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_*]

If I may make a smart-alecky crack, the world has been "going with a crazy weather" for a very long time now.

But R. Neuhaus actually does have a relevant point to make. Thanks to man-made global warming (which now seems extremely likely), the human race may well be faced in the coming decades (or centuries!) with an extremely ugly choice: either impoverish itself or cook itself. Any hope we have of squirming off the horns of that dilemma lies in discovering new technologies for CO2-free but cheap energy production, energy conservation, and pulling CO2 back out of the atmosphere ("sequestration") cheaply. If ever there was a cause fit for another Manhattan Project, this is it. And if the scientific and technological spending we need for such work cuts into space spending, we had damn well better cut away.

Most space spending, that is. We need to know as much as possible about the extent to which the problem actually is likely to be serious -- and that means climate-monitoring satellites. (It wasn't until ERBS was put in orbit in 1984 that we could even answer such a basic question as whether Earth's current cloud cover is cooling or further heating the planet!) Last year this [extremely bad word] administration made a major effort even to cut that research -- even though there's a small chance that it will end up telling us that the danger really is a false alarm and that we need not carry out major anti-warming efforts. Thanks to an uncharacteristic determination by Congress not to be pushed around on that subject, the White House finally backed off, and climate-research space spending hasn't been significantly cut this year -- but its efforts last year have managed to delay several very important missions on this subject by a year or so. Meanwhile, space spending as a whole is being rediverted from this sort of thing to such tripe as Shuttle/Station, the manned lunar program, and even (dare I say it?) a lot of unmanned space research whose actual practical importance to humanity is infinitely smaller.