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The Last 10 Days In The Space Shuttle's Bunker?, Atlantis apparently to be scrapped in 2008
Guest_BruceMoomaw_*
post Feb 23 2006, 04:52 AM
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QUOTE (dvandorn @ Feb 22 2006, 03:43 PM) *
However, I take *strong* exception to the statement earlier in the thread that eliminating manned space flight is one of Griffin's goals. I dare anyone to produce a statement by Griffin that supports this. I also put up against it the fact that Griffin put a Shuttle servicing mission of Hubble back on the schedule, even after O'Keefe and his minions had killed it.


-the other Doug


Neither I nor Bell said that Griffin intends to "eliminate manned space flight" as a whole for now -- although, like Freeman Dyson, I would have no objection to that happening for the next several decades. What I and Bell said was that we have every reason to think that Griffin despises Shuttle/Station, and would jump at any opportunity to kill it. And that is beyond question -- Griffin has written precisely that, in public reports that he issued before being picked as NASA Administrator.

As for his supporting a Hubble repair mission for Shuttle: that, I imagine, is a separate issue, based on his assumption that if we're going to retain the damned thing anyway as part of what he sees as the unjustifiable ISS project, we might as well use it for ONE thing that might perhaps be worthwhile (especially since, actually having technical training, he instantly realized how harebrained O'Keefe's proposed robotic Hubble repair mission was). Whether if -- after the cancellation of ISS -- he'd try to fly one last Shuttle mission just to repair Hubble (as Robert Zubrin proposes in "Space News") is uncertain; but I imagine we'll never get the chance to find out. When they finally are zapped, Shuttle will get the ax first, then ISS will.
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dilo
post Feb 23 2006, 07:12 AM
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QUOTE (Bob Shaw @ Feb 22 2006, 11:55 PM) *
Marco:

Try looking at:

http://www.astronautix.com/lvs/saegerii.htm

Bob Shaw

Thank you very much, Bob.


--------------------
I always think before posting! - Marco -
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Stephen
post Feb 23 2006, 10:33 AM
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QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Feb 23 2006, 04:52 AM) *
Neither I nor Bell said that Griffin intends to "eliminate manned space flight" as a whole for now -- although, like Freeman Dyson, I would have no objection to that happening for the next several decades.

With all due respect, if NASA's manned spaceflight were ever to be "eliminated...for the next several decades" that abolition may well turn out to be pretty much permanent, whether that was intended to be so at the time or not.

Abolishing manned spaceflight would not just mean sending the shuttles off to museums (or the breakers yards) and pensioning off a few astronauts. It would also impact on the associated infrastructure, personnel, and industrial capacity. Allowing those to wither away would mean that if and when somebody did want to put manned space flight put back on the national agenda again they may well have to be rebuilt from scratch.

For example, what do you do with the VAB at KSC? Put it in mothballs, demolish it, sell it to land developers for transformation into condominiums, or leave it to slowly rot away as another of the KSC's collection of antique lawn ornaments? smile.gif

What would happen to manned spaceflight's funding? Does it go to the unmanned program or will Congress use much of it to fund better welfare, more hospitals, and tax cuts for American voters? Conversely, where will the funding come from to start it up again? From widows and orphans, the terminally ill, and American taxpayers? More likely it will be at least partly funded by cuts to the unmanned program, even if it received not a penny from the original disbandment of the manned program. That in turn is not likely to endear the return of manned space flight to the American science community.

BTW, if you want an example of a country which abolished a space program (albeit not a manned one) and now finds it pretty much impossible to put it back together again check out what happened to Australia's.

======
Stephen
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Guest_AlexBlackwell_*
post Feb 23 2006, 04:12 PM
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QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Feb 23 2006, 04:37 AM) *
Of course, the same thing is true of the vast majority of European and Japanese citizens. Lo and behold, their nations have fair-sized space programs anyway. So I repeat: why wouldn't the US? Are we supposed to believe that the US government and its citizens are THAT idiotically addicted to purposeless manned space flights?

