The Last 10 Days In The Space Shuttle's Bunker?, Atlantis apparently to be scrapped in 2008 |
The Last 10 Days In The Space Shuttle's Bunker?, Atlantis apparently to be scrapped in 2008 |
Guest_BruceMoomaw_* |
Feb 21 2006, 03:05 AM
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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.) |
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Guest_BruceMoomaw_* |
Feb 22 2006, 01:19 AM
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Guests |
While I will agree that it's insane (even given NASA's past actions) to say that Griffin would DELIBERATELY pass up an opportunity to minimize the dangers of more falling Shuttle foam before the next launch, there's another possibility: we may very well have no choice but to do so if we want to keep the ISS going at all.
The best weblog page on the ISS ( http://www.geocities.com/i_s_s_alpha ) says flatly that the only possible carrier right now for the Control Moment Gyros, except for the Shuttle, is Japan's HEV cargo carrier -- which won't be ready until 2009. (Europe's cargo carrier module can't do it.) NASA released a solicitation for "Commercial Orbital Transportation Services" carriers that might be able to do the job in October, with the proposals due this May -- so how long will it be before one of those can possibly fly? Surely 2008 at the absolute earliest. And the CMGs have proven very fragile. Quoting last Sept. 5's Aviation Week: "The CMGs are too large to fit through the Progress vehicle hatch, so the Shuttle is the only option for replacing them. The combination of their ability to save propellant and their apparent fragility makes CMGs the long pole in the tent for continued Station viability without Shuttle support. " 'If we went down to one CMG we couldn't last very long, says Mark Ferring, lead ISS flight director during the EVAs [on last year's Shuttle flight]. That's the thing that we had to get done.' "NASA is already looking for smaller, lighter gyros to use on the Station after it retires the Shuttle. But for now, the only option available to the Station program is getting the most use out of the current model. Controllers were surprised when CMG-1 failed -- the victim of a bearing failure that gave only a few hours' of warning -- and they still don't have a full understanding of the breakdown. As soon as the spacewalkers restored power to CMG-2, ISS controllers took CMG-3 offline for attitude control because it was showing unusual vibrations and current pulls, although they let it continue to spin. Engineers at NASA and L-3 Communications, which supplied the CMGs, were eager to get a look at the original CMG-1 in the hope it would hold clues to the cause of its bearing failure. Noguchi and Robinson carefully bolted it into the aft end of Discovery's payload bay for the trip home. " 'Bringing one back is actually one of the biggest priority things that we have on this flight, not just installing a new one, but getting the one that's failed on the ground so we can do analysis on it', Ferring says." So. If they get down to only two working CMGs on the ISS again and they don't have a flying Shuttle before 2008, they are up Excrement Waterway -- they will have no way to prevent the sudden reduction of the ISS at any moment to only one CMG, after which it "can't last very long". For this reason alone, NASA may very well have to fly Shuttles again as soon as possible even if they don't -- or can't -- solve the foam problem. Unless, that is, they're prepared to dump the ISS at any moment. As for Griffin's Jan. 19 interview with the Orlando Sentinel that Bell mentions ( http://blogs.orlandosentinel.com/news_spac...griffin_af.html ), he makes it pretty clear that --while he hopes they've solved the problem of big pieces of foam falling off -- he is by no means confident of it: "Orlando Sentinel: What is the likelihood of making May? "Griffin: We don’t know. I think you’ve been covering this long enough to understand that in order to even find out, you have to set a date and then you have to start working toward that date. We know what our processing flow is. We’re not going to make it up on the fly and the process flow either makes May or it doesn’t. But on the other hand, if we don’t set a date and try for it, we know we won’t make one. So that’s the plan. In brief summary to the question, yes, we think we understand the mechanism. Yes, we have mitigation based on that understanding of the mechanism. And we think we’ll get back to flying in late spring or early summer. We believe things will go well after that and we’ll be on our way to completing the [international space] station. "Orlando Sentinel: What happens if on the next mission, STS-121, things don’t go well and you see big pieces of foam come off the tank again that are in excess of your design restrictions? "Griffin: I can’t get into that kind of speculation. Obviously, it would be a major hiccup and we would have to deal with it. "Orlando Sentinel: Could the program survive that politically? "Griffin: I just don’t even know. I’m not going to speculate. I just can’t. There are too many branch paths. Right now, we are devoting our resources to flying and flying well. That’s how you have to think." In a situation like that, if YOU were Griffin, wouldn't YOU be eager to get rid of this whole thing at the slightest opportunity? It's not only a white elephant; it's a dangerous rogue white elephant. Griffin, contrary to Bell, surely isn't deliberately making the next Shuttle flight more dangerous than it needs to be -- but it is unavoidably extremely dangerous; he knows it; and I think at the slightest indication that the foam problem hasn't been completely solved he will seize the opportunity to say it's time to kill Shuttle-ISS completely. |
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