Tight NASA Videos, Part 2

There’s a lot to be said against the space shuttle program, and most of the criticism boils down to the fact that when you attach 2,700,000 pounds of ignited, highly explosive fuel to something as it leaves the planet and then subject it to 3000° F and wildly varying pressures on the return trip, expecting that thing to be reusable basically makes no sense. The space shuttle was supposed to launch once a week and provide a cheap, consistent way to get satellites into space; in actuality, all of the work it takes to maintain the shuttles at a safe level is expensive and time-consuming enough to keep them from going up more than half a dozen times a year. Even with all that painstaking care, we’ve lost 2/5 of the functional orbiters, and the program had to be grounded for years after each disaster.

On the other hand, this is entirely awesome:

Tight NASA Videos, Part 1

As far as I'm concerned, here is an airtight argument for giving NASA all of the funding it wants:





That's our planet. We live there.

It spins. The sunlight reflects off of the cool water of the South Pacific and out into space. You can see it get smaller, as the Galileo spacecraft moves away from it at tens of thousands of miles an hour on its way to Jupiter in 1990.

(More information and a higher quality video can be found at the Astronomy Picture of the Day)