Incidentally, the Huygens and Hayabusa missions seem to have attracted considerable interest and support from European and Japanese citizens, without a single astronaut being involved -- just as the Voyager, Hubble and MER missions did here.

You know, Bruce, for someone who claims a political science degree, you are stunningly (if not purposely) ignorant of Realpolitik as it applies to space programs. Often, comparative rationality, whatever that means, has absolutely nothing to do with political decision making. No doubt there are a few U.S. senators or representatives who make political decisions on a "logical" basis, but the vast majority are guided by parochial concerns. For instance, if a Member of Congress has a company in his/her district that manufactures components for manned space flight, then that fact will trump anything related to, say, whatever "considerable interest and support from European and Japanese citizens" have about their respective space programs.

Frankly, I think your argument is a typical case of oversimplification. There are enough differences (political, cultural, historical, etc.) among the various space-faring countries of the world that drawing direct comparisons is, at best, problematic. At worst, it's simple hand waving.
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The Messenger
post Feb 23 2006, 05:44 PM
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QUOTE (Richard Trigaux @ Feb 22 2006, 12:47 AM) *
Yes this is the problem: they think "what is the cost this year " or "what is the cost during the time I am the responsible" and not "what is the overal cost of the program, spin-off and inconveniences included".
sad.gif

Last Summer, twice I had cynical space camp kids ask what was the point of the ISS - and it shocked me, how much they disdain the shuttle: Anything flying before they were born isn't high tech.

Post shuttle babies are voters now, and will soon be populating congress.

What good is the ISS? I avoided the question and launched into a discussion about Cassini, and all the questions that are yet to be answered.
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ljk4-1
post Feb 23 2006, 05:53 PM
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QUOTE (The Messenger @ Feb 23 2006, 12:44 PM) *
Last Summer, twice I had cynical space camp kids ask what was the point of the ISS - and it shocked me, how much they disdain the shuttle: Anything flying before they were born isn't high tech.

Post shuttle babies are voters now, and will soon be populating congress.

What good is the ISS? I avoided the question and launched into a discussion about Cassini, and all the questions that are yet to be answered.


Fear not - their children will disdain their current technology
because they didn't have quantum teleporters:

Quantum teleporter creates laser beam clones

NewScientist.com news service Feb. 21, 2006

*************************

Quantum physicists have moved
beyond teleporting individual
photons to imitating a classic
science-fiction scenario -- a
teleportation machine that generates
two near-identical copies of the...

http://www.kurzweilai.net/email/newsRedire...sID=5325&m=7610


--------------------
"After having some business dealings with men, I am occasionally chagrined,
and feel as if I had done some wrong, and it is hard to forget the ugly circumstance.
I see that such intercourse long continued would make one thoroughly prosaic, hard,
and coarse. But the longest intercourse with Nature, though in her rudest moods, does
not thus harden and make coarse. A hard, sensible man whom we liken to a rock is
indeed much harder than a rock. From hard, coarse, insensible men with whom I have
no sympathy, I go to commune with the rocks, whose hearts are comparatively soft."

- Henry David Thoreau, November 15, 1853

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Guest_BruceMoomaw_*
post Feb 24 2006, 01:55 AM
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QUOTE (AlexBlackwell @ Feb 23 2006, 04:12 PM) *
You know, Bruce, for someone who claims a political science degree, you are stunningly (if not purposely) ignorant of Realpolitik as it applies to space programs. Often, comparative rationality, whatever that means, has absolutely nothing to do with political decision making. No doubt there are a few U.S. senators or representatives who make political decisions on a "logical" basis, but the vast majority are guided by parochial concerns. For instance, if a Member of Congress has a company in his/her district that manufactures components for manned space flight, then that fact will trump anything related to, say, whatever "considerable interest and support from European and Japanese citizens" have about their respective space programs.


