Nah. Twofer just designs all their parachutes. :)

Twofer - I fyou can get more than one ticket, 'night launch' is on my before-I-die list, too. :)

12: Twofer, yer a bloomin' astronaut! wow. didn't know that! What'd you do to get that ringside Ticket?
Install the shuttle crew's Dolby 5.1 Home Theater system for playing (off-duty hours, of course) Buffy the Vampire Slayer? <g>)

[q]Twofer - You should post up a link to that orbiter launch pic you sent me.[/q]Your wish is granted... ;)

[i]Atlantis,[/i] outbound last month: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/image/0107/nightlaunch_sts104_big.jpg with the parent site here: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap010723.html

That's the 1024/768 version; other sizes, including ridiculously higher rez, here: http://science.ksc.nasa.gov/shuttle/missions/sts-104/images/caption...

I watched [i]Discover/i] lift off a couple of years ago, just after dawn (Rick Husband, the pilot, sent me close-in tickets... one of the job bennies, heh). While probably not as impressive as a night launch (which I want to see before I die), it was the single most impressive thing I've ever witnessed... there simply are no words.

Well, it didn't show up here in lynx. (Snort, followed by CLI Linux guy elite chortling)

Speaking of getting your money's worth....

A space related comment to Twofer is two better comments gained.

Twofer - You should post up a link to that orbiter launch pic you sent me. I browse NASA's pics on an occasional basis, but that's still one of the nicest I've seen in quite a while.

Geez, I hosed the very [iirst[/i] tag! <:(

[/q]IMO "infrared" is sort of un-interesting from PR point of view.[/q] While I understand that reaction, the [image/i] derived from an IR instrument are of course visible -- and they're plenty interesting, even to the public, if they're presented well enough. For an example, the Chandra X-Ray Observatory is Hubble's counterpart in the x-ray spectrum, which we can't see any more than we can see infrared... but whoever is in charge of image processing for Chandra is [i][bood!:[/i][/b]

http://chandra.harvard.edu/photo/cycle1.html

...it's all in the presentation.

But NASA isn't always so wise: they operate the Infrared Telescope Facility at Hilo, Hawaii, which also does some very nice work... but doesn't have anyone doing fancy image processing (like the Chandra work):

http://irtf.ifa.hawaii.edu/Science/GalleryOfImages/GalleryOfImages....

Pretty bland for the most part... the bottom right image here

http://irtf.ifa.hawaii.edu/Science/GalleryOfImages/gallery95jul26.jpg

is about the best they have -- and it wouldn't have been hard to take the other three images, appropriately color and register them, and have something breathtaking. Oh, this is nicer-than-average, too:

http://irtf.ifa.hawaii.edu/Science/GalleryOfImages/grs5ch95a.jpg

I have to agree with you on the PR bit; scientists may not like the inevitable dumbing-down, but PR's what keeps the money flowing.

BTW, the reason the Next Generation Space Telescope is IR? One primary goal is to look back to the early Universe, shortly after the Big Bang when the first stars and galaxies were forming... and that visible light is red-shifted into the infrared. It's also nice for seeing through the dust clouds which still surround newborn stars (and their forming planetary systems, if they have any). The science is there...

Twofer, that giant 8 Meter Telescope they're building: IMO "infrared" is sort of un-interesting from PR point of view.

It'd be great if it was a visible light Scope like Hubble.
Think of the incredible photos of visible objects that could be released to "wow" the public, keeping up sentiment for future funding of space projects (and keeping 'Scope funding when Congress is axing or scaling-back other programs). That's why this huge program should have a high public 'wow' factor. Joe-6 is interested in what he can see ("infrared, what's that?").

Granted, scientists for good science reasons got it approved. But later down road when Congress budget-cutters are snooping to see what to scale back they'd think twice before cutting a space program Joe-6 supports. Joe's opinion counts there. The 'wow' factor.

Werner Von Braun was PR-smart. He played the PR card for all it was worth and got more $$ from Congress for Huntsville Ala. NASA should play PR card big-time here, to get this Scope "long-term Big Funding" (with that kind of $$ you can quietly slip in those "extras" that are so loved by "scientists-only" <g>). PR, it's always PR.

And, Von Braun knew all this from Day One. With a "Buck Rogers" type of bullsh--- PR movie (shown to Hitler in his private theatre) he and fellow scientists got the V2 Rocket program not only approved, but with highest funding.
The key to "Big$$ Space Funding" is smart, real smart PR.

Thanks! I've got some reading to do!

