I see that John Glenn is getting into the fray over the retirement of the space shuttles. While reading the latest article on this matter, some questions came to mind about him and the space program in general.
One thing that came to mind is something obvious. Do we have something else to take the place of the shuttle? One would think after 50 years of the same basic technology we would have long since had something better, and more efficient, to get stuff into orbit and to the ISS.
Another question that comes to mind, again. Why would we send a 77 year old man into orbit? With that huge cadre of astronauts, why in the world would we send one into space so advanced in years when many much younger are dying
of ordinary degenerative diseases such as strokes and heart attacks. This shows me that just about any relatively healthy person up through middle age could go up in that vehicle.
With the 100 billion dollar investment that has been made, what is taking place up there in the space station? Glenn is quoted as saying he is worried about the lack of the ability to bring back the experiments to earth in bulk. This sounds like some kind of a factory. What in Heaven’s name are they making up there??
Hi there! I am Ray Ward. I live in Plano,Texas with my wife of
40 years. I am semiretired and the proud grandfather of 7 grandchildren ranging in age from 10 months to 22 years old.
I have been interested in space and astronomy nearly all of
my life. I have read and studied in these areas for many many years! I really feel that there are answers to all the mysteries that exist.
Jim,
Thank you for commenting on this article.
The first question that I asked was somewhat rhetorical but it seemed to make sense. I suggested that with all those Nasa and Air Force projects out there, we should have a means of shuttling astronauts and heavy payloads to orbit other than the SST. The original Dyna-Soar(circa 1963, maybe sooner than that) could carry at least 2 astronauts into orbit at that time. I don’t know, however, if it was ever completed for the Air Force. I just figured that the services always had a parallel program anyway and not depending on the civilian sector to handle their missions also. The Titan 4 comes to mind when one thinks of a heavy lift vehicle. Nova was on the drawing boards though, again, I don’t know for sure if it was ever completed. The public was told it was not built. It was a very large upgrade of the Saturn 5, I think and was to be used for a mission to Mars by 1980. It was to have 12 million pounds of thrust and would have stood much higher than your Saturn 5 moon rocket and was a very ambitious project indeed. I was looking forward to it, as were a lot of people back then. However, all we ever saw back then were the layoffs from Nasa. Skylab was put into orbit by a Saturn booster, but it seemed the public learned little of it before its orbit decayed and the Shuttle went up. What a waste. We could not use the military space station and had to go on our own in the civilian sector.
I believe, nowadays, that the Titan 4 rocket is being used routinely to put school bus size objects into just about any orbit we desire but we as civilians know very little about what these payloads carry when the space above is increasingly militarized in some form or other.
You say the public is apathetic about the space program but you don’t realize how many kids lost their family security when literally a million people were laid off back in the haydays of the space flights. I talked to a kid once about this. I mentioned going into some kind of aerospace job and all he could do is mention his father was laid off. He absolutely could not get past his father’s layoff. Do you guys realize how many kids’ dreams were crushed back in those times. They were eager to go up and this whole thing was pulled out from under them. There must have been a thousand kids that wanted to go up there in space for every astronaut that really went. Even now, look how much resistance there is to just one lousy civilian going up on one of the shuttles. The few civilians that have gone up report how distasteful their experiences and actual contact with the astronauts have been. I was truly shocked at the time I first heard of these reports.
What I brought up concerning Nasa and the shuttle is whether some kind of parallel space project produced some kind of exotic technology that could possibly aid in transporting astronauts and heavy payloads to space. All the other technology is rocket powered. If there is such a thing, we have not been told about it by those in charge. We taxpayers have poured countless billions of dollars into the space program for over half a century and we know little of what has really gone on, if one puts any credibility in all the rumors that fly about.
My point in bringing up a second question about why John Glenn was put into orbit had nothing to do with what is officially published concerning his mission on that shuttle flight. Besides being already flight rated, he has the title of Senator which gives him some stature among those in space. As such, his importance is as a government representative and a negotiator above that of just being there as an astronaut. He has experience as a negotiator since he has served on the nuclear nonproliferation committee, I believe. His name came up when we did an article on the threat the Earth faces from space. It was a shuttle flight he was on that we called attention to.
The third point I brought up was that with all these years since 1998 and 100 billion dollars spent on hardware, there is a huge amount of manhours spent on things we here on Earth are simply not privy to.
Since you bring up the ISS I thought I would run something else by you that is puzzling to many folks back here. Why are there no stars in the ISS images, anywhere, anytime? All the scifi I watched as a kid showed a humungous number of stars when the ship reached orbit and the astronauts peered out of the port hole of their spacecraft.
For someone who purports to “have read and studied in these areas (space and astronomy) for many many years!” you show a keen sense of ignorance instead by virtue of the questions you raised.
If you really “have read and studied in these areas for many many years” you would have known why Glenn was tapped for a second spaceflight. You also would have know the many different (and failed) attempts to come up with a suitable replacement for the space shuttle.
You would also know what the ISS has been doing since first actual assembly started back in 1998 — but more importantly, you would also know that our space program has and is driven by the whims of politics, and an ambivalent and apathetic public.