Jump to content

Home

Are you watching CNN?


NiKo

Recommended Posts

a 16 day mission to perform experiments in space. that's it, but then, that's mainly why anyway, that or to perform maintenance on satelites and space stations. bascially, it wasn't anything special. this is still really sad, that fact that people are dead, i know people die every day, but these people left earth in the hope that they were coming back, and well... i think you know what i mean.:(

Link to comment
Share on other sites

I know it's horrible, I feel bad I was out pubbing last night and while I'm watching friends get drunk that was happening. I feel some sort of connection to this though and if you read the following article I'm about to post you'll get what I mean, I went to the highschool involved :(

 

I just feel so horrible, so much death this weekend, first the Sydney train disaster where 8 people died and now this, freaks me out :(

 

 

 

Aussie spiders perish on shuttle

 

02feb03

 

EIGHT Golden Orb spiders, bred by Melbourne school students, were on board the US Columbia space shuttle which broke up on its return to earth in the early hours of this morning.

 

Columbia, carrying a crew of seven, vanished from NASA's radar screens at 1am (AEDT), minutes before its scheduled landing at Florida's Kennedy Space Centre.

Television images of the shuttle's descent showed several white vapour trails, suggesting that Columbia disintegrated as it re-entered the atmosphere 160km south of Dallas, Texas.

 

The spiders, bred at Melbourne Zoo through a four-year joint project by NASA and students from Glen Waverley Secondary College and RMIT University, were part of an experiment determining the strength of spiders' web in space.

 

Kevin Manning of Melbourne's RMIT University said the news of the lost mission had come as a shock.

 

"I think in the back of all of our minds we knew that something like this could happen but you certainly don't want it to happen," Mr Manning told ABC radio.

 

"We were looking forward to getting our spiders back today and I think at this point all we would really want is to have our seven astronauts back."

 

Mr Manning said the project had not been a complete loss, with researchers allowed steady access to scientific information throughout the 16-day mission.

 

"We have about 90 per cent of the scientific data that we need. The thing that's missing are obviously the spiders and the samples of spiders' web."

 

"But I suppose I can't say it enough, all of that really became insignificant this morning."

 

The Melbourne students involved in the project were devastated by the news of the doomed space mission, Mr Manning said.

 

"It's not difficult to necessarily explain it to the students, the students over the years have learned a lot of hard lessons about the reality of space flight and micro gravity science."

 

"They were all quite aware that indeed we could have had an accident on the launch pad or shortly after take off, but no one was really prepared for what happened today," Mr Manning said.

 

It was hoped the "spidernauts" would have allowed scientists to see if webs built at zero gravity were different to those created on the ground.

 

Low resolution video images, made available before the mission's tragic demise, had suggested they had successfully built webs.

 

If this proved correct, scientists were hoping to mimic the spider silk in aerospace structures and space stations.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

also, the first israelli inspace, Ilan Ramon, was a national hero, (as i expect NiKo will know). His mother and grandmother survived the Auschwitz death camp. Like his Zionist father, the astronaut fought for his country, in the Yom Kippur War in 1973 and the Lebanon War in 1982. He took part in the 1981 air strike that destroyed an Iraqi nuclear reactor.

it's horrible for such a hero to die like this.

Link to comment
Share on other sites

Archived

This topic is now archived and is closed to further replies.

×
×
  • Create New...