[q]Oh well just a dream of mine, guess it always will be.[/q]The design of the Next Generation Space Telescope is well under way:

http://ngst.gsfc.nasa.gov/
http://www.spie.org/web/meetings/programs/as98/3356.html
http://www.ngst.nasa.gov/public/unconfigured/doc_0192/rev_01/ngstWF...

They expect it to have an aperture of about 8 meters, making it nearly as large as the largest ground telescopes; it will be a very lightweight, flexible structure which uses active shape control instead of the classic rigid, extremely-sturdy design of ground facilities, and it will work in the infrared rather than the visible region of the spectrum.

But there are other plans in the works, all part of NASA's Origins Program:

http://origins.jpl.nasa.gov/index.html

One is the Terrestrial Planet Finder, designed specifically to discover Earth-like worlds out to about 50 lightyears -- and that volume includes several thousand stars, BTW. This is already scheduled, though not yet built:

http://tpf.jpl.nasa.gov/

The JPL design includes four 3.5-meter cyrogenically-cooled telescopes (each almost 50% larger than Hubble) free-flying in formation at the L2 point, to act as one much larger telescope; they will fly with a separation of 75 to 1000 meters (which is adjustable), so this will be the effective aperture... yep, a telescope up to a kilometer in diameter.

Another (earlier alternative) design for the same mission:

http://www.ae.utexas.edu/~harold/professional/Origins/telescopes3.html

And looking further out, there are plans for the Life Finder telescope, which would do spectroscopic studies of extrasolar planets in an attempt to find the chemical earmarks of life:

http://origins.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/lf.html

And then there's the Planet Imager, designed to produce images of extrasolar planets -- not just a point of light, but photos you could make at least crude maps from:

http://origins.jpl.nasa.gov/missions/pi.html

They're thinking maybe eight 8-meter telescopes, flying in a formation up to 6000 kilometers across... that's half the diameter of Earth -- beyond our present technology, but not beyond forseeable tech.

So I don't know that it's never going to happen; only the first two steps are funded and under way, but they're part of the whole plan I linked. Maybe it's more than just a dream...

Oh, if you're into telescopes, here's a pretty comprehensive list of present (and some planned) instruments, of all types (including space):

http://www.laas.org/www-obs.html

#3: that was an informative reply to my "speculation" comment, and appreciated.

An aside:
More than anything in space program I would love to see a humongous orbiting space telescope developed in an all-out crash program, or better still an even bigger Moon-based one. Boy. would we see things previously unheard of, unthought of. We annually spend more on booze in this country than what the annual cost of such a Program would be (according to a NASA study I saw several years ago which added that the "key" to such a program was development of very big solid boosters).
Oh well just a dream of mine, guess it always will be. Sigh.

"Speculation" and "physically realistic computer model" are two quite different things.

The model they ran is pretty damned realistic... models of equivalent complexity (and accuracy) guide NASA's planetary probes around the Solar System, and through multiple passes in Jupiter's moons (like the very-successful [i]Galile/i] probe).

I have no problems at all with a number like that.

"100 years". Speculation sure is fun.

Good stuff, Ryu!

Some more detail here: http://www.spaceflightnow.com/news/n0108/15mooncreate/ including a brief discussion of the computer model itself and a visual sequence from the simulation (too bad it's not a movie...).

One of the facts about the Earth-Moon pair that has always been difficult to explain is the Earth's fast spin: most methods of forming a pair of co-orbiting bodies relatively close in size (and the Moon is a quarter of Earth's diameter, although only about an eightieth of its mass) is that they almost always end up facing each other (what's sometimes called "locked rotation") as they orbit. The moon always presents one face to Earth, but the Earth doesn't reciprocate; Pluto and Charon, its moon, do in fact keep one face toward each other (they are also a much closer match in size, and much closer than Earth and Luna -- and may also have been formed in a giant collision).

As the article mentions, planets were formed by the repeated collision of smaller bodies ("accretion" is the technical term), gradually building up a few larger planets from the huge swarm of smaller rocks that condensed from the primordial protoplanetary dust cloud (some nearby examples of which are here: http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/ap980423.html ). This one was fairly late -- Earth was basically its present size or a bit bigger -- and Ryu's right, it was no doubt a great light show.

In the era of final planetary condensation -- tellingly named the "Hadean Epoch" -- repeated impacts of multi-hundred-mile-diameter bodies melted the forming Earth over and over; in fact, there was probably an "atmosphere" of rock vapor for a while after each one. And the whole process may have taken only a few million years...

And to think we had no notion of much of this until the Appolo lunar missions: the discovery that the Moon was completely different from the rest of the inner Solar System's planets truly jumpstarted planetary formation science all over again. Thirty years later and we're still working over the details... I think we got our money's worth!