Beth got her Iphone Wednesday and seems to be very taken with it. She got her Otterbox from Newegg today and talk about over kill. It has a hard plastic case that the iphone fits into. A clear plastic cover for the screen that the touch screen works through. Beth's quote "the touch screen better work through it or I won't be happy" with her head shake and the attitude. To go outside of the case is a rubber frame so it has a soft landing when she drops it. The package I found at Newegg also included a hard plastic slip and belt clip that the phone slides in and out of. As I said its a tad bit of overkill but as Beth says she drops her phone a lot.
It makes me happy to get her to smile. She does so much for the whole family and I could not ask for a better partner, friend, and love of my life. The boys and I drive her nuts but she just keeps us all in line and moving in the right direction. Oh and she is one hot momma.
The boys are done with baths and just gave goodnight hugs and are heading to bed. Elie has a game tomorrow at 9 am at Cardinal Run and Gmans is at 11. Not sure what the afternoon plans are but it will be good to be home for the weekend.
The space shuttle just landed in California welcome home you all. The idea of now flying it back to Florida when there are so few missions left for them seems strange. I know they are getting old but we will not have the replacement until 2014. Do we really not want to have a space craft ready to fly until then? Jeff any thoughts?
Have a good night all
I have all sorts of thoughts about the space shuttle...unfortunately, very few of them are really very coherent.
ReplyDeleteWhile we largely take the general design of the space shuttles for granted, there really are some interesting design decisions that were made as a part of developing that program. Some of the implications of the design are good, some, in retrospect, not so much.
Of course, after the loss of Columbia, it became pretty apparent that the design idea of having the orbiter sitting next to the external tank, rather than, say, nice and out of the way of falling ice like up on top of it, turns out to have been a bad idea. It makes the shuttle assembly easier to assemble, because you only have to attach the orbiter to the side of the rest of the assembly, rather than lifting it on top. It also allowed the orbiter to have its own main engines that fire from liftoff, which gives the system a bit more flexibility.
The orbiter was also designed from a very top-down sort of methodology. By that, I mean that they came up with the overall plan and design for the system, then started designing the component parts to fit inside of the overall design. This tends to result in the innards being very complex, hard, and therefore expensive, to maintain, upgrade, or even examine to see if its in good working order.
So, do I want to see the US go for several years without a manned orbital vehicle capability? No, I really don't. I also am concerned that some of the decisions about the International Space Station are being informed by the termination of the shuttle program and the span of years that the US won't have a launch vehicle capable of manned flight. I fear that the ISS's mission will be rather severely constrained when the shuttle system goes away, and that's a really shame as the ISS is shaping up to be a really impressive piece of work.
So the questions come down to:
How far do we push the shuttle system? How many flights can we really make with them before we push the envelope enough that we encounter another catastrophic failure? Can such a catastrophic failure be forestalled by putting more resources into the program? At what point does putting resources into the shuttle program negatively impact NASA's ability to deliver the next generation of launch vehicle(s)? And then, what's the ideal point on that curve of maintaining the flight-worthiness of the shuttles, while still being able to develop and deliver the next generation?
If you take a step back, though, 2014 really isn't *all* that far away. The shuttle program has had two large hiatus' in it...32 months after the Challenger disaster, and 29 months after the Columbia disaster. So we're looking at less "downtime" (assuming the replacement systems actually arrive in 2014 as currently planned) than occurred during the shuttle program anyway.
So, yes, I'm a techno and aeronatics geek, so of course I want to see the US continue to have a viable manned launch system, but realistically, yeah, retiring it is probably a reasonable decision to make, as long as we really are committed to returning to space with the Constellation system and supporting the ISS.