Alex, that is exactly what I said earlier in this thread -- if by some (desirable) miracle, the US manned space program WAS shut down, the huge size of this country's existing Space Pork Complex would cause us to have a considerably bigger unmanned program than Europe and Japan have. NOT a smaller one, as dvandorn suggested.

I take for granted that the manned space program in this country will actually not be shrunken until the fiscal strains on the government from other sources (the coming glut of retirees; rising oil prices; the costs of the Megaterrorism War) force it to do so -- and that the government will probably then respond as irrationally as possible by cutting the unmanned program to a comparable or greater extent, regardless of the actual cost-effectiveness of the two programs. But I reserve the right to continue yelling that shutting down the manned program is what SHOULD be done. And it is not at all unrealistic to hope that we may at least be about to get the incubus of Shuttle/Station off our backs -- and that it may not be replaced with a manned lunar program as bloated in size and speed as Bush's absurd version is.
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Guest_AlexBlackwell_*
post Feb 24 2006, 02:08 AM
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QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Feb 24 2006, 01:55 AM) *
Alex, that is exactly what I said earlier in this thread -- if by some (desirable) miracle, the US manned space program WAS shut down, the huge size of this country's existing Space Pork Complex would cause us to have a considerably bigger unmanned program than Europe and Japan have. NOT a smaller one, as dvandorn suggested.

I just don't buy that. You and I depart company in believing that a "considerably bigger unmanned program" is a logical result of a shrunken (or "shut down") manned space program in this country. Until I see hard evidence (not hand waving assertions) that U.S. politicians would naturally follow your scenario, I'll remain skeptical.
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Guest_BruceMoomaw_*
post Feb 24 2006, 03:17 AM
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You've just said yourself that American politicians are eager to keep the level of space spending flowing to their particular districts big. Most aerospace firms involved with manned spaceflight are also involved in a major way with the unmanned variety, or could very easily switch to it. Give me one reason why they WOULDN'T have a very strong tendency to demand a compensatory rise in unmanned spending if manned spending declined -- and why their puppets in Congress wouldn't go along.

But then -- to repeat -- that's not the real phenomenon we may be on the verge of seeing, which instead involves the elimination of Shuttle-Station and simultaneous compensatory rises in both unmanned space spending AND Bush's new manned program.
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RNeuhaus
post Feb 24 2006, 03:21 AM
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QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Feb 23 2006, 08:55 PM) *
I take for granted that the manned space program in this country will actually not be shrunken until the fiscal strains on the government from other sources (the coming glut of retirees; rising oil prices; the costs of the Megaterrorism War) force it to do so -- and that the government will probably then respond as irrationally as possible by cutting the unmanned program to a comparable or greater extent, regardless of the actual cost-effectiveness of the two programs. But I reserve the right to continue yelling that shutting down the manned program is what SHOULD be done. And it is not at all unrealistic to hope that we may at least be about to get the incubus of Shuttle/Station off our backs -- and that it may not be replaced with a manned lunar program as bloated in size and speed as Bush's absurd version is.

I think that the next biggest goberment money glut is the conversion of any oil energy to a non-pollutant energy. That would be the top priority since without this program, the Earth will go with a crazy weather.

Rodolfo
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dvandorn
post Feb 24 2006, 04:21 AM
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Watch it, Rodolfo -- if you worked for NASA, this U.S. administration would be trying to censor you for mentioning anything about "crazy weather"...

How in the WORLD can anyone take this administration seriously when they think they can play politics with science, if science happens to reveal something that's *inconvenient* for them? Sorry to get a touch political, here -- but this is a case where a group IN POWER is trying to silence science with politics and doublespeak. And it threatens us all.

-the other Doug


--------------------
“The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right.” -Mark Twain
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Guest_BruceMoomaw_*
post Feb 24 2006, 04:02 PM
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If I may make a smart-alecky crack, the world has been "going with a crazy weather" for a very long time now.

