StarDestroyer.Net BBS

A forum member on an Astronomy site found this.

http://www.usajobs.gov/GetJob/ViewDetails/302967000

NASA posted a Job ad for an astronaut.

Intelligence agencies also advertise in the paper nowadays. It's just weird to me.

Don't you need spaceships for that?

cosmicalstorm wrote:Don't you need spaceships for that?

Not with today's catapult technology, you don't.

Nevertheless, I was thinking the same.

cosmicalstorm wrote:Don't you need spaceships for that?

Europe had astronuts, but never had & never will have man-capable spaceflight They hitched a ride, I'm guessing we'll hire out to the chinese, their manned SOYuz Sauce Bottle Rocket copies are cheaper to launch than the shuttle...

and have a better safety record?

or scale up scaled composites production.

I daresay, w/ nasa being out of the spaceflight business for the first time since we launched Alan Sheppard, it seems Russia finally won the Space Race. We beaty them to the moon, but they're still launching people.

The Bear (tortoise) beat the Hare

Well, NASA still seriously plans to have man-capable vehicles in around ten years, so astronauts recruited now will likely be flying them... plus they send a steady trickle of people up to the ISS and there's apparently hope of a man-capable capsule from the private sector to do that within five years or so.

By comparison, astronauts recruited in the late '60s and early '70s did a lot of the work flying the Space Shuttle in the early 1980s, ten to fifteen years after they joined up.

Musk has crazy plans like sending 10000 people to Mars. You heard it right, 10000 human beings. He thinks he can deliver cargo to mars at $100-$200 kg. Very crazy ideas. Nonethless if it pans out needless to say there are science fiction like oppurtunies for space pilots seeking to work in the private sector...

ComradeClaus wrote:

cosmicalstorm wrote:Don't you need spaceships for that?

Europe had astronuts, but never had & never will have man-capable spaceflight They hitched a ride, I'm guessing we'll hire out to the chinese, their manned SOYuz Sauce Bottle Rocket copies are cheaper to launch than the shuttle...

Wow. You're a moron . . . but stating this is like stating a fire is rather hot. As others have already pointed out, NASA plans to get back into the manned launch business. Even if NASA never got into the business of launching people into space ever again, it'll be a very long time before we start hiring out to the Chinese. Russia is a full partner of the ISS effort and China is not. The Russian platform has achieved over 110 launches across eight generations of continuous improvement, while the Chinese platform has managed eight (only a fraction of which are manned.) Ergo, we will continue using Soyuz until NASA finally builds with whatever overpriced boondoggle ultimately replaces the Shuttle.

or scale up scaled composites production.

Again, you = moron. Scaled Composite's spacecraft spinoff, The Spaceship Company, is building sub-orbital rocket planes for the foreseeable future. The only feasible "private" orbital ship I've seen is SpaceX's Dragon capsule, and the man-rated version isn't going to be ready until at least 2013 - 2014. The usual suspects (Boeing and Lockheed) are developing capsules of their own, with testing set to start sometime around 2015.

Sarevok wrote:Musk has crazy plans like sending 10000 people to Mars. You heard it right, 10000 human beings. He thinks he can deliver cargo to mars at $100-$200 kg. Very crazy ideas. Nonethless if it pans out needless to say there are science fiction like oppurtunies for space pilots seeking to work in the private sector...

Outside of Earth orbit, I expect that such opportunities will remain in the realm of science fiction during the lifetime of anyone old enough to participate on this board.

Even Musk's conservative (pronounced: 'vaguely in-line with reality') estimate puts the first man on Mars no earlier than the early 2030s (his optimistic estimate is the early 2020s . . . but he has yet to actually build the Falcon Heavy rocket required to do this, let alone prove that it can safely carry people.) Which would equate to having 10,000 humans on Mars by the mid-2070s, assuming you somehow managed to launch fifty (over double the present number of launch sites on Earth) ten-man spaceships to Mars every launch window (which opens every 780 days.) If you, somehow, had built four spaceships that could carry the same number of people as a Boeing 747 (for simplicity's sake, we'll say that a Boeing 747 carries 400 people,) starting from 2030, you could put 10,000 people on Mars by 2060 . . . but I'd be surprised if you saw a space-747 before the second half of the century, let alone four of them. If I weren't planning to be dead, unaware, and indifferent by then; I'd be shocked if there were 10,000 people on Mars before the year 2150.

