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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Feb 25 2006, 02:01 AM
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Senior Member Group: Members Posts: 3419 Joined: 9-February 04 From: Minneapolis, MN, USA Member No.: 15 |
Well, Bruce, since *no* country on Earth has ever developed a manned and unmanned spaceflight capability and then gave up one of them, we neither one of us have any precedents to draw from.
So, without a specific example from which to draw conclusions, I'm doing a poor imitation of the same -- I'm drawing from the length and breadth of human history. Look at all of the great empires that have arisen since humans started arranging themselves into tribes. Every *single* time an empire begins to cut back on one area of exploration, it signals the beginning of the end of *all* exploration attempted by that empire. Followed, usually fairly shortly thereafter, by the fall of that empire. Why does this happen as empires fall? Because only empires at the height of their powers can *afford* exploration, simply for the sake of exploration. It is only after the fall that anyone ever realizes that their empire could have stood a bit longer if they had just understood that the cost of failing to explore is actually higher, in all senses that make a people *great*, than the cost of continuing their explorations. Obviously, you don't think America is likely to follow the same pattern as every previous empire in the history of mankind. That much is obvious. So, here you can serve yet another glorious purpose -- to prove, once again, that those who refuse to learn from history are doomed to repeat it... -the other Doug -------------------- “The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right.” -Mark Twain
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