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.)

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

Regardless of the merits of Truax's technical points, the first rule of aerospace is that paper studies like his Sea Dragon are worthless by themselves. Until you have actually built, tested, and flown a system multiple times, you are only extrapolating based on incomplete data how it will perform, how well, and how cost-effectively. Talk is cheap, and aerospace is riddled with large and embarrassing failures based on ideas that seemed great on paper.

There's no shortage of people who trash the Shuttle with 20-20 hindsight, but the engineers who designed and built it did the best job they could under the technical and budgetary constraints at the time, and it's quite an achievement in that light. Within the limits of statistical error, its failure rate matches pretty well with the original honest assessment of 1 in 100 flights. If you want higher reliability than that, you'd better be prepared to pay for it, in money or capability or something.

The trouble with Shuttle is not its reliability rate -- a failure rate of less than 2% does compare well with any unmanned booster. The trouble, as should be obvious, is everything ELSE about it: its disastrously low cost-effectiveness per kg of payload carried, and, oh yes, the fact that when it fails it usually kills people, which another type of booster would not. (Had the Shuttle been a CEV-type design -- that is, a reusable booster carrying a capsule with an escape rocket -- it would have killed NOBODY by this point. The Columbia accident would never have occurred; in the case of Challenger the escape system, if designed with even minimal competence, would have detected the leak and rocketed the crew to safety about 15 seconds before the explosion.)

In fact, these flaws -- basic to its fundamental design -- WERE clear to a lot of people at the time besides Truax, which is why NASA had to lie about the Shuttle to a degree that would have made Baron Munchausen blush to get it through Congress. Robert Thompson -- the program manager at the time -- actually guffawed while he was telling CAIB about the size and absurdity of the claims NASA was successfully feeding to Congress at the time: "Hell, anybody with any sense knew we'd never fly that often." He thought it was a terrific joke.

And the responsibility for the crime (which is not too strong a word for it) lies not with engineers frantically trying to do the best they could with such an absurd design -- it lies with the leadership of NASA, who deliberately, from the very start, set out to create a massively expensive and unjustified program to try and keep the agency's funding level as close to the bloated levels of the Moon Race as they possibly could, and who were willing to tell absolutely any lie necessary to achieve that goal. As Reagan's science advisor George Keyworth said during his frantic but futile attempt to keep Reagan from swallowing NASA's similar outrageous lies about the cost and utility of the Station: "Every government agency lies part of the time, but NASA is the only one I know that does so most of the time." (He could have added that the reason for this is simply that it has far more reason to lie than any other government agency, because its total spending level has made far less sense than that of any other agency since the historical freak of the Moon Race ended.)

The one piece of actual new news in Thompson's testimony was his revelation that President Nixon, instead of being another victim of NASA's scam, was in on it from the start. He knew that the Democratic Congress would never approve what he and NASA really wanted -- a super-expensive Shuttle/Station program -- so he collaborated with NASA's lies about the supposed economy of the Shuttle as a cargo carrier, in order to increase the chances that Congress would agree to pony up the additional money for the Station before the end of his second term. Watergate put a stop to that plan; but NASA kept it in mind, and finally successfully staged part 2 of their Master Plan by exploiting the gullibility first of Reagan, and then of Al Gore.

[mcaplinger]

Had the Shuttle been a CEV-type design -- that is, a reusable booster carrying a capsule with an escape rocket -- it would have killed NOBODY by this point. The Columbia accident would never have occurred...

No doubt this explains why the Russians have never lost people on Soyuz flights. (Well, no: four people dead in two entry accidents. Would you argue that the US would never have accidents like those? We came fairly close to losing the US crew of Apollo-Soyuz to an accident similar to Soyuz 11.)

Forgive my lack of confidence in your ability to flawlessly predict these alternate-history outcomes. And I'm not sure what this CEV-type vehicle would have been doing; certainly neither DOD nor NASA had any interest in such a thing in the time frame we're discussing. For that matter, I'm not sure what the current CEV is supposed to be doing either