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.)

[David]

I don't see why the U.S./Soviet space race was such a bad thing; it certainly accomplished more in its dozen or so years (let's say 1957-1969) than has been accomplished since. Obviously, we've done a lot with unmanned spaceflight since 1969; but all of that was built on the incredible accomplishment of getting anything into space at all. And I don't think that would have happened as early as 1957 without the superpower rivalry. I can easily imagine a modest, rational space program waiting until 1970 before actually orbiting a satellite. Why rush things? In fact, it's even easier to imagine a world in which national governments have no interest in space at all, and rocketry is totally in the hands of privately funded Raumschifffahrt clubs. In which case we would probably still be waiting for the first "man-made moon".

My biggest quarrel with the American-Soviet competition is that it didn't go on long enough, and the Americans won too easily. Perhaps if the Russians and the Americans had landed on the Moon at about the same time, there would have been an extra impetus to keep on exploring. Or perhaps it would have been better if the real goal had been a long-range one, or a series of goals, rather than the one-success goal of "landing a man on the Moon before the decade is out", which encouraged a tailoring of the manned space program to that one goal, and finding a way to do it as cheaply and easily as possible. Looking back at the far more audacious plans of the late 1950s, which involved landing multiple crews in enormous craft with huge amounts of supplies, aiming at lengthy stays and even the building of small cities on the Moon -- well, it's clear that Apollo, even an extended Apollo, was going to fall far short of that. And of course after Apollo the whole thing fell apart.

Sure, it would have been costly. But when you think about where the Soviet and American money actually went, being used to fund proxy wars in various parts of the planet, it's hard not to see the space race as a far better form of competition.

Getting back to the shuttle, the concept of a space-plane that would bring people and supplies to and from an orbiting space station is actually quite an old one. But what I'm a little puzzled by is figuring out what the space station was actually intended for, even in those early plans. I understand that it's "cool" to have a big building-sized structure flying around the earth, but it seems to me that spacecraft assembly, fuelling, and all the other things that we see these proposed stations being used for can be done just as well without the station. What am I missing?