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 25 2006, 02:58 AM
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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. In the past, nations have almost never "explored for the sake of exploration". They've explored for the sake of economic development. Columbus, Magellan and the Conquistadores -- and the nations that backed them -- were in it strictly for the money. In cases where national governments have financed plain "exploration for the sake of exploration" -- which is pretty much limited to polar expeditions and the Moon race -- it was as a political Muscle Beach prestige contest with other nations, which makes much less sense in today's age (and those polar expeditions cost a far smaller percentage of their sponsoring nation's GDP than space exploration does). So: to the extent to which going into space makes economic sense, nations will do it -- just as they "explored" the New World, the East and Africa only to the extent that they had something to gain from it economically. But that's ALREADY happening with space; absolutely nobody questions the worth of communications, reconnaissance, weather and navigation satellites. If -- and only if -- space industrialization makes sense economically will we (and should we) establish a really huge presence in space. A better analogy to non-economic space exploration for purely prestige or artistic purposes is the Pyramids; it would be rather hard to claim that ancient Egypt would have fallen sooner if it hadn't built those. |
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