Free fall for short periods (a couple of seconds) is easily attainable in a small airplane. Go to your nearest general aviation airport and find yourself an aerobatics instructor and you can get a taste of zero G for a couple of hundred bucks.
Perhaps relevant is Maciej Cegłowski's 2005 piece on the uselessness of the Shuttle and the ISS.
Taken on its own merits, the Shuttle gives the impression
of a vehicle designed to be launched repeatedly to
near-Earth orbit, tended by five to seven passengers with
little concern for their personal safety, and requiring
extravagant care and preparation before each flight, with
an almost fetishistic emphasis on reuse. Clearly this
primitive space plane must have been a sacred artifact,
used in religious rituals to deliver sacrifice to a sky
god.
Obviously, he's got a point. The shuttle was meaningless without a space station to dock too, and obviously many weird concessions were made for the sake of military applications.
But by his metric, manned flights as a whole are meaningless. That everything we do must be useful and come with a predictable ROI is questionable. Do we need the pyramids, the cathedrals? What about the LHC?
But by his metric, manned flights as a whole are meaningless.
Manned flights as a whole are meaningless. They accomplish no purpose but to generate PR for billion dollar handouts to defense contractors.
There is nothing -- nothing -- humans can do in space that systems cannot do better, with the exceptions of "mug for the camera" and "perish". What passes for "science experiments" in space bears more resemblance to a high school fair in microgravity than to actual science.
(Here's a spider spinning its web... in microgravity! With four highly trained military officers and a few hundred million in hardware along for the ride!)
> Manned flights as a whole are meaningless. They accomplish no purpose but to generate PR for billion dollar handouts to defense contractors.
Sure, but people /do want/ to fly, and visit the moons of saturn. Well I don't know for you, but I sure want to :) It's probably the main motivation for space exploration at the individual level.
Seeing the inside of the shuttle flight deck gives me very very vivid reminders of crashing my shuttle/team during a sim at the old Space Camp in Mountain View; I was part of the first class to go through in '96.
that would have been really good if they would have cut the music and eliminated the silly editing, just leaving it in one fluid shot, no overlays, none of that crap. as it was, it was so distracting I had to turn it off. blech.
