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 24 2006, 08:03 PM
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Whatever is in the news, Bruce thinks it's wrong. If something goes wrong, Bruce knew it would and could have told you 5 years previous. If something totally and fundamentally unexpected happens that could never have been forseen, Bruce wants to know why they didnt know it was going to happen, and he knew it would happen all along. The only thing I can say in reply to that is that you're wrong on all three points. If I thought I knew what was going to happen in advance in regard to the space program, I would never have been interested in it in the first place, dammit. What is true is that I have been OCCASIONALLY correct in predicting that the design of the space program was wrong and needed to be corrected -- which is itself not exactly controversial. On the subject of the idiocy of Shuttle/Station, I've been no more than one of a large swarm of people who have been pointing out the glaringly obvious for over 15 years now; and on the subject of the idiocy of the manned space program as a whole at this point in our history I'm only one member of a crowd that is almost equally big (and includes Freeman Dyson, whose arguments on the subject strike me as bulletproof). On smaller issues I am SOMETIMES correct -- as with the possibility of a much cheaper design for the Pluto probe than Dan Goldin was blatting about as supposedly necessary in 2000. (I found out a few months after publishing my article on that subject that -- as I had always assumed -- a hell of a lot of engineers had come up with the same excruciatingly obvious idea. What I HADN'T known was that Goldin was shutting them up by threatening to cut off all their NASA grants if they opened their mouths on the subject, because his line about a Pluto probe supposedly requiring expensive new technology was actually a deliberate lie on his part to force cancellation of any Pluto mission just because he personally didn't want one: "Nobody gives a damn about Pluto", as he told one aide. So Simon and I -- entirely unintentionally -- ended up belling the cat by running that article; after we'd put it out, he couldn't keep the idea hushed up any more.) But I'm wrong with metronomic frequency -- and if I wasn't, I would never, from my childhood on, have found space exploration unpredictable enough (in both its scientific revelations and its historical developments) to be interesting in the first place. It's precisely, and only, when I AM wrong in predicting something that things get interesting for me. |
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