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.)

[Guest_BruceMoomaw_*]

A subject you started, you posted many many times about - you really do make for entertainment, I'll give you that much.

Doug

Yep, I started it. I had no idea, however, that it was going to turn into a religious war. (As for my "ranting" on the subject, it consists of exactly the same arguments used by such dread figures of anti-space evil as Freeman Dyson, James Van Allen and Alex Roland. But, in any case, I started this thread talking about a separate subject from opposition to manned spaceflight -- namely, whether Shuttle/Station in particular will and should get the ax soon, in a move that would benefit both the unmanned program AND Bush's manned program. And both issues are of course also separate from the question of whether NASA's functions should be broken up and redistributed among other governmental agencies, and to what extent.)

David's argument that keeping the Space Race going -- and amplifying it -- might have distracted the US' and USSR's attention from carrying out actual wars unfortunately misses the point that both nations decided pretty quickly on their own that those actual wars were more cost-effective from their point of view. Khrushchev got the Space Race rolling initially by deciding to emulate the Wizard of Oz, using the USSR's early space successes to try and persuade the US and the rest of the world that the USSR had far superior missile technology, and thus intimidate us militarily. After our spy satellites and his own Cuban missile fiasco exposed that as a lie, there really wasn't much purpose in the Soviet Union trying to sustain it -- which is why the Soviet Union (as we learned afterwards) never really poured very much money into trying to beat the US to the Moon (although they decided to use just enough to keep us spending like crazy to try and beat them in a race which, it turned out later, we were always virtually certain to win even if we'd spent far less on it). And after Nikita's attempted deception was exposed, it made far more sense for both nations to resume devoting their attention entirely to what they had been doing before the late 1950s -- namely, carrying out genuine if indirect military actions against each other, with Indochina of course being the main attraction.

Indeed, even given Khruschchev's actions, the US might not have gotten into the Moon Race if it hadn't been for the frenetic efforts of Vice President Johnson to get us into it. Eisenhower, Nixon, and (as we now know from his released White House tapes) JFK himself were not enthusiastic about the idea. LBJ, however, was absolutely wild about it -- although, as he privately told some of his acquaintances at the time, he actually decided to launch it largely as an attempt to increase federal pork spending in the South. (The Manned Spacecraft Center was supposed to be built in Vallejo, California; LBJ moved Heaven and Earth to get it reassigned to Houston.) He managed -- just barely -- to talk JFK into the idea (it was apparently the only respect in which he had any effect on US policy as Veep). But almost as soon as he himself became President, he found himself embroiled in a very real and very expensive war, which pretty much finished off the national political support for a simultaneous symbolic one -- especially given the collapse of Khruschchev's ICBM charade by then. So, unfortunately, saying that we should have tried to keep the Space Race going is rather like saying that we should have tried to divert the Soviets away from military efforts into a worldwide flower-gardening contest to prove their superiority to capitalism.