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_*]

You've just said yourself that American politicians are eager to keep the level of space spending flowing to their particular districts big. Most aerospace firms involved with manned spaceflight are also involved in a major way with the unmanned variety, or could very easily switch to it. Give me one reason why they WOULDN'T have a very strong tendency to demand a compensatory rise in unmanned spending if manned spending declined -- and why their puppets in Congress wouldn't go along.

But then -- to repeat -- that's not the real phenomenon we may be on the verge of seeing, which instead involves the elimination of Shuttle-Station and simultaneous compensatory rises in both unmanned space spending AND Bush's new manned program.