"Now, the fate of those atoms is uncertain. NASA officials believed the disks would shatter even if the capsule hit the ground with a parachute."

Three cheers for single point failure.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/5942268/?GT1=5100

Seriously, let's bet it all on a streamer and some stunt pilots in helo's... What are they 4th graders? Where were the ninjas and the monster trucks?

Those damn contractors. Can't turn you back for a second.

 

hey, at least they failed in grand fashion. Did you see the video of that thing hitting the ground, or see pics of it half stuck in the ground? It was pretty friggin sweet.

-Chris

 

I saw the video. It was awesome. "Sir, it looks like we have a no-chute deployment. Sir, impact at ground level North of the road."

They showed it all slow motion. Sad thing is, I bet the guys that spent 6 years of their lives on this project were just holding their ***** in agony.

[slowmotion]nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!!![/slowmotion]

 

maybe they didn't find jack so they set this up so they wouldn't have to make excuses for wasting millions of dollars.

Or maybe they wanted more budget money so they set this up so they'd have an excuse to go back.

looks like a UFO in the pictures....when it's smashed into the ground anyways...makes me wonder about that deal in the 60's.

 

Maybe it IS a ufo! Duh duh duuuuuhhhhhh. Seriously though. It really looks like a ufo. If you see the pics of it falling through the sky it looks just like the stereotypical "flying disks" of the 60's.

-Chris

 

remember the movie EVOLUTION??????

now look at the crash site and what it is carrying....

 

yeah


this is real fun

let's make fun of NASA

 

Wow, sorry. My friend that is a NASA contractor sent this to me. If he thought it was funnay, that's good enough for me. What, do you work for NASA or something?

 

dude...I work for the company that built genesis...although it was built at our denver site.

if only you guys even knew the complexity involved in these space systems....

I've worked at Hewlett Packard doing some really advanced hi-tech, cutting edge crap the media always raves about...but that is child's play compared to the types of engineering problems one has to deal with when working in space (well space isn't exactly all of the problem...a lot of it is the transition from an earth environment to a space environment). Anyhow, I think NASA gets ripped on too much by people who simply don't understand the complexity in spacecraft design.

 

I understand the complexities of what they do.....believe me. My uncle is the one that fixed the hubble telescope when the GOV messed up. They brought it to his company and asked them to build it..he said...it's not gonna work...let me fix the design and we'll build it...no way..they go somewhere else...low and behold..it doesn't work... he fixed the lense.

on top of that my old buddy ace used to be a rocket scientist...strangely enough..yes..yes it did say that on his business cars. He worked for LM.

my only beef if that we spend tons and tons and tons of tax dollar on trying to find the end of the universe and to see if we can live on mars when we could be spending that to figure out how to better use the land we have to better provide for our people now and in the future and better prepair for future issues. Like how to make better use of solar energy and alternative fuels.

that's my issue. Not that they don't know what they are doing...the people that work with nasa are some of the best brains in the world.

I just can't understand why their budget was increased tramendously in the past couple years when state education costs have been cut to pieces and federal aid for state level problems is non existant. You think that cutting the education and healthy after school activities of our kids is going to help our future technology and even nasa programs? No education. No future.

 

I wasn't saying that I thought it was like hucking a rock into the air and hoping it didn't come down on your head. I realize the complexities. My buddy had way too much fun drawing diagrams and equations trying to explaining this stuff to me in college. He concentrated in aerospace and satalite stuff in college.

I guess the part I found silly was the parafoil and stuntman helo recovery plan. My bad...

 

1. NASA does government research on "solar energy and alternative fuels". They were the first to do it back when we were running the Apollo missions.
2. The NASA budget has not increased tremendously in the past couple years. At $15.47B for 2004, $15.1B for 2003 and $15.0B for 2002, it has increased barely to keep up with inflation.
3. The cost of the war in Iraq is currently at $200B
4. I agree; education is the best investment ever but I wouldn't be so quick to draw comparisons b/t flailing NASA programs and education/federal-grant cutbacks. It's too much of a stretch and I have too high of a respect for NASA to let this slide by and have others go misinformed.

 

The recovery plan wasn't stupid or even weird...they wanted to parachute it (like we do with everything that's falling back to earth) and then catch it with a helicopter...not a bad plan...how would you do it? Wrap it in rubber? Put wings on it and have it fly autonomously? Maybe you'd use your anti-gravity ray...don't bag on NASA's engineers, they only mess up when they have to deal with idiotic buerocrats or the fact that the US still uses an archaic system of measurment...a parachute failure gets filed under the heading S*** HAPPENS.