaponizing space for generations, all the while the space-age fan boys pray to catch the occasional glimpse throught the shadows...

An acquaintance working for a NASA-related industry in Mississippi indicated similar sentiments. That this public "retiring" of the shuttle program would help pave the way for more clandestine projects.

It makes me wonder what locations and platforms will be used going forward.

Was the missile fired off the coast of California a test of one or both of those variables?

Launch of giant rocket in Southern California heard for miles

With a thunderous roar heard for miles around, the tallest rocket ever launched from Vandenberg Air Force Base blasted into outer space, hurtling over the Pacific Ocean as it cut across the afternoon sky.

At 1:10 p.m. Pacific time, the 23-story Delta IV Heavy rocket lifted off from the base northwest of Santa Barbara. A white plume trailed the massive rocket as it ascended.

Standing 235 feet tall, the rocket was so large that the blast reportedly was heard as far away as 50 miles. According to aerospace experts, the booster was carrying a top-secret spy satellite for the National Reconnaissance Office — the covert federal umbrella agency that operates spy satellites. (anybody ever heard of this shit before? I sure haven't. I thought NRO was National Review Online.)

The rocket hit speeds of about 17,500 mph as it climbed toward space. About six minutes after launch, the first stage of the rocket broke away — later splashing down in the Pacific.

Because the rocket was so large, it was visible from much of the Southland after its launch, but it was difficult to see because the launch was in the middle of the day.

"Someone not looking for the launch probably wouldn't have noticed it," said Brian Webb of Thousand Oaks, who runs the website SpaceArchive.info, which monitors rocket launches.

Standing with binoculars on a bluff overlooking Highway 101 about three miles east of Santa Barbara, Webb said moments afterward that he could see "two or three very closely spaced orange points of light."

"Below me, vehicles were pulling off and stopping on the southbound shoulder of Highway 101 before the launch," he said. "Some of them were outside of their vehicle or vehicles."

The rocket lifted off from the base's Space Launch Complex 6, known on base as "Slick Six." The launch pad was built in the 1960s.

The Delta IV Heavy was built by United Launch Alliance, a joint venture of Lockheed Martin Corp. and Boeing Co. The rocket's three massive engines were built by Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne in Canoga Park.

http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-v ... 0521.story



In keeping with the spirit of this thread, it does bear note that the payload is definitely a mystery as well. Apparently it is headed for a polar orbit.

Go to NRO.gov. It looks like some fan site for a sci-fi series.

viewtopic.php?p=378719#p378719

[freemason9]

You know they stopped making concorde, too? Technology seems to have jumped the shark and is now on the down-slope, mired in crass commercialism.

WE ARE DEVO