Word: spacecrafts
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Researchers from other disciplines have begun approaching the Galaxy Zoo team for help sorting their own masses of information. With Galaxy Zoo's assistance, the Royal Observatory Greenwich just launched Solar Stormwatch, which asks volunteers to track solar explosions captured on video by NASA's STEREO spacecraft. The idea is eventually to be able to predict these flare-ups, which interfere with satellites and endanger astronauts. Another project will task volunteers with translating the famous Oxyrhynchus Papyri, a cache of 50,000 Ptolemaic-era manuscript fragments from Egypt. Yet another will analyze footage of the New Caledonian crow...
...been highly active over the past few decades. The space shuttle has flown nearly 130 flights, and the International Space Station is entering its tenth year of operation. However, last week, President Obama cancelled the National Aeronautics and Space Administration program to build a next generation spacecraft to travel to the International Space Station and the moon, essentially “grounding” our human space flight program There are only four more scheduled space shuttle flights remaining. Following this, American astronauts will rely on Russian rockets to travel to the space station and back...
While the proposed 2011 budget allocates funds to incentivize private enterprises to design and build human-rated rockets and spacecraft, none have been tested and deemed ready for flight. Expanding access to space and engaging private enterprise is a worthy project, but this untested path should not be America’s only means of sending humans to space. There are also no funds to support a vision for space travel beyond the five to ten years of “life” left in the ISS. We should reconsider whether or not we want to forfeit America?...
Furthermore, great countries, historically, have been those that have explored and searched beyond their borders. In an attempt to keep America at the forefront of space exploration, former President George W. Bush laid out a plan to develop a new spacecraft, Orion, that would take flight in 2015 and send astronauts to the moon in 2020 in order to build a lunar base. But Obama’s budget undoes this commendable plan and will instead turn astronauts into paying passengers aboard yet-to-be developed commercial vehicles or Russian rockets. Meanwhile, China will be forging ahead in its effort...
More problematic is NASA's planned abdication of its role as a developer of manned boosters and spacecraft. Instead, it will become a shopper, and leave the designing and metal-cutting to the private sector. To an extent, this has always been the case. The first Americans to orbit the earth blasted off aboard Atlas and Titan rockets - both built by commercial companies as missile launchers and later adapted to human flight. The Saturn moon rockets were the first designed and built exclusively for humans, but even those were contracted out. Still, it was NASA minds that drove the designs...