My mom sent me these pictures (source unknown), of the Shuttle (STS-115) launch in December, and supposedly taken from onboard ISS, so I went looking to see where they really came from (apparently they are from a NASA WB-57F Ascent Video Experiment airplane). Well, this search lead me to here, where I found a link to an interesting essay on the worthlessness of the space shuttle and international space station.
Not saying I completely agree, but there are some points that can't be denied, and this is a very well written summary of manned space exploration in the US. Here's a few excerpts I particularly enjoyed...
On the "Exploration" motivation for manned space flight (and the fact that we haven't left low earth orbit in 30 years):
But NASA dismisses such helpful suggetions as unworthy of its mission of 'exploration', likening critics of manned space flight to those Europeans in the 1500's who would have cancelled the great voyages of discovery rather than face the loss of one more ship.
Of course, the great explorers of the 1500's did not sail endlessly back and forth a hundred miles off the coast of Portugal, nor did they construct a massive artificial island they could repair to if their boat sprang a leak.
Ane on sending humans to do a computer's job:
Meanwhile, while the Shuttle has been up on blocks, a wealth of unmanned probes has been doing exactly the kind of exploration NASA considers so important, except without the encumbrance of big hairless monkeys on board. And therein lies another awkward fact for NASA. While half the NASA budget gets eaten by the manned space program, the other half is quietly spent on true aerospace work and a variety of robotic probes of immense scientific value. All of the actual exploration taking place at NASA is being done by unmanned vehicles. And when some of those unmanned craft fail, no one is killed, and the unmanned program is not halted for three years.
Over the past three years, while the manned program has been firing styrofoam out of cannons on the ground, unmanned NASA and ESA programs have been putting landers on Titan, shooting chunks of metal into an inbound comet, driving rovers around Mars and continuing to gather a variety of priceless observations from the many active unmanned orbital telescopes and space probes sprinkled through the Solar System. At the same time, the skeleton crew on the ISS has been fixing toilets, debugging laptops, changing batteries, and speaking to the occasional elementary school over ham radio
Kind of a long read, but I enjoyed it...
