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 23 2006, 04:52 AM
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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. -the other Doug Neither I nor Bell said that Griffin intends to "eliminate manned space flight" as a whole for now -- although, like Freeman Dyson, I would have no objection to that happening for the next several decades. What I and Bell said was that we have every reason to think that Griffin despises Shuttle/Station, and would jump at any opportunity to kill it. And that is beyond question -- Griffin has written precisely that, in public reports that he issued before being picked as NASA Administrator. As for his supporting a Hubble repair mission for Shuttle: that, I imagine, is a separate issue, based on his assumption that if we're going to retain the damned thing anyway as part of what he sees as the unjustifiable ISS project, we might as well use it for ONE thing that might perhaps be worthwhile (especially since, actually having technical training, he instantly realized how harebrained O'Keefe's proposed robotic Hubble repair mission was). Whether if -- after the cancellation of ISS -- he'd try to fly one last Shuttle mission just to repair Hubble (as Robert Zubrin proposes in "Space News") is uncertain; but I imagine we'll never get the chance to find out. When they finally are zapped, Shuttle will get the ax first, then ISS will. |
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