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.
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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.)

[dvandorn]

And you can add to Truax's comments the comment, made in the mid-90's by one of the main NASA designers of the Shuttle system, that they "got exactly the system (they) wanted." He went on to say that the designers knew exactly how infrequently this Shuttle would be able to fly, and how expensive it would be, and that's exactly the system they wanted. (If someone could recall the designer's name for me, that would be appreciated -- I just don't recall it at the moment.)

I seriously disagree with some of Truax's comments, and I also believe that his comments were designed solely to attack a competing concept -- i.e., he, Truax, was looking at getting a few billion dollars from the government in his *own* pockets, which motivated him to make some unsubstantiable attack statements. Obviously, his attacks didn't work, probably because everyone at the time realized that he had an axe to grind on this particular issue.

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.

Once again, I will say it -- eliminate manned spaceflight from the U.S. budget, and you'll be left with Russia, ESA and JAXA for *all* of your unmanned probes. Congress will *never* see the sense of continuing unmanned exploration unless there is also a manned space presence; they will see bowing out of manned spaceflight as a statement of our intention to abandon space exploration entirely. If you sell the first, the second will follow automatically. So, if you want to see American unmanned spaceflight brought to a complete halt, go ahead and lobby for an end to American manned spaceflight.

Pardon me if I don't join y'all in that.

-the other Doug