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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Guests |
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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Feb 22 2006, 08:57 AM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 1870 Joined: 20-February 05 Member No.: 174 |
We have to remember that the IDEA of a space shuttle is a good one. The one we got is a bad one.
Shuttle was supposed to 1.) provide access to and from space and serve as a work platform in orbit. 2.) Fly frequently. 3.) Fly Cheaply. 4.) Fly Safely. It is about 80% successful at #1. Fails #'s 2 and 3 by 10x each, and Fails #4 by 100 to 10,000 or more times (depending on which early reliability claims you pick) Why? 1.) We'd never built any reusable spacecraft or launch vehicles. Building shuttle right would have been like building a DC-3 Goonybird in 1925 instead of 1935. 2.) We had to enlist all possible customers to get the political support for the $ to build it, so it was designed to satisfy every one's hypothetical needs (especially the military's). The design was over-constrained by trying to please everybody. 3.) We tried to build it on the cheap. Any of those 3 things inevitably would have compromised what we got compared with what we wanted. Together, they turned a great idea into a 35 year disaster. From orbit insertion to atmosphere interface, the shuttle is wondererful. The rest of the time it's a disaster, like Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. |
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