And to add to the CC bash: ESA is developing a manned spacecraft. "Never will have", huh?

edit: Aren't many NASA astronauts retiring or have retired? At least I got the impression from interviews that many feel they don't want to sit around waiting a decade.

From what I understand, Boeing could start building 6-man X-37 C's to mount on ATLAS V's right away... the issue is funding.

Col. Crackpot wrote:From what I understand, Boeing could start building 6-man X-37 C's to mount on ATLAS V's right away... the issue is funding.

Money, and time. Man-rating a vehicle takes both

Anyways, even if a guy flies to the ISS on a Soyuz, he is still an astronaut. Hell, most of the Mercury 7 astronauts didn't fly until Gemini came about, so they technically had no spaceship, either

Uh, 'Zook, might want to check what you're referring to - all of the Mercury Seven flew Mercury missions except for Deke Slayton, and I don't think the New Nine were ever slated to fly in Project Mercury.

Scottish Ninja wrote:Uh, 'Zook, might want to check what you're referring to - all of the Mercury Seven flew Mercury missions except for Deke Slayton, and I don't think the New Nine were ever slated to fly in Project Mercury.

Huh.

Yeah, you're right. I have no idea where that one came from.

Skgoa wrote:And to add to the CC bash: ESA is developing a manned spacecraft. "Never will have", huh?

edit: Aren't many NASA astronauts retiring or have retired? At least I got the impression from interviews that many feel they don't want to sit around waiting a decade.

Many of the current crop probably don't- people with the brains, determination, and credentials of an astronaut can do very well for themselves in a lot of other walks of life. It makes good sense for them to go find something else to do if they're pretty sure they're not on the roster for any flights in the next five to ten years.

Really, the average useful 'life' of a given astronaut is about ten years- they mostly don't stay in the astronaut corps much longer than that. Age and career ambitions catch up with them.

At the same time, though, NASA wants to keep its astronaut training infrastructure running, and they do need people to put on flights to the ISS in the 2016-2020 timeframe, no matter what they're using to get people up there. By then there will be a lot of retirements among the existing astronauts, so they need fresh blood.

Makes sense to me.

Yes. And we shouldn't forget that "Astronaut" is not such an exclusive club as it used to be. Scientists do fly regularly nowadays. If you don't have a flight coming up, there is no point hanging around instead of doing science.

Weird considering the layoffs from last year.

The safe return home of Atlantis marks the official end of the shuttle program, as well as the start of thousands of layoffs for NASA employees.

link

dragon wrote:Weird considering the layoffs from last year.

The safe return home of Atlantis marks the official end of the shuttle program, as well as the start of thousands of layoffs for NASA employees.

link

Not really, the people that were fired then were probably all ground crew for the shuttles.

Malagar wrote:

dragon wrote:Weird considering the layoffs from last year.

The safe return home of Atlantis marks the official end of the shuttle program, as well as the start of thousands of layoffs for NASA employees.

link

Not really, the people that were fired then were probably all ground crew for the shuttles.

Yeah, it was mostly the shuttle processing teams at KSC. Also the people who worked to assemble the External Tanks. You can somewhat see efforts to halt the flow of losing people. KSC has wasted no time finding users for the two Orbiter Processing Facilities (the shuttle's hangers). The Air Force will be using one as a processing facility for the X-37B. Boeing claimed another for their CST-100 capsule.

That said, NASA never really fires Astronauts unless they do something horribly wrong. The military astronauts get their paychecks from their respective services anyway. The active list has dropped however, to mainly just those eligible for long duration, ISS flights. When shuttle retired a number of others were suddenly classed as "management" astronauts on NASA's official website, with no specific managerial tasks assigned. Presumably they are still active, but for one reason or another, ineligible for long duration flights.

Enigma wrote:Not with today's catapult technology, you don't.

Apparently, Hobbits are in great demand nowadays. I guess that's why.