Flight controllers undocked the Progress supply ship and deorbited it this morning (burnup at around 1415 GMT) in around three hours. They didn't waste any time. Curious why they didn't leave it hanging around the ISS somewhere, or attach it to another docking port. I know it can't be cheap to manufacture. But I don't think it has the capability of re-entering without destroying itself, which gives it negative value when unloaded and docked to the ISS. I would think that making a "two-way" Progress supply ship would be cheaper than making dozens of them in the long run. Maybe the Russians didn't want to run the financial risk. Read on the Internet a couple days ago, on spaceflight.nasa.gov, under the gallery section that in the late 1980's and early 1990's, Russia has its own Space Shuttle program. It looked just like the American Space Shuttles. It made one unmanned test flight. Upon its return, it was disassembled and the Russian equivalent of the VAB was converted into a trinket factory because of financial troubles. I found that very sad and unfortunate. Never knew about the Russian space shuttle, either. ------------------------------ Jonathan T. Wojack tlj18@juno.com 39d45'N 75d33'W ________________________________________________________________ YOU'RE PAYING TOO MUCH FOR THE INTERNET! Juno now offers FREE Internet Access! Try it today - there's no risk! For your FREE software, visit: http://dl.www.juno.com/get/tagj. ----------------------------------------------------------------- Unsubscribe from SeeSat-L by sending a message with 'unsubscribe' in the SUBJECT to SeeSat-L-request@lists.satellite.eu.org http://www2.satellite.eu.org/seesat/seesatindex.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Nov 01 2000 - 13:11:06 PST