NEWS: NASA Spacecraft Failure

A 225 kilogram spacecraft known by the acronym DART (Demonstration of Autonomous Rendezvous Technology) experienced a mishap in orbit and has failed to rendezvous with a US military satellite. The rendezvous was supposed to happen 765 miles above the earth but missed by ninety metres after the DART craft diverted from it's course and placed itself into retirement phase. NASA officials are investigating the reasons behind the failure.



The DART craft was part of a 143 million dollar mission designed to test technology to dock with and track other spacecraft without human intervention which would allow unmanned spacecraft to carry cargo into space for orbitting satellites and future space stations.

NASA has been caught out by some expensive mistakes in the space program over the last year, this 143 million dollar voyage has now turned into just another piece of space junk orbitting around our planet.

[edit on 16-4-2005 by Mayet]

Nasa is a useless, bottomless pit $$ waste..
What relevant have we learned from all the $$ they have flushed??

Nasa is a useless, bottomless pit $$ waste..
What relevant have we learned from all the $$ they have flushed??

What do you expect each and every space program to be an immediate success

If so you need to get off cloud nine and come into the real world.

BTW
If it was not for NSASA that computer you are sitting at might not even exist, or didn't you know that



[edit on 4/16/2005 by shots]

>>What do you expect each and every space program to be an immediate success

If so you need to get off cloud nine and come into the real world.

If you think Nasa contributes nothing back. Check this website out, I think you'll be very surprised by how much NASA has given us that we take for granted today.

www.thespaceplace.com...

www.sti.nasa.gov...

This quote from this link www.stars4space.org...

PAST NASA SPINOFFS
Fabrics
NASA's use of aluminized materials to serve as insulation for satellites and spacecraft helped lead to a revolution in reflective insulating materials ranging from survival blankets to wraps for water heaters to new types of interior home insulation. Extremely strong fire-retarding materials that were developed for use in the pure-oxygen air of early spacecraft have led to a host of cloths, such as Beta Glass, used in fireproof clothing, accessories and firefighter's suits. Other spacecraft materials have included teflon-coated fibers with extremely light weight but great strength that have been used as roofing material for such structures as the Detroit Silverdome and the Jedda, Saudi Arabia, Airport.

Materials
Composite materials, a mix of fibers and resins designed to provide great strength yet remain very light weight, have been synonymous with all aerospace applications from airplanes to NASA spacecraft and have advanced into lightweight, strong materials for helmets, tennis rackets and other sporting goods. NASA spawned further development of memory metals, metals that remember their former shape when bent, in its early space station studies and advanced forms of the materials are now used in common flexible metal eyeglass frames. Other glasses benefit from scratch-resistant coatings originally developed as a protective coating for delicate spacecraft parts. In footwear, a shock-absorbing spacerÓ technique originally developed for the boots of moonwalking astronauts has given birth to an entire new family of shock-absorbing tennis shoes and other athletic shoes.

Electronics
The smoke detectors now required by law to be placed in all homes and universally credited with saving countless lives are an end result of a technology originally developed for NASA's early 1970s Skylab spacecraft. Quartz timing crystals which have led to the current status quo in wristwatches and small clocks were first developed for NASA as a highly accurate, lightweight and durable timing device for the lunar-bound Apollo spacecraft. On the moon, astronauts used specially developed portable, battery-powered electric tools to drill into the surface and take samples of the crust, tools that were the direct predecessor of today's cordless screwdrivers, drills and other rechargeable power tools. Common bar codes now used for pricing in supermarkets are an advancement of technology originally developed for uses within NASA, such as maintaining a highly accurate inventory of millions of spacecraft parts.

This is just a few areas that NASA has helped develop, more R&D $$$ = More stuff like this



[edit on 16-4-2005 by sardion2000]

[edit on 16-4-2005 by sardion2000]

Yeah, screw it..
Lets just give up..

OR

Learn from mistakes, and try again.

Way to go sardion2000

Deny ignorance it sure appears that is the case here.

Reading The Day after Roswell by Col. Corso tells me more about technology all the propaganda NASA spouts.
I am not trying to be difficult, but we have starving children, battered women, and hijacked oils prices, and NASA has an inlimited budget..
Something is rotten in Denmark?
Sorry if I view human life more important than space fantasies..truly...

[edit on 16-4-2005 by siriuslyone]

Yes you are trying to be difficult but again you're dead wrong.

I am not trying to be difficult, but we have starving children, battered women, and hijacked oils prices, and NASA has an inlimited budget..

Nasa does not have an unlimited budget...far from it.

The US Total budget is around 1.94 Trillion dollars... from

here

NASA's budget is $16.2 billion from here

And the US Defence budget is [Drum Roll]

466 Billion Dollars for 2005 alone from here

The US spends more then 20 times the amount of money on thier military then they do on thier space program and look at all the grief that is causing.

