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7 Awesome Images That Will Make You Mourn The Space Shuttle (Video Too)
Among the many ongoing embarrassments for the United States is the public perception that we no longer even have the means to get ourselves into space anymore without asking our sworn enemy (Russia) for lift. That certainly is true for missions to study plant growth or Lord knows what else, but for military purposes, what often remains under the radar of ordinary Americans is the “Secret Space Program.”
Those words can have several meanings. First, although completely classified, we know the U.S. has AT LEAST two un-manned mini-shuttles (pictured below) that are part of the Air Force and it’s budget. Just because NASA has no budget, does not mean the U.S. is not VERY active in Space. I have also heard from several interviews with alleged insiders, that the number of un-manned mini-shuttles the U.S. has might be upwards of around 30 units total, and while we may know very little about them, posts like, US Air Force’s Secretive X-37B Space Plane Passes 600 Days in Orbit, along with the links to several other stories below tell us that there is CLEARLY more than what we see on the evening news happening up in Space.
For now, it’s safe to assume that the U.S. still has a very comfortable technological lead where it counts, and that is national security, but just how extensive the “Secret Space Program” is, is not clear, hence why it’s called “Secret.” For example, some have said we’ve already colonized Mars. Do a quick Google search and you’ll find TONS of information on the “Secret Space Program.” How much of the information is accurate is another story entirely. The “Secret Space Program,” and “Area 51” will be topics covered more in depth in future posts very soon.
For now, try to forget the bone-headed decision to retire the Space Shuttle Fleet without a replacement, and enjoy the following shuttle memories complements of cracked.com, and the following video from the upcoming Special Edition Ascent: Commemorating Space Shuttle DVD/BluRay by NASA/Glenn a movie from the point of view of the Solid Rocket Booster with sound mixing and enhancement done by the folks at Skywalker Sound. The sound is all from the camera microphones and not fake or replaced with foley artist sound. The Skywalker sound folks just helped bring it out and make it more audible.
THIS VIDEO WILL BLOW YOU AWAY!
FOR MORE ON WHAT WE KNOW ABOUT THE NOT SO SECRET PORTION OF THE “SECRET SPACE PROGRAM:”
The End of the United States Sanctuary in Space…
SPACE WARS HAVE BEGUN BETWEEN: Russia, China and the U.S.
AMERICA JUST LAUNCHED A ROCKET ON A SECRET MISSION INTO SPACE
US Air Force’s Secretive X-37B Space Plane Passes 600 Days in Orbit
SPACE TERRORISM – A THREAT FOR THE NEW ERA!
SECRET SPACEPLANE; MYSTERY MISSION
OUR NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH SPY SATELLITE PROGRAM
It’s over: No more manned space missions on the agenda. As of now, America is pursuing a “flexible path” space-flight program, which essentially means we have nothing. They’ll say the program died because of funding cuts and age, but that’s not the whole story. Astronauts and the Space Shuttle used to reign as the unquestionable rulers of badass, but then somewhere along the line, cultural opinion shifted, and somehow wrapping a man in a giant metal bullet and firing him into the face of the void became thought of as stuffy and boring. The space program didn’t die because of budgetary concerns; it died because we forgot how goddamn awesome it was. And that’s something we had no excuse for doing, as these images will prove:
#7. Burn Down the Sky
This is the Saturn V rocket, carrying the Apollo 11 moon mission:
This is the Discovery launch:
This is the Athena II:
These images bring up an important question: At what point did we forget that the Space Shuttle was, essentially, a program that strapped human beings to an explosion and tried to stab through the sky with fire and math? How jaded do we have to be to lose collective interest in that? We celebrate the 4th of July every year, all across the nation. If explosions are that important to us, why don’t we just channel a third of our yearly fireworks budget into one big bastard of a shot — one mad, screaming, man-made asteroid hurled right back up into the face of nature, just to prove to the bitch that she doesn’t have a lock on that kind of thing?
The Endeavour, mankind’s polite rebuttal to the meteor strike.
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#6. What Void?
With most photographs being taken in the contextless void, it’s easy to forget that astronauts are just human beings wrapped up in fancy clothes, floating miles up in the air, surrounded on all sides by a lethal nothing. And then you see an image like this:
An image that really drives home the fact that these are people — tiny, fragile beings that die if they swallow a pretzel wrong or slip in the shower — and they’re existing so far removed from the planet they could be saying, “Oh excuse me, New Zealand, I didn’t see you there.”
Space is a vast and frightening thing; it is an extreme and murderous absence; it’s the closest physical metaphor for the disturbing unknowns that follow death; space is a villain from a children’s book — it’s the Nothing from The NeverEnding Story. And now, here’s Bruce McCandless, an astronaut on the Challenger, taking the first untethered spacewalk.
He had no ties to any earthly bond whatsoever, he was hundreds of miles beyond the point where the sky gives up, and he said, “No, thank you,” to a lifeline, then went for a bit of a constitutional … into the abyss.
#5. Battle Tanks are GO
Remember those famous pictures of the Mars rovers, where they looked like tiny, plastic, chintzy little toys?
Well, this is what the new model, Curiosity, looks like:
It looks like something that should be laying siege to G.I. Joe Headquarters. It looks like it’s about to call Optimus Prime a pussy and then kill John Connor for good this time.
The NASA PR campaigns showed us the rover looking tiny, flat, kind of bland, and nobody cared. No matter how crazy awesome it was that we were playing RC cars on Mars, the public didn’t have a catchy visual, so everybody wrote it off as more dry science stuff.
