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Kopijeger posted:"They never sent so much as an unmanned probe" That cartoon was drawn years ago though, by Tim Kreider. 
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Jun 25, 2015 16:18
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Slavvy posted:The other girl is an F22 so it's a gay black kettle pot situation. I still smile when I think back of D&Ders arguing that F-35 was the much more practical plane we should be funding more of, instead of F-22. 
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Oct 28, 2015 17:32
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Nov 4, 2015 23:43
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Popular Thug Drink posted:its not that ridiculous - from the soviet cold war perspective, the shuttle makes a lot more rational sense as a stealth spaceplane bomber because what it was actually used for - a complicated, risky, not very efficient method of delivering small payloads at great cost into space - is pretty fuckin dumb. it clearly had some military applications just looking at it, and since you want to plan for the worst, like a sudden stealth strike on moscow, it gets incorporated into america's nuclear arsenal (also justifies building one of the things yourself) the Russian design was actually even more useless than the American design. nearly the entire reason for those huge wings and elaborate sheath of delicate thermal tiles was to bring back the main liquid engines intact so that they could be reused again and again. but if you're sticking those engines on expendable rocket boosters that are just going to crash into the Russian steppe, then what the gently caress is the point of building that fuckoff-huge 70 ton orbiter? the Russians proved you can do space station assembly without a giant 70-ton spacecraft with a robot arm attachment, they already had working spacecraft, and if you don't lug those huge wings and payload bay around you can get even more poo poo into orbit in a single launch. some of the listed "safety features" are also counterproductive. the jet engines are just going to eat hard into your maximum payload to orbit, and as the space shuttle program proved anyway, they were totally unnecessary. the ejection seats are probably useless during launch, since you'd probably wind up ejecting into the superhot rocket exhaust anyway, and also you wouldn't be able to have individual ejection seats for a crew of seven anyway. that said, liquid boosters would have been nice, but even with the air force backing it the shuttle nearly didn't get funded. congress and OMB were extremely hostile to NASA in the 70s; a deputy director of OMB was quoted on at least one occasion as arguing that they should set NASA's budget to a fixed dollar amount forever and let inflation strangle the agency. the Viking and Voyager probes nearly didn't happen because Congress was paranoid it would somehow get the nation wanting a (funded) commitment to a manned Mars expedition. same with unmanned capability. the 70s-era computers designed into the American space shuttle did not have enough memory to run an entire mission; the astronauts had to change program loads at least once during a mission. in fact, the computers couldn't even hold flight profiles for every abort mode at once; if mission control had called a trans-atlanding landing abort, the astronauts would literally have had to change programs mid-flight during whatever crisis had caused the abort in the first place. anyway. the "satellite snatch" mission's been bandied about as a possible use for the Air Force's requirement that the Shuttle be able to do a single orbit and then return to the launch site, but it's not very practical for various reasons. my opinion is that what they were really hoping to do was to load up the payload bay with a big-rear end telescupe and the highest-resolution film they could get, do a low orbital pass over some Soviet installation with the telescupe pointed out the bay, then pull it back in and land and rush the film off for processing. in the era before digital photography, this would have made the space shuttle the ultimate spy plane. the other, much more terrifying possibility, is that someone in the air force thought it would be nice to have the Shuttle usable as a platform for a fractional orbital bombardment system, which is basically a sneak nuclear attack by coming in from an unexpected direction. speaking of spy satellites:  mission patch for National Reconnaissance Office satellite launch. always reminds me of this: 
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Mar 21, 2016 20:27
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SEX BURRITO posted a winner over in the Frinkiac thread:
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May 23, 2016 23:59
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