Sorry if I view human life more important than space fantasies..truly

You may think you do but the value of Humanity is more important then the value of a few. We are talking about the survival of our Species and if NASA doesn't get off thier ass the Russian, Europeans, Indians, Brazillians, Isrealis, Canadians and Chinese are gonna take the lead and the US WILL be relegated to 3rd world status when that happens. Innovations plants the seeds of economic booms.

I guess you would rather fund the Imperial-like Bush Regime in "promoting" democracy abroad huh...

[edit on 16-4-2005 by sardion2000]

>>The US spends more then 20 times the amount of money on thier military then they do on thier space program and look at all the grief that is causing.

>>Quartz timing crystals which have led to the current status quo in wristwatches and small clocks were first developed for NASA as a highly accurate, lightweight and durable timing device for the lunar-bound Apollo spacecraft

You and I do not disagree on these points, but one thing overlooked here is how much is the black ops projects budget?

Black budget projects most likely would not be reported on the NASA budget but then again do you think that NASA is the only spacefaring Agency? I don't. Most likely Air Force related, since the shuttle has been out of service.

Nobody knows because there is above black ops who answer to no living human..

Actually people on the Senate Select commitee on intel know, John Kerry might know if he were to attend regularly. Point being even black projects are reported, study up on the "Aurora Project" to see how gov't budget items can lead to lots of speculation by "experts" in various Aviation Mags.

Have you read the Corso book?

I'm a skeptic so probably not...

I am one of those who does not think we went to the Moon, so guess I am a lost cause on NASA projects..

Agreed, at least you are not taking it personally that I'm disagreeing with you like so many others have so there is some hope for you yet

Being a Master watchmaker myself, this caused thousands of men [mostly] to lose their livelyhood, as a quartz watch pulses and does no longer use a balance wheel, but thank G-d people are going back to manual movements which cost 3 times as much as quartz..
No relevant I suppose, but it caught my attention..

Sorry to hear that, but tis the way of an unstoppable force called "Creative Distruction", same thing is happening in IT and has happened since the biggining of technology. It's speeding up now IMHO.

[edit on 16-4-2005 by sardion2000]

>>Agreed, at least you are not taking it personally that I'm disagreeing with you like so many others have so there is some hope for you yet

I'll google it up a bit, but it seems a bit too much for me to swallow. I make a point of not buying books like this as most of the time it's usually just a money making scheme. Hoaglund comes to mind readily, but if this person presents his speculations along side actual evidance, that can be verified(have not seen anything like that to date, got really jaded after what's his name who said that UFO's used element 115 to power thier ships, and he also said it was stable but it turned out the exact opposit, then I learned that most physists have been laughing at him for years as they have been able to predict the properties of undiscovered elements years before they actually discovered it lol)

But I will look into it, if only for debunking purposes. But I'm not a hyper debunker, not by any means. I always acknoledge that I may be wrong but in this case I'm 99.99% sure that I'm right Still open to being proven wrong, in fact I would love it if Aliens were helping us along, I just do not see it as likely as it stems from a Humancentric Arrogance that we are special IMHO.

I know you have probably come across this argument before but I'll say it again. Extrodinary Claims requires Extrodinary Evidance to back it up. Fuzzy pics and Eyewitness testimonies don't really cut it for me. I really hope these books bucks the trend heh.

>>I know you have probably come across this argument before but I'll say it again. Extrodinary Claims requires Extrodinary Evidance to back it up. Fuzzy pics and Eyewitness testimonies don't really cut it for me. I really hope these books bucks the trend heh.

This is an unfortunate setback. The Russians have been doing this for years with there Progress craft, which services the ISS, I was hoping that finally we would accomplish the same feat...guess not, yet.

and for the record, this wasn't a complete failure, the craft did everything that was perprogrammed into it. The only real problem was that it ran out of fuel, so there will be an investigation into the focket engine and when it fired and how long, etc. DART came within 302 feet of docking with the military satellite but then it noticed it was low on fuel, and it would need more fuel then it had to do the remaining 302 feet left of maneuvering, so that threw up a red flag, and the craft aborted its mission so it wouldn't take out the military satellite.

It was a fuel shortage, not some huge problem.

and siriuslyone, Hubble's time is up, get over it. and we did land on the moon.

When you're at the edge of human achievement things go wrong. That's just a fact of life. You don't just give up if you fail the first time. You learn from it, and you try again.

Humanity wouldn't have progresed very far if nobody every took risks.

Since NASA is a civilan agency every screw up is magnified a hundred fold by the media. While its achivments are often ignored or forgotten after a month.

You don't see the screw ups of the military all that often, nor the failed black ops programs and the millions of dollars pissed way in the name of national defense.