The Last 10 Days In The Space Shuttle's Bunker?, Atlantis apparently to be scrapped in 2008 Options

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20060...lantis_spa.html :

"Under orders to retire the shuttle fleet by 2010, NASA plans to cancel shuttle Atlantis' next scheduled overhaul and mothball the ship in 2008.

"Rather than becoming a museum piece, however, Atlantis will serve as a spare parts donor for sister ships Discovery and Endeavour to complete assembly of the International Space Station.

" 'People are already calling us and asking us can they display one of our orbiters in their museum after we're done. I'm not giving anybody anything until we're all agreed the station is complete and the shuttles' job is done,' shuttle program manager Wayne Hale told Kennedy Space Center employees during a televised address on Friday.

" 'We're going to keep (Atlantis) in as near flight-ready condition as we can without putting it through a (modification and overhaul) so we can use those parts,' Hale said.
____________________

Jeffrey Bell has recently finished a piece for "SpaceDaily" proclaiming that the wholesale cancellation of other NASA projects in the FY 2007 budget to keep Shuttle and ISS going is actually just part of Michael Griffin's Machiavellian strategy to get both of the cancelled, by making it clear that they can be saved now only at the cost of a swarm of other projects (including Bush's lunar program) which are now more popular. Certainly that is the overwhelming message being conveyed, whether Griffin planned it that way or not -- I haven't seen a single newspaper editorial yet that favors retaining Shuttle at this point.

(Bell also claims to see other, subtler evidence of this strategy in Griffin's moves over the last few weeks -- and also signs that he definitely plans to throw ISS from the train as well, by just giving it to the Russians half-finished in a few years and paying off the ESA and Japan for their unlaunched space lab modules. These include the fact that he's cancelled work on the unmanned cargo variant of the Crew Exploration Vehicle that will be necessary to take up replacement Control Moment Gyros to the ISS after the Shuttle is no longer available.)

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

"I still maintain that the US HAS to complete it's obligation to international partners with ISS. Bush called for international cooperation in the VSE, and he's simply not going to get that if they scew over Japan and Europe with ISS. NASA can do that however it wants - using STS or something else - but it HAS to do it. ITAR makes international cooperation harder now than ever before ( ask the Canadians working on PHX ) - so the US, if it is serious in wanting future involvement with other agencies, HAS to do what it signed up to many many years ago."

That depends, I think, on whether NASA is willing to cover the costs that the ESA and Japan ran up building their lab modules -- which Bell thinks it can easily do with a small fraction of the money it will save by cancelling Shuttle/ISS. If it does, then -- given the Gordian-knot mess which the entire ISS project has degenerated into -- I think ESA and Japan will be a lot more willing to forgive us for jumping ship on this one. (They would certainly have taken America's cancellation of its half of Ulysses better in 1981 if we'd covered their costs for THAT one -- they lost half of their own planned experiments!)

The scrapping of plans for a cargo CEV shows, perhaps, that he's prepared to take commercial options for shifting smaller loads into orbit (Delta 4, Atlas 5 etc ). An alternate interpretation of that particular piece of evidence.

Doug

Bell says -- and I haven't double-checked this yet -- that there is no other cargo-carrier satellite big enough to carry replacement CMGs.

He has told me in an E-mail tonight, though, that he doesn't regard the scrapping of Atlantis as corroborative evidence that Griffin is planning to zap Shuttle/ISS:

"No real news here. Space Cadet chat groups had figured this out long ago. Clearly there is no point in starting a 2-yr overhaul of Atlantis in 2008 when the system is closing down in 2010.

"And stripping an Orbiter for parts isn't new either -- parts are constantly swapped between the Orbiters. This isn't a pointer to an early Shuttle termination."