Thursday, September 02, 2004
NASA is worried about Hurricane Frances. Any damage to the 3 remaining space shuttles could really put a damper on their attempts to restart the space program.
My friend's condo was 20 miles from the eye of the last hurricane to hit Florida, and he put down the storm shutters and everything was fine. I suspect his house would be in worse shape if for some reason it were to enter the atmosphere at 17,500 miles per hour.
"If there were serious damage to one or two of the orbiters or the facilities needed to process and launch the orbiters, I think it would raise a very large question about the continuation of the shuttle program," Logsdon said.The only thing I'm wondering is, if you design a space shuttle to withstand re-entry to the earth's atmosphere at Mach 25, why would 140 MPH winds be that big of a deal? You would think that when the craft is going so fast it rips apart air molecules causing it to be surrounded with 3000 degree plasma and strong shock waves -- that would be even worse, right? What about the frozen Russian space turds flying around to and fro up there?
My friend's condo was 20 miles from the eye of the last hurricane to hit Florida, and he put down the storm shutters and everything was fine. I suspect his house would be in worse shape if for some reason it were to enter the atmosphere at 17,500 miles per hour.
