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[Ranzear]

Slashdot has it covered pretty well:
http://science.slashdot.org/story/10/04/18/239245/Shuttle-Reentry-Over-the-Continental-USA

At 5:24am PST or 6:58 PST, conditions permitting for orbits 222 or 223 respectively, the shuttle will begin a nonstandard 'descending node' reentry path over the United States, meaning it will pass through Canada and the Midwest to land in Florida.

The second time is what interests me, Toady, and anyone in the Seattle area, because the shuttle will be passing overhead at a 50 degree angle, and will look something like this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ts_pS0BM95o

You can use this Java based calculator to find if and where it will pass over your location. Select "KSC222 (ENTRY)" or "KSC223 (ENTRY)" for each landing time.
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/realdata/sightings/SSapplications/Post/JavaSSOP/JavaSSOP.html

You can watch the NASA TV online or if you have the channel for eventual info on which orbit will be selected for landing, or if they defer further to one of the later options.
http://www.nasa.gov/multimedia/nasatv/index.html

[Grakelin]

No matter how hard we try, shuttle landings will never actually be interesting to watch. Not even when intoxicated. I have tried.

Though, there was one astronaut who had a pendant that kept lifting up during his interviews with NASA. He would move it back down by tapping it with his face. That was totally worth watching the NASA channel for 4 hours at a party for.

[Outcast Orange]

"Probably."

Yeah right.

Like human kind will never go to space again.

[Agdune]

I think the 'probably' is referring to the fact the shuttle's being decommissioned. So it's the last chance to see a shuttle re-entry, as per the title. Not the last chance to see a spacecraft re-entry.

I would watch but being in Australia, nothing interesting ever happens in my sky. Or even in the local rocks. We don't get fancy volcanoes or shuttles or space stations.

[RedKing]

"Probably."

Yeah right.

Like human kind will never go to space again.

China, yes. America? Not so sure. We've got too many problems, too much deficit and too many short-sighted politicians. Manned space flight is now seen as a "frivolous expense" by too many people. I remember as a kid NASA announcing they would have a permanently manned moonbase by 2001 and a permanently manned Mars base by 2010. I'll put that up on the shelf with personal jetpacks, robot servants and flying cars as another childhood promise broken.

Instead, we've spent the better part of a decade and the better part of a trillion dollars fighting goatherders in some of the most godforsaken places on Earth. Yay future. 

[Outcast Orange]

China?

What is your take on this?

[RedKing]

My take is that Xinhua is a government-run news agency, and they jumped the gun. Boilerplate stories of an expected event is common, even in the West. News agencies have "Team A/TeamB WINS Sporting Championship!" type stories ready to go the moment the final buzzer sounds.

I think there are some people who still just can't wrap their heads around the idea of a nation going from everybody riding bicycles to manned spaceflight in 30 years. Having spent some time there, I have no doubts that the PRC can accomplish whatever Beijing sets their minds to. If they want something built, they don't spend time with planning committees, environmental impact assessments, vendor bidding, oversight of the vendor bidding, etc. They just grab the nearest 10,000 people and say "Go build it." I stood in a cutting-edge university campus in Hanghzou that was 5,000+ acres and had a man-made river running through it. Then one of the local university admins casually mentioned that "Yeah, six months ago this was all rice paddies." Part of the reason they can do that is because they took the umpteen thousand farmers displaced from their land, turned them into construction workers, used them to build the campus, then either resettled them in farmland elsewhere, or put them in a city high-rise and left them as construction workers.

Now, I'm not saying that that's a necessarily great society to live in, or a benevolent way to treat your citizens, or even that super-fast construction is a great thing. But you have to admit that it's effective. If there's one thing autocratic governments are good at, it's directing resources towards things they really want. And they really want a manned spaceflight program.


My take is also that YouTube is full of stupid shit.

[Grakelin]

Guys, the US still has a plan for a space program. Obama wants to send people to Mars by the mid 2030s. This isn't the end of the space program by any means.

It's not even economically feasible to turn off the space program, since they need people to set up all those satellites.

[RedKing]

Guys, the US still has a plan for a space program. Obama wants to send people to Mars by the mid 2030s. This isn't the end of the space program by any means.

It's not even economically feasible to turn off the space program, since they need people to set up all those satellites.

And Bush had a plan to send people to Mars too, which mostly got scrapped as soon as something shinier popped up and distracted him. Political will in the US is fickle about space funding, especially without the pressure of competition that we had with the USSR. It was once seen as a matter of vital national interest to keep our edge in the space race. Now, people mostly bitch about how many people Probe X could have fed, or how it's pork-barrel spending or even a "Southern jobs program" (since most of NASA's facilities are located in the Sun Belt). And from the other political direction, conservatives complain that NASA is a bloated Federal bureaucracy full of eggheads who don't do enough practical research.

As for satellites, much of that is already being offloaded to commercial launch vehicles and/or foreign space agencies. And no, I'm not thinking we're going to stop sending stuff into space period, just that we're going to stop sending people into space. Because it's way cheaper, safer and easier to send a robot probe. Look at how the way we fight is changing. Predator drones comprise the bulk of our actively utilized offensive firepower in Afghanistan.

[mainiac]

I'm glad the shuttle is ending.  The shuttle was a monstrosity from the beginning; a contorted design bent to serve too many different whims.  It only made budget sense if you indulged in wishful thinking (a hundred of launches a year) that was completely contrary to the fiscal reality (budget cuts).  The space shuttle was complex to the cost of safety and there was never a mission that called for all it's capabilities.  I am very encouraged by the switch to the Ares rocket.  Remember, rocket's took us to the moon and made the first space station.

[Virex]

We may actuly soon see far more people going into space. Besides NASA, the ESA and the russian space agency, China has already launched people (or at least they pretended they have), Inda is planning to launch it's first astronauts by themselves in 2015 and Nigeria is planning to launch their first astronauts in the same year, though it's not clear if they want to do it themself (they don't have launch capacities yet). Iran's planing to send their first astronauts off by 2021. North Korea has officialy stated they want t launch astronauts, but who knows if they'll ever succeed.

Besides those, Israel, Japan, Brazil, South Korea, Pakistan and the Ukraine also have satelite launch capacities, so they could probably launch within 15-20 years if they wanted.  Maleisia is currently working on launch vehicles, but it's not clear if they will launch them from their own platforms or from other launch sites (Japan is helping Maleisia so presumably they'll also help them with launching.)

[Ranzear]

Fastest derail ever.

Landing postponed to tomorrow morning. New orbits:

237 to Kennedy Space center
238 to Edwards AFB
238 to Kennedy Space center

None of these get above 10 degrees over the horizon in seattle

[Grakelin]

Protip: Talking about the space program in a topic about shuttle launches is not a derail.