The Final Booster-Cam Video from the Space Shuttle Program

Does nasa retrieve these things from the ocean? Also, are there mechanisms on the boosters to stop them from taking out a cruise ship?

Bjorn, Nasa is collecting these boosters from the sea.What they do, as far as i know, is that they estimate where they are gonna drop and sending teams with boats to search and collect them.

The boosters has 3 parachutes attached on them, so they are not destroyed when they reach the sea.This also gives time to the resque team to find them and collect them as soon as possible.I guess these teams are informing passing by vessels that there is a 40 meter tower coming from above :P

This video reminds me how inefficient our current space propulsion technology is, which is one of the primary reasons NASA is stopping the shuttle program. I am hoping that we relive the nation's excitement during the Apollo missions in the near future when we have developed a much better method of propulsion, and maybe a space elevator to reduce the huge costs of countering Earth's gravity.

O'course, now everyone is thinking ion/plasma rockets, Mars, and "The Final Frontier" Or something like that.

Oh, and don't forget light-speed travel.

@ bjorn
yes nasa retreives them from the ocean. and no they have no sensors

this was a sad, amazing, awsome, and quite good time for america.

Those SRB's are a blessing and a curse -

The blessing is that they're recoverable and refurbishable (NOT the same as reusable!)

The curses are that they're expensive to refurbish; dangerous in that because of them not being abld to shut down there is no launch escape possible in the first 2 minutes of flight; if only one lights the whole rocket stack tips over on the pad with loss of everything including the crew; and each one contains hundreds of tons of perchlorates, which means that white "smoke" they produce is actually a cloud of hydrochloric acid vapor. Also; EPA just added perchlorates to their list of risks to groundwater.

Better to have hunan rated liquid rockets and spacecraft with launch abort systems like SpaceX's Dragon, Sierra Nevada's Dream Chaser spaceplane and Boeing's CST-100.

DocM

@ bjorn Nasa retrieves them, they have multiple videos devoted to just that.

www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/shuttle/behindscenes/recovery_ships.html

Those ships, the Freedom and Liberty patrol two exclusion zones for up to 3 days before the launch of the shuttle making sure no unlucky soul wanders into the path of falling debris.