Discussion for article #238394
Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics: “We built that!”
Americans who fund science and exploration: “We built that!”
Exploring humans: “We built that!”
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Cost of New Horizons mission (lifetime) to Pluto and another KBO: $650 million.
We built that!
Estimated cost of the boondoggle SLS rocket: $41 billion for four launches to nowhere.
Please, don’t let us build that!
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This is a stunning testament to the intelligence and creativity of the people at NASA. This was launched in 2006 and travelled over 3 billion miles to get within 7500 miles of Pluto. It’s not like driving an aerial drone with a joystick - they plot out the path in advance, and then rely on math and physics to get it there. Absolutely incredible. It’s staggering that it take like almost 9 hours for light to get to New Horizons and back. Well done, NASA!
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Cost of Iraq/Afganistan war $4 to $6 trillion. That’s about $18k per man-woman-child in America. Cost for the SLS system $124 per person. Lets build the SLS System instead of fighting wars.
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I love this story. A bit of Clyde Tombaugh’s ashes are on board.
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That would be a good idea presuming the SLS was worth building. It’s not though. It’s a pure pork project–nothing more. It has no purpose, and no real mission.
Pushing to change spending emphasis in pork guided NASA -
…Remotely possible
Pushing to change war spending and funneling it to NASA or any kind of science -
Step 1: Find a brick wall.
Step 2: Repeatedly bash head against brick well.
Step 3: Hope to eventually see stars.
They do plot the course in advance…but they also make many, many small trajectory corrections in route. That allows them to do some pretty amazing missions. What’s even more amazing is the mind numbing levels of bureaucracy that goes into getting a mission launched at all.
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Five American probes exiting the Solar System…Does The Donald know our “failure country”'s system border is porous as heck?
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To a Republican, that’s tantamount to witchcraft, magic, and voodoo.
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THAT, is a planet. I don’t care what they say.
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Waiting for a Uranus joke…
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IEEE Spectrum has a great description of the four-dimensional needle that New Horizons is threading (he said hopefully).
Pluto and Charon revolve around a point in space that is their common center of gravity. From sun-ward, the probe is flying between the orbits of Pluto and Charon, then through the sun-shadow and earth-shadow of Pluto, then through the sun-shadow and earth-shadow of Charon, to perform measurements of sunlight and radio signals that will support atmospheric studies and more accurate size information for the two. All within a few hours.
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HAR!
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You asked for it. Ahem. Apparently Pluto is now a planetoid, but Uranus is still a gas giant! Ba-da-bing!
It just took one of the fastest spacecraft we ever launched 9 years to reach Pluto, which is still in our solar system. That should convince anybody that we aren’t going to a new Earth anytime soon. We going to be on this rock a long, long time. So when 90% of the scientists tell us climate change is real and we need to do something about it, we really need to do something about it.
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I’m not a scientist.so I can can say whether Pluto is real or not, nor can I tell if the spacecraft is man made, so I will ignore this entirely…
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Uranus is inhabited by Republicans who don’t want to fund science.
USA USA USA, or is it too soon for that?
They inhabit Uranus, but are very concerned with your uterus