Are they worried about lightning strikes? Would a lightning strike even matter?
It’s just a little water!
Just as the roads get slippery, so does the air. No traction.
Also, no windshield wipers.
ETA:reported for possible forum change.
Moving thread from MPSIMS to General Questions.
Because it’s a waste of money. OOps, that was a hijack.
Take this shuttle to Iran!
Oooo, thanks for that link! I learned something today!
Seventeen thousand miles per hour. Wowser.
The Shuttle can’t fly in the rain, but it could land on the Sun.
But only at night.
Don’t be ridiculous.
If it was night they couldn’t see where they were going.
Don’t be ridiculous. You can land on the sun during the day. You just have to aim for a sunspot.
IIRC On one of the Apollo missions the capsule was struck by lightning on liftoff. I believe one of the crew said something like “Every alarm went off. It was like they threw all the training exercises at us at once.”
That was Apollo 12. Great scene from From the Earth to the Moon.
Unless this was a (successful) whoosh, could you explain this a bit more? The Shuttle obtains altitude through Newton’s laws and a set of very big rockets…
Yes, I know that’s a joke, but as an aside, the Sun is literally the hardest destination in the Universe to reach. It would take more energy to send something to the Sun than it would to send it to another star (of course, the other star would still take a lot longer).
[moderating]
Yes, it was. And inappropriate for GQ, too.
[/moderating]
Whoosh galore.
I assume all that energy is required to deaccelerate from the orbital path everything on earth starts on. Could the large planets be used to change a spacecraft’s trajectory to go directly toward the sun?
Not to hijack, but why is this? It seems like it would be a lot harder to fight gravity than to go with it.
She was great in Goldfinger.
Wow, I learned something new! I’d never thought about it before, but I suppose that even if you fired a rocket in the direction opposite the Earth’s orbital trajectory, which would accelerate it towards the Sun, the greatly lesser mass of the rocket compared to the Earth means that it would have less attraction to the Sun and would spiral rapidly away from the Sun. Correct?
It’s easy to forget how fast we’re moving all the time!
Even so, is the Sun really the hardest place to get to? Is there no spot in the galactic center, or any galactic center, that would require comparable amounts of energy to navigate to? (I understand that by “hard” you really mean “energy expensive.”) Obviously this depends on making a lot of assumptions–if the universe is infinite then even the intergalactic medium would slow something down eventually, right?
ETA: Plus, of course, if you’re willing to wait a really long time, you can just stay on Earth and wait for the Sun to expand!
The thing is, we don’t feel any gravity at all from the Sun, since we’re orbiting it. An orbit really is zero-g, despite what you might hear the pedants claim.
The lowest-energy way to reach the Sun would be to just stop our circular motion around it, and fall in. But in space, you can’t “just stop”: You have to fire a rocket or the like to do so. And there’s a greater difference in velocity between “orbital velocity” and “stopped” than there is between “orbital velocity” and “escape speed”.