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
Post
#1
|
Guests |
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.) |
|
|
Guest_BruceMoomaw_* |
Feb 24 2006, 07:31 PM
Post
#2
|
Guests |
At the risk of getting thrown out of this group by Doug for actually replying to Alex:
Of course the ESA and Japan are irrelevant to my argument, since they never had a manned space program to begin with and so there is no way they can be used to judge whether a nation that shrinks its manned space program will expand its unmanned space program to compensate. But Russia is also totally irrelevant, since their economy collapsed utterly and forced them to virtually end their space program completely -- EXCEPT for their involvement with the Station, which they use quite openly and unashamedly as a parasitic way of sucking money out of the US government. Without that freakish parasitic setup (enabled by Goldin and Al Gore), they would have ended their manned space program totally as well. Thus they too provide no conceivable guide to how the US Congress would respond to a shrinkage of the US unmanned program. Which means -- to repeat (sorry, Alex, but repetition seems to be necessary) -- that the only guide we have to how Congress would react is that very clue you yourself mentioned: the space program as a whole is supported by Congress primarily as pork and patronage, and so if the manned portion of it was by some miracle ended, the Space Pork Contingent in Congress would probably try to expand the unmanned space program to compensate for that loss. My reasoning in this case is not exactly complex. But then -- to repeat again -- this whole issue is irrevelant to what may be about to happen in any case: to keep Shuttle/Station going, Griffin has had to pull $2 billion out of the unmanned program AND $1.5 billion out of Bush's manned lunar program, and he himself has already made it clear in writing, in the reports he co-wrote just before becoming NASA Administator, that he would dearly love to cancel Shuttle/Station at the slightest opportunity, after which (if and when it happens) both the unmanned program AND the manned lunar program would have that money restored to them. |
|
|
Lo-Fi Version | Time is now: 26th September 2024 - 07:16 PM |
RULES AND GUIDELINES Please read the Forum Rules and Guidelines before posting. IMAGE COPYRIGHT |
OPINIONS AND MODERATION Opinions expressed on UnmannedSpaceflight.com are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of UnmannedSpaceflight.com or The Planetary Society. The all-volunteer UnmannedSpaceflight.com moderation team is wholly independent of The Planetary Society. The Planetary Society has no influence over decisions made by the UnmannedSpaceflight.com moderators. |
SUPPORT THE FORUM Unmannedspaceflight.com is funded by the Planetary Society. Please consider supporting our work and many other projects by donating to the Society or becoming a member. |