Columbia shot down by a UFO??

What in the hell do you call the space shuttle? surely you do not feel that was not an advancement on space travel? Up to that point we had no re-usable rocket. It was obscene level of cash to fire anything up there. Now we have had the shuttle for 20 odd years and chucked plenty of sats up there so god knows what these limitation on space travel are?

Also we are limited in travel as we have no propulsion system which could accelerate humans to somewhere useful safely. This is not due to a lack of effort. Ion drives and solar sails have/ are being tested with new probes. They just take a very long time to get about. You cant use normal rockets to get to mars and back as it would be just silly. Also the time to get there, undergo some experiments and return would lead to some instability in whoever was sent. Then look at levels of radiation exposure, which are unknown at these distances.

We are still testing peoples reactions to long term space. That is why we have the ISS.
 
What a complete steaming pile of horse manure. Quite frankly it's so stupid I consider it insulting to the legacy of the astronauts who perished that tragic day.

Anyone with a decent recollection of the events of that day will have no problem recognising that picture. In fact, it looks remarkably like the trail left by the disintegrating super-heated bits of shuttle. If you've seen a meteorite shower you'll have seen this effect as the meteorites (which, I might add, are usually considerably smaller than the shuttle) burn up. You can even see various parts that have broken off trailing behind the main body (the bit actually labelled Columbia). I'm pretty sure the only plasma you'll find there is that created by friction acting on metal travelling at somewhere around Mach 20.

I've heard some stupid conspiracy theories in my time, but this one wins an award for the most ridiculous pile of rubbish I've ever seen. It doesn't even deserve to be called a theory. :/

As people round here may well know, I'm a pretty close follower of space exploration, and you can bet I followed the Columbia story. I even remember Challenger as well.


As for why we haven't advanced - someone, in their infinite wisdom, decided that LEO (that's Low Earth Orbit) was the best place to explore. That, combined with a fair whack of military funding for deploying satellites in what at the time was (wrongly) considered an efficient manner lead us to the shuttle (which was a considerable compromise from the start - much as I love to see the thing in orbit). Yes, it was (and still is) the most complex machine ever invented, but the design is also fundamentally limited to going round planet Earth at an altitude of a few hundred miles. It can't get to the Moon, and most certainly can't land there.

Unfortunately those politicans who came up with the Vision for Space Exploration (with the goal of getting man safely to Mars and back) were unable or unwilling to back up their rhetoric with cold hard cash, so the Vision has turned into a Lunar outpost sometime around 2020 and considerable cutbacks to robotic Mars exploration. Oh well. :(
 
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Spend_day said:
yeah i went through a similar phase. UFO's have been spotted on many space flights even video tapped the point is we know very little about space and the way it affects things this there probably just natural :D

dont just look at one source of data and one point of view


+ conspiracy theories kinda suck and isn't plasma (i mean real plasma like st elmo fire) not that dangerous
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there's different kinds of plasma, ionised gas, which is cool and is ionised by electricity and super heated gas which is ionised by the extreme heat, (iirc)
if it was the latter, id expect the air around the "beam" to be on fire.
 
iraiguana said:
We are still testing peoples reactions to long term space. That is why we have the ISS.
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you would also need at least some room of artificial mavity, be it rotational etc, as i think prolonged exposure to zero G causes weakening of the bones.
 
Tefal said:
you would also need at least some room of artificial mavity, be it rotational etc, as i think prolonged exposure to zero G causes weakening of the bones.
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Yes it does - and atrophies muscles too, among other effects.

Long duration astronauts have a rigourous excercise routine of at least two hours resistive excercise per day. Although that certainly helps, even that is not sufficient to completely mitigate the loss in bone density (which, incidentally, never fully recovers).

I doubt we'll be seeing space-faring vessles capable of any form of artificial mavity in the forseeable future. The Constellation program certainly doesn't provide any means for it, rotational or otherwise.
 
The thing is hypothesising about space travel in our caveman technology ways just makes no sense......I think it may be better to bend time in some way to travel long distances.
 
I had a big UFO mania a few months ago - I watched loads of (apparent) footage of them, interviews with people who apparently know of their definite existence. Well eventually, I learnt that there were different races, that the US creates things like the Cold War, 9/11, the war on terrorism etc to distract us from the existence of aliens, I learnt that all the planets in our solar system are colonised, even our moon. I also learnt that all the planets actually do have atmospheres and that we tried to colonise them at one point but failed; but we still have 'Secret Space Marines' that wipe the dirt off the Mars Rover's camera. There's more: We've made deals involving human abductions and exchange of technology, we have already reached the end of our solar system with our own spacecraft, the triangle UFOs are ours, we launch them from the South Pole. And much much more crazy stuff, including that what we thought were gods, were actually aliens, and that aliens are harvesting our souls using a miles-high tower on the moon.

Eventually it all got too much, and I stopped believing.
But I still believe that aliens have come to Earth at some point (especially during the building of the pyramids). In fact I find it harder to believe that some people don't believe that UFOs are in our solar system.
 
Sounds like someone has been reading Mutineers Moon by David Weber.

I think its far more likely that humans on this planet are the results of "Aliens". Be it a failed experiment or a Prison planet. Just seems far far more likely than some god like being. Unless by "god like" it simply means "more advanced".
 
magick said:
Why is it in the past 50 years we've hardly made any progression in space travel?
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You do remember what you were taught in those Science lessons at school right? That in 1969 NASA put a man on the moon?

Even if you look at the last 39 years... We've put hundreds of satellites up there, built various space stations and sent plenty of probes out to scout around other planets in the solar system. If these supposed ETs were trying to cripple our space exploration, they definitely wouldn't be letting us send out probes to research other planets.

That aside, as someone said further up, we haven't made the technological advances in the last 50 years to make further space travel viable anyway. The next nearest celestial body worth looking at is Mars - Taking a human there would be a one-way trip spanning many years. It just isn't do-able with our current tech.
 
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The truth is out there, Fox said so!

Who believes in all this UFO jollop? im sure if there was some ET we would know by now O_o or we would have become under attack
 
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