But R. Neuhaus actually does have a relevant point to make. Thanks to man-made global warming (which now seems extremely likely), the human race may well be faced in the coming decades (or centuries!) with an extremely ugly choice: either impoverish itself or cook itself. Any hope we have of squirming off the horns of that dilemma lies in discovering new technologies for CO2-free but cheap energy production, energy conservation, and pulling CO2 back out of the atmosphere ("sequestration") cheaply. If ever there was a cause fit for another Manhattan Project, this is it. And if the scientific and technological spending we need for such work cuts into space spending, we had damn well better cut away.

Most space spending, that is. We need to know as much as possible about the extent to which the problem actually is likely to be serious -- and that means climate-monitoring satellites. (It wasn't until ERBS was put in orbit in 1984 that we could even answer such a basic question as whether Earth's current cloud cover is cooling or further heating the planet!) Last year this [extremely bad word] administration made a major effort even to cut that research -- even though there's a small chance that it will end up telling us that the danger really is a false alarm and that we need not carry out major anti-warming efforts. Thanks to an uncharacteristic determination by Congress not to be pushed around on that subject, the White House finally backed off, and climate-research space spending hasn't been significantly cut this year -- but its efforts last year have managed to delay several very important missions on this subject by a year or so. Meanwhile, space spending as a whole is being rediverted from this sort of thing to such tripe as Shuttle/Station, the manned lunar program, and even (dare I say it?) a lot of unmanned space research whose actual practical importance to humanity is infinitely smaller.
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djellison
post Feb 24 2006, 04:11 PM
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So what you're saying is that NASA should be doing NOAA's job?

Doug
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Guest_AlexBlackwell_*
post Feb 24 2006, 04:20 PM
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QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Feb 24 2006, 03:17 AM) *
You've just said yourself that American politicians are eager to keep the level of space spending flowing to their particular districts big. Most aerospace firms involved with manned spaceflight are also involved in a major way with the unmanned variety, or could very easily switch to it. Give me one reason why they WOULDN'T have a very strong tendency to demand a compensatory rise in unmanned spending if manned spending declined -- and why their puppets in Congress wouldn't go along.

Forgive me if I don't defer to your "expertise" in this matter but, in my opinion, you're just waving your arms, as usual.

I have yet to see evidence that shrinking a country's manned space program automatically results in a commensurate increase in its unmanned space exploration efforts. The two examples that you offer in your ahistorical "analysis" (Europe and Japan) are irrelevant. Neither have ever had any real type of manned space program to begin with (other than flying "guest astronauts/cosmonauts"). And it's no surprise that your cherry-picking left out Russia. Its current manned space program has severely contracted; indeed, it's a shell of what it once was. So, under your theory Russia should have a booming unmanned space effort as a result, right? In fact, the former Soviet Union's unmanned space exploration efforts flourished at the same time as did its manned space exploration program.

And so did the U.S. programs.

QUOTE (BruceMoomaw @ Feb 24 2006, 03:17 AM) *
But then -- to repeat ...

This statement (or variations thereof) seems to be a mantra with you. Perhaps you could adopt it as a signature line, preferably IN ALL CAPS SHOUTING MODE.
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djellison
post Feb 24 2006, 05:00 PM
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We all know that Bruce is just someone who has to criticise. Nothing sneaks under the radar with him. Whatever is in the news, Bruce thinks it's wrong. If something goes wrong, Bruce knew it would and could have told you 5 year previous. If something totally and fundamentally unexpected happens that could never have been forseen, Bruce wants to know why they didnt know it was going to happen, and he knew it would happen all along.

I've said it before, and I'm NOT going to say it again Bruce - if you want to exercise your habbit for unjustified ranting, do it elsewhere. Alex, myself and others had to put up with it for too long elsewhere, and I wont let the same mistake happen here. I'm posting this publicly so everyone can be a witness to it.

Doug
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