But look at that thing again: Every kid in the world needs a toy version of that, and they need it right now, because that’s how kids need everything. Release a scaled down RC car of Curiosity, call it something like “CrushStomper,” slap a couple of ads up on episodes of Bakugan, and there you go: You’ve got NASA funded for the next 10 years.
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#4. He’s Got the Whole World … in His Face.
Odds are you’re at work right now, reading this instead of collating or conglomerating or whatever adults with real jobs are supposed to do. Also, odds are your cell phone has a camera in it. So let’s perform a quick social experiment: Fire it up, and take a self-portrait of you just doing your job, right now.
How’d that picture turn out?
Does that gripping image of you making crude pixel-tits in Excel fill onlookers with awe and wonder? Does that photograph of you quietly mourning the death of the last Red Bull capture the insanity, beauty and existential terror of mankind’s progress?
No?
Funny, because when Clay Anderson, flight engineer for Expedition 15 tried this same experiment at his job …
… it totally did all of those things like a motherfu****.
#3. Thrust Diamonds
That’s the engine of an SR-71 Blackbird being tested, but you can be forgiven if you panicked just now and slapped at the button that calls James Bond into your office. (Also, hey, thanks for reading, Q! Big fan.) The shapes in that Death Ray up there aren’t tricks of the camera, either — they’re called Thrust Diamonds, and to NASA, that sh** ain’t even a thing.
Brother can’t take a dump up in NASA without firing off some Thrust Diamonds.
#2. The Crawler-Transporters
If you’re the kind of person that skips right to the moneyshot when watching porn, you’ve probably only seen the actual take-off portion of a shuttle launch. And hey, if a missile being fired into the throat of the unknown armed with a warhead of “dudes who just don’t give a fu**” doesn’t impress you, surely nothing else about the launch process will.
How about the world’s largest tank?
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The machine that brings the shuttle to the launchpad is called a crawler-transporter, and it’s the largest self-powered land vehicle in the world. They’re twin mobile platforms weighing 3,000-tons a piece, 131-feet-long by 114-feet-wide, driven by a crew of 30, and powered by four 1,400 (not a typo) horsepower engines, one on each corner. That big, fu**-all structure holding the shuttle up there? Here it is cruising down the highway.
For scale, here it is next to a human being:
It’s like taking an oil rig out for a spin.
It costs the USA $1 billion more than NASA’s entire budget to provide air conditioning for the Armed Forces in the Middle East. Clearly, our national priorities are skewed towards conflict. That’s kind of messed up, but OK, fine: Objectively, we know the crawler-transporter isn’t armed or armored, but next time we start a war, let’s do it by driving Hans and Franz up there (their actual names, by the way) right into the other guys’ capital. I promise you, that war would be won in an afternoon.
I mean, would you shoot at it?
#1. The Space Shuttle is Metal as F*ck
Here’s the Space Shuttle doing its best impression of a Dio album cover.
This isn’t some lucky fluke shot, either. Lightning loves itself some Shuttle. Here’s another:
Jesus Christ. That’s clearly the tower of some evil techno-wizard.
Holy sh**. That’s the picture you’d see on the real estate brochure for God’s house. Here’s another angle:
Somewhere, there’s a big-haired anime character with a disproportionately large sword who’s trying to shut down the shield reactors so he can get in there.
***
All I’ve really done here is (hopefully) prove that the Space Shuttle was badass, but I’m an adult now, and I understand that we can’t keep funding something just because it’s bitchin’. That’s not how budgets work; there’s no spreadsheet column for “badical.” We didn’t fund these programs to start with because they were cool; it was because we had to get to space before the Russians, and because we had to establish a sense of national identity in a conflicted period in our nation’s history. In a nutshell, we went into space because nothing brings people together like shoving something in somebody else’s face.
So in the interest of that: I heard Europe talking the other day, America, and I mean — I don’t want to start anything here, so you didn’t hear it from me — but they were saying you don’t go into space anymore because you’re scared. Then they said that Italy was a much bigger landwang than Florida, and Africa made some crack about how the Gulf of Mexico must be cold this time of the year, and then all the other continents laughed.
Are you really gonna take that?
WHAT A SAD SIGHT, SEEING THE SHUTTLE AFTER BEING PERMANENTLY GROUNDED AND BEING SENT TO A MUSEUM.
FOR OTHER POSTS ON MYSTERIES IN SPACE:
Google Reveals Heavily Controversial Planet X to the Public At Large
Baltic Sea Anomaly a 14,000 Year-Old Alien UFO That Crash Landed?
10 Things You Didn’t Know About Blackholes – #9 Seems Impossible!
10 Insane UFO Conspiracy Theories That Might Actually Be True
15 Space Pictures That Will Actually Make You Think
Breaking Video: Crazy HAARP Weather Explosion In Mid Air
This “Alien” Discovery is Throwing NASA Into a State of Bewilderment!
Elusive Planet X Caught on Video in the U.S. After Sundown (Video)
13,000 Year Old Satellite Orbiting Earth Sending Radio Signals (Video)
Aliens on the Moon: The Truth Exposed
Possible Alien Structures Spotted on NASA’s Image of Ceres
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There is absolutely no evidence that anyone has ever been in (Outer Space) Period! There is unlimited evidence the space agencies around the world has stolen trillions of dollars from those who are easy to fool.
amasing video are the astronaughts flying thousands of miles perhour or they park in space working on the satallite.
I can jump up and down and land in Japan. A Saudi cleric said so.
But seriously that shuttle video was great and the author’s writing style is legendary.
Only thing I don’t understand is why was there still sound after it broke the sound barrier.
1500 mph and we’re still hearing noise from the booster engines. Uhhhhhh . . . that’s impossible.