"Disaster as Climate Probe Crashes"

[GreenPartyVoter]

A satellite designed by British scientists to measure how fast Earth's polar ice caps are melting crashed shortly after its launch from a Russian missile site yesterday.

CryoSat, the £100 million brainchild of UK climate expert Duncan Wingham, was supposed to survey the thinning of Earth's ice caps from space. Instead it plummeted into the Arctic Ocean at around 4.15pm.

The loss is a major blow for climate research - and for Europe's ambitions to become a major space power. Last night delegates, dignitaries, and senior scientists - who had gathered at Europe's Esrin space control centre in Frascati, Italy, to celebrate CryoSat's success - stood in grim huddles as they tried to digest the news of its fate.

'This is a tragedy for all the scientists who have spent years putting together this mission,' said Volker Liebeg, head of the European Space Agency's Earth Observation division.

http://www.commondreams.org/headlines05/1009-03.htm

[Lerkfish]

1. seems...conveeeeeenient.

[niyad]

2. exactly!!!

[GreenPartyVoter]

3. Seems like one sholdn't use old Soviet rockets to launch anything

[Lerkfish]

4. or american space shuttles, for that matter.

the shuttle program is not accident free, unfortunately.

[GreenPartyVoter]

5. Sadly true. What we need for satellite launches is a

REALLY big slingshot.

[Lerkfish]

6. Actually, a mass driver has long been theorized...

think of it as a huge luge course that steeply angles at the end.
Its very simple and I don't understand why it has never been used.