It seems to me the shuttle is launched with the Shuttle itself  facing south and then rolls through 90 degrees to face out over the Atlantic - is there a reason for facing it to the south in the first place? Does the roll actually help to stabilise it in flight?
209994
the Shuttle reaches a point about one minute after launch when the pressure force of the atmosphere rushing past the rapidly accelerating rocket reaches a peak. The roll maneuver is performed shortly before max q is reached because this "heads-down" orientation helps alleviate the stresses that the dynamic pressure loads cause on the vehicle's structure.
567534
Actually the Military just launched a rocket with a classified satellite about 30mins ago. It was launched from Vandenberg AFB in California. If you live on the west coast you very well could have seen it. I was watching the live webcast off the Internet.\n\nThat was definatly the Delta IV that launched from Vandenberg. You live right in the path of the flight.
47759
Various explanations for the apparent high number of dissapperances have been put forward, ranging from the mundane to the hyper-fantastic.\n\nSkeptics contend that this region has a comparable rate of maritime and aerial incidents as any other similar sized region of the ocean. They point out that Lloyd's of London, a world-reknowned insurer of maritime vessels, does not charge a higher insurance premium for ships that regularly traverse the triangle.\n\nScientific considerations for an increased dissaperance rate take into acount that this region experiences severe tropical storms and is the source of many hurricanes. These storms create an increased danger to both ship and air traffic.\n\nRougue waves have also been put forward as a possible cause. These rare waves can reach heights of as much as 100 feet (30 meters), easily swamping most ships. Rouge waves, however, would have no effect on air travel.\n\nA third scientific explanation is methane hydrates. Methane deposits on the ocean floor may release bursts of methane gas that reduces the density of the water it permeates. Since ships rely on displacement to stay afloat, a reduction of density in the water would cause a ship to immediately sink. As the methane leaves the water and rises into the air, it would reduce the density of the air as well, thus reducing lift on aircraft, causing them to descend rapidly. In addition, the methane would change the air mixture taken into the engines of the aircraft, causing the engine to stall. While these events have not been witnessed in nature, they have been proven in lab experiments.\n\nMore exotic explanations for the Bermuda Triangle include it being an area of magnetic disturbance, temporal (or time) holes, the location of the lost city of Atlantis, or extra-terrestrial abduction.
500006
Are you sure those are really rockets?  There are not that many launched, you know, and the tend to go up quite quickly so unless you are down range from a rocket launch pad, you probably never seen a rocket.\n\nI tend to have a hunch that what you are talking about can be contrails from high altitude airliners.  If this is so, and then they can be in all directions (while rockets are essentially launched towards the east to get an extra nude from the earth's rotation) this is not smoke, it is just the engine exhaust, a mix of carbon dioxide and water vapor from the combustion of hydrocarbon fuel, that cools in the very chilly air at those altitude (10000 m and above).  The ice crystals form and look just like a cloud that can dissipate at varying rate depending on how humid it is up there.
197185
The plane is actually following the curvature of the earth, which only seems to look straight - exactly the way ships do.\nIF it would follow a geometrical straight line, it would actually increase altitude, leaving the sphere of the atmosphere, and make it look like a perpetuous climb (gain of altitude) to a LOCAL observer ...\nBut the so cold level-flight, is a question of keeping altitude, or keeping touch with a certain air pressure, which means a constant distance to the earths center of gravity, making the path a curve...\nSo, a plane is not flying a straight line - strict geometrically (and GLOBAL) speaking!
392692
As I understand it, ballast tanks are along the sides of the ship. And that's all around distributed. But just remember: it's Poseidon. It's full of crap. How is it that only those few characters survive? How did they hold their breath through that really long passage way, even an Olympic swimmer couldn't do that? How is it that they is a fully inflated raft waiting for them at the end when they jump down, complete with oars, med kit, and emergency flares?\n\nIt's doesn't have to make sense :-P
151530
Most of the time, they land at Edwards Air Force Base, a desert ancient lake bed, in California.  It is ideal because it is flat and the weather conditions are the same every day of the year -- clear skies and dry.  It is then flown by piggy-back on a specially fitted 747 to Kennedy Space Center in Florida (which is one of the worse and most flickle places to launch or land) where it is launched.  Sometimes it can land in Kennedy Space Center but this is rare.\n\nSo why this arrangement? Not considering politics and legislative "horse trading", this arrangement is practical because more scientists and NASA employees rather live in Florida than the middle of a desert. It launches in Florida instead of California, presumably because in an emergency, you can land in the ocean instead of on land. Why this is an advantage, no one knows. Early U.S. space pioneers landed on water while Soviet/Russian pioneers landed on land.  No one has ever been spared one way or the other. If there is a mishap on takeoff or landing, the pioneers die before they hit land or water.\n\nI'd rather see THE space center to be the same place -- in Nevada or New Mexico, away from the coast.
