RadioFreeLiberal.com

A booster rocket failed less than two minutes after launching an American and a Russian toward the International Space Station on Thursday, forcing their emergency — but safe — landing on the steppes of Kazakhstan.

http://apnews.com/a69a391999f048d7a1ecf023ed928799.

It was the latest in a recent series of failures for the troubled Russian space program, which is used by the U.S. to carry its astronauts to the station.

NASA astronaut Nick Hague and Roscosmos’ Alexei Ovchinin were subjected to heavy gravitational forces as their capsule automatically jettisoned from the Soyuz booster rocket and fell back to Earth at a sharper-than-normal angle and landed about 20 kilometers (12 miles) east of the city of Dzhezkazgan in Kazakhstan.

I am very happy the pilots are safe, but I totally fed up with the U.S. paying Russia to get our Astronaughts into the ISS.

We are beholden to known hostile Foreign Power and we put our pilots in hands of a government who in my opinion is not holding them hostage in order furter the goals of Russia.

The sooner the U.S. Space Program gets off its collective fat ass and starts using U.S. Rockets launched from a U.S. Base the better.

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" I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." - Mahatma Gandhi (1869 - 1948)

Maybe this will speed up the existing program.

The Soyuz used to run like a rail system. You got in, you did the Spam in a can thing, you got there. You got in, you did the scariest ride in the space program, you got back. It was proven, and simple. That was then, I guess.

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"This is the end of my presidency. I'm fucked." --President Donald J. Trump, May 2017

I agree. The US should never have gotten to this point where we depend on another nation to ferry our astronauts.

Wasnt NASA gutted by republicans, isnt that how we got here?

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"Corporate Democrat" phrase created at the same place "Angry Mob" was...People keep falling for rightwing talking points. How sad.

NASA gets new marching orders every time the administration in DC changes. The shuttles were pretty much end-of-mission, and there was no replacement. They were all designing a huge booster system for The President's Vision. You remember, that's when goober was all amped up about "to the moon, Mars, and beyond." It really was called The President's Vision, as if goober had some kind of medieval revelation from God. Obama pretty well calmed everything down, but never seemed to get a reliable ferry funded either.

So we got stuck with no system for low Earth orbit. I always found it odd that Russia was doing the job. I was afraid there'd be some kind of crisis in the Middle East or wherever, and Vlad would say, "OK, get your own astronauts back." We had nothing.

Now that it's a commercial proposition, I keep reading that SpaceX or whoever might get the bid.

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"This is the end of my presidency. I'm fucked." --President Donald J. Trump, May 2017

Space X

Tesla

I heard MURDOCH is taking over Tesla, the son.


https://www.reuters.com/article/us-tesl ... SKCN1ML2AB

Doubt I will even consider a Tesla now, assuming there are other options.

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"Corporate Democrat" phrase created at the same place "Angry Mob" was...People keep falling for rightwing talking points. How sad.

SpaceX isn't the only commercial provider, but they seem to have the most capability. Elon Musk is a shit, but their hardware is pretty decent. Problem is that for human certification you need a whole higher level of reliability. It takes a lot of testing and such. I don't know what the time frame is here. It's fine for Musk to take billionaire orders for a lunar orbit, but back in the real world things change when you stick people in the hardware.

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"This is the end of my presidency. I'm fucked." --President Donald J. Trump, May 2017

Soyuz has been a very dependable craft, but with age comes problems. The Shuttle was kinda like the old Douglas DC3, very dependable as well. NASA had no backup planned the Shuttle Program ended.

SpaceX won't be on line for a while yet. At one time the U.S. Space Program was the envy of the world, now we are a sad sack hitching rides with Russians.

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" I like your Christ, I do not like your Christians. Your Christians are so unlike your Christ." - Mahatma Gandhi (1869 - 1948)

At this historical juncture, it is probably not a good idea to be dependent on the Russians to get American astronauts to and from the ISS.

Both due to geopolitics, and the safety record of the Russian space program.

Of course, I'm also one of those folks who thought NASA's answer to ending the Space Shuttle program shouldn't have been ... 'nothing'.

I'm not saying it's our highest governmental priority, but who knows, Interstellar might not have been wrong, we might need to get off this planet at some point for the future of human survival.

Our space program needs to continue, and I mean beyond NASA just launching robot probes of our solar system.

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-- Tis an ill wind that blows no minds.
Malaclypse the Younger

NASA's answer, as ordered by goober bush, was to do a complete 180 and start building a deep space system from scratch. And so Russia became the only country doing any kind of regular human space flight. You might say that goober, like dick, had other priorities.

I always got the idea he'd watched Toy Story once too often. "TO INFINITY AND BEYOND!"

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"This is the end of my presidency. I'm fucked." --President Donald J. Trump, May 2017

Fuck commercial suppliers.

The end result is "Passengers". Those who have the most money benefit. Those with needed technological expertise will be provided for but not nearly at the level of simply money.

The human species will not leave this planet en masse for several reasons:

Fear of the unknown
In ability to pay for it
lack of useful skillsets

The first step will be "Elysium", the second will be "Passengers".

Meanwhile Earth will decay into chaos and extreme tribalism fighting over dwindling resources.

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bird's theorem-"we the people" are stupid.

"No one is so foolish as to choose war over peace. In peace sons bury their fathers, in war fathers bury their sons." - Herodotus

The new motto of the USA: Unum de multis. Out of one, many.

We may reach a point where we have no choice ... that's the tragic theme of Interstellar.

Personally, I hope we avoid that. I would rather, when we head for the stars, follow Gene Roddenberry's vision, we do it because we want to explore, not because we've backed ourselves into a corner where we have to.

But anyway, space colonization is a long, long way off. May be a lot later than the 27th century. Got one huge problem to solve: still can't go anywhere near fast enough and the other stars that MIGHT have planets are way too far away. And the 5th dimensional beings haven't opened a wormhole for us, yet.

In the meantime, we should be working on continuing to explore the solar system, and expand the human manned presence throughout it. The Moon and Mars, at least. NASA still needs a vehicle for orbital manned missions, Space Shuttle 2.0, whatever they want to call it.

BTW, the theme of Elysium IMHO is that those who lived on the orbital space station had health devices that could treat and cure the diseases of most people on Earth, but only those on the station - a small elite - had access to them. Living in space got you the best health care, everybody else ... well they had less.

As for Passengers -- a very odd 'love' story, once you realize what he did to her.

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-- Tis an ill wind that blows no minds.
Malaclypse the Younger

What was also intriguing in Passengers is that Jennifer Lawrence’s character was going to return to Earth.

As for having less whether those traveling in coach class shall we say in Passengers or those on Earth in Elysium the determining factor was money. As it always is. Not even necessarily earned money but possession of money or, rather, wealth.

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bird's theorem-"we the people" are stupid.

"No one is so foolish as to choose war over peace. In peace sons bury their fathers, in war fathers bury their sons." - Herodotus

The new motto of the USA: Unum de multis. Out of one, many.

A more dystopian view was the lunar penal colony in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. You know, like how Australia started. Unlike Australia, it had the advantage of an easily weaponized gravitational well, making precisely dropped rocks as dangerous as nukes. Which is why it's a bad idea to put a penal colony on the moon, and also why the military was so interested in it for a time.

There are various theories going around SF about terraforming Mars, but it's a small planet with a lot less sunlight and no magnetic field, so that may stay SF.

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"This is the end of my presidency. I'm fucked." --President Donald J. Trump, May 2017