I happen to know an inside source- several things in this post are not going to be cited because of this. For the first time in blog history, you'll need to take a little bit of this on faith. But before we get into any of that, there is something you really should know about NASA in general and the space program of the United States.
Um, how do I say this nicely, they're rather derptastic over there. And not just a little, they make silly mistakes way more often than people who shoot things into space on aluminum bullets propelled by giant explosions should.
For example, there was a time when a bat was caught clinging to the external fuel tank (the big orange part of the shuttle) before a launch. This discovery ignited a serious (read as- two hour) effort to figure out if the bat posed any danger to the mission. The launch team pulled out all the stops; they even had a guy furiously searching Wikipedia to figure out if bat guano was corrosive. They gave the bat an official debris tag, and tracked it with a high speed camera until the external tank broke away from the shuttle.
In a nutshell, they shot a bat into the upper atmosphere (it probably burned and died, if the airstream didn't suffocate it and the g-forces didn't hemorrhage it to death). This would be plain awesome and not retarded if on the same mission, a massive chunk of ice did not score part of the same external fuel tank on the opposite side from the bat. Apparently, no one was paying attention to that side.
Yeah.
So, it really came as no surprise when I learned that there was a commercial bid to fly the space shuttle rather than mothball it to oblivion. Private companies thought they could do better than the bureaucratic nightmare that the National Aeronautics and Space Administration can occasionally (read as: often) be.
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| Fact: There are more politicians than engineers in this photo. |
It's not like NASA had anything to worry about with the idea of competition, right? They had the Ares 1 rocket, TIME magazine's invention of the fucking year back in '09.
Hilarious fact- NASA had, to use the scientific term, jack shit. Any and all Ares 1 rocket tests that anyone had done were of old solid rocket boosters from the space shuttle launched on their own to see how fast they could go.
If you're following the theme, this means that NASA really did fear a commercial company running the space shuttle better than they did, because NASA had no alternative. They had a lot of bluster and smoke and mirrors, but those things have never helped me pass a calculus test.
The current manned US space program is, "Fuck it, we'll let the Russians do it."
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| This could be a Russian launch stand, or a Transformer. |
So, NASA did what any good government funded corporation would do when they're about to lose a metric fuck ton of face- they refused to sell the shuttle commercially.
Never fear, it the Russians won't have a monopoly on manned space forever, as commercial companies are again trying to pick up the slack NASA left behind as they try to work the great can of BS, the Ares rocket, into service. No, seriously.
That and DARPA has decided that they always hated logic and reason with a passion anyway, and are still going ahead with the 100-year star ship project. This is happening despite the lack of any real funding by the government for manned space flights.
Right. Why did we let go of the space shuttle again? I mean look at it. It’s metal as fuck.
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| Space Shuttle launch pad, or a Metallica album cover? |
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