572385
Very impractical for at least two reasons:\n\n1) It would have to be an unbelievably powerful magnetic field to generate any significant lift. The Earth's magnetic field is very weak.\n\n2) As soon as it left the ground the vehicle would be trying to flip over to an attitude where the Earth's magnetic field attracted it. You can't have a south magnetic pole without a north one and vice versa. As soon as this flip happened, the vehicle would crash back to Earth hard.
41640
It takes a lot of energy to break out of Earth orbit, and thus takes a lot of fuel.  Just to get to the moon, it took a giant, 3 stage, Saturn V rocket.\n\nThe space shuttle was specifically designed to be used in Earth orbit and thus could not carry near enough fuel to escape Earth's gravitational pull.
607171
The sun DOESN'T know the ship is there, and it doesn't have to:  Gravity is a warping or deformation of the four-dimensional fabric of space-time, not an actual pulling.\n\nThe earth travels around the sun because the earth is actually travelling IN A STRAIGHT LINE in its "local" space.  The end result is an ellipse because the space around the sun is literally bent into a curved shape.\n\nSo, your ship can travel faster than light, but it can't travel faster than space -- which is to say, wherever it arrives after its hyperspace trip -- it IS where it IS and if the space is bent the ship will follow the contour of its local space regardless of how far it is from the source of the gravitational spacetime warping.  No information or "graviton" needs to actually travel from the ship to the sun.
465513
georgex is exactly correct about how aerodynamics come into play in this situation.\n\nI would just add the observation that wind resistance is not a significant issue in the acceleration of the missile (and the acceleration of the various parts of the catapult). The acceleration occurs over a very short period of time, and the main resistance to accelerating the missile is the MASS that needs to be accelerated, not the wind resistance.\n\nOnce the missile has been released, it is travelling very fast (which means that the wind resistance will be very significant), and it will be travelling for a considerable period of time (which means that the wind resistance will be slowing it down for a relatively long time and a long distance). So wind resistance is much more important during this phase.\n\nIf you want to make your question more specific, you might get more specific responses.
512634
I was just about to ask the same question. It is interesting that it is so evenly divided. Both sides think they are right. What keeps it from tilting one way or the other?
211467
Yes man landed on the moon. The flag was not waving in any kind of breeze. The flag had a wire in it so that it appeared to be standing out in a breeze. NASA thought that would look better than a flag simply lying flat against a pole. Really now, if NASA was bright enough to pull off this kind of conspiracy, don't you think they would have had enough sense to make sure a flag didn't move.
330214
What you are experiencing in the roller coaster, or an airplane in turbulence, for that matter, is Newton's laws of motion, i.e.,"a body in motion will continue that motion until an outside force is applied".\n\nSo, in the case of the roller coaster, when it reaches the top of the course and starts down (that's when you feel it), your body continues its up-ward motion and direction according to Newton until a force is applied to it by way of a seat belt, or other restraint, thereby changing your body's direction.  This particular force is sometimes called a "negative g force" by astronauts and pilots, because it acts counter to gravity (g).  \n\n\nAnother way to look at it is that when the roller coaster starts down, it takes your seat with it, but your body continues going up! So it seems to you that the seat has dropped out from under you (same deal in the turbulent airplane!)\n\nNow, when the roller coaster reaches the bottom of the track, and starts back up, or the airplane climbs out of a dive, a positive g force (acting the same direction as gravity)is created. Then, you are jammed down in your seat, or, as Newton would explain, "the seat you are in is applying an upward force on your body, which wants to continue down in the direction it was going!\n\nAin't physics fun?
518758
The Shuttles built were:\nEnterprise (not able to go into space, used for training purposes, currently at Edwards AFB)\nColumbia (destroyed)\nChallenger (destroyed)\nplus the three still in service.  They are to be retired within the next four years.  One will unquestionably go to the Smithsonian's Air & Space Museum.  One may be left on display at Cape Canaveral.  The final one may wind up at some very lucky museum elsewhere in the USA.
628906
I have been across the Triangle many times in both boats and planes. I never observed anything different. There are many scheduled flights across it every day.  One of the reasons for so many stories is that there is such a huge amount of air and shipping traffic across this area.
429873
As others have said, it's all about speed. \n\nIt's a minor point really, but it's a common misconception that it is the friction with the air that causes objects hitting the Earth's atmosphere at high speed to heat up. Actually it's not friction. The heating up is caused by the fact that the air in front of the object cannot get out of the way fast enough, so it's gets compressed in front of the object. As the air gets compressed the pressure rises and as the pressure rises so does the temperature. This is what causes the burning up effect.\n\nWhen a space craft is blasting off into orbit, as its speed rises it's also gaining altitude. At higher altitudes the atmosphere is less dense, so this compression of the air in front of the space craft never becomes a problem.\n\nIf a space craft used its rockets to slow its decent back to Earth then it wouldn't have any problems with burning up on re-entry. The reason they don't do this is because of the weight of the fuel that would be needed to do it. With current technology, no spacecraft could carry that amount of fuel and still be able to get into orbit.