Nasa to launch faulty space shuttle

Nasa to launch faulty space shuttle

Monday, March 16, 2009 WASHINGTON: The US space agency will break with protocol and try to launch the space shuttle Discovery late on Sunday even though it has yet to uncover the cause of a hydrogen leak that delayed its mission earlier in the week, officials said. On Saturday, Nasa scheduled Discovery and its crew of seven, including a Japanese astronaut, for a blast-off from the Kennedy Space Center in Florida to the International Space Station (ISS) at 7:43 pm (2343 GMT) Sunday, with a 10-minute launch window. "From a broad safety perspective we are fine.... We feel good about it," shuttle launch director Mike Leinbach told a press conference. He said that equipment replacement work was about three hours behind schedule but would not delay the launch, and that leak checks would be performed later on Saturday. But he acknowledged that "no, it's not usual" when asked whether it was normal to fly without resolving a problem such as the hydrogen leak. "We like to know the root cause for problems. I am a little surprised that we did not find something more obvious because it was a healthy leak," he said, referring to the leak Nasa discovered on Wednesday in the filling system for the shuttle's external fuel tank just hours before liftoff. Mike Moses, the head of the mission management team, noted that the leak occurred on the "ground side system," not on the shuttle or the external fuel tank itself.

 

DISC: How would one warp space-time to create a funnel that can be traveled through?

Say I want to crete a sort of spiral of space-time or a time funnel/spiral [whatever you want to call it]. Or just warp space so it's bigger in front of you and smaller behind you .This would cause near instantaneous travel over many light years. But it would be difficult getting it to stabalize and have all your atoms put in the right place.

What happens when space and time reverse on the interior of a black hole?

According to the Schwarzschild metric, when you travel through the event horizon of a black hole, the (previous) radial-like coordinate becomes positive and the (previous) time-like coordinate becomes negative. This suggests that the old radius is now a time-like coordinate (which must always move towards the singularity) and the old time is now a space-like coordinate that can be traveled in either direction (possibly violating our current understanding of causality). Considering that an extremely massive black hole has a very large surface area with relatively small tidal forces, would it be possible to travel into a black hole with little ill effect beyond this reversal of time and space, or is there a more fundamental problem with this switch that I'm not seeing?