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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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.) |
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Guest_BruceMoomaw_* |
Feb 24 2006, 08:27 PM
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Guests |
So you concede, despite initially offering the examples of Europe and Japan, that there are no real examples of other countries' experiences to support your assertion? Great. Now we're making some progress. I just don't accept your contention that converting the huge, complex manned space program support infrastructure to one exclusively supporting unmanned space missions would be "easy." Nor have you convinced me that the funds available for manned space flight in this country, if eliminated, would automatically be re-programmed into unmanned space flight instead of, say, defense, homeland security, social programs, deficit reduction, etc. Not that I expected any, but I was hoping for some evidence, not more assertions. How long, O Lord? The only reason I mentioned the ESA and Japan at all is that the fact that they have unmanned programs without having manned ones is strong evidence that the US would not automatically and mindlessly kill its unmanned program completely once the manned program was eliminated -- which is what Dvandorn was claiming (without trying to provide any evidence). As for saying that "converting the huge, complex manned space program support infrastructure to supporting unmanned space missions would be 'easy' ": I never said anything of the sort, because it's obviously untrue. What I said was that the aerospace giants who are currently getting a lot of their contracts in the manned space program would obviously be eager to acquire substitute work if they lost those contracts, and that one consequence of this would be an increase in the number of their contracts for unmanned space work. (Another consequence would doubtless be some expansion of their defense-industry work.) Obviously not all of the funds currently going to the manned program would be rediverted to the unmanned program -- but SOME of them would be; and if the Space Pork Congressmen had their way (which they very often do), quite a bit of them would be. My "evidence" is the evidence you yourself have provided, with your (correct) observation on Congress' inevitable and large appetite for pork. You know, at first I thought you were just being argumentative. Now, I believe that you really believe that a Balkanization of the U.S. space program would be beneficial. Unreal. Why? It only exists in its currently freakishly swollen form in the US because of the Moon Race. If that hadn't happened -- and it wouldn't have happened, if it hadn't been for the combination of Khrushchev and LBJ -- America's space program would indeed bear a strong resemblance to that of Europe. That is, it would be much more rationally proportioned to the actual national benefits from it. |
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