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_Richard Trigaux_* |
Feb 25 2006, 06:39 AM
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About the motives of exploration (Earth exploration some centuries ago, space exploration now) Bruce says there were very interested motives. Other say it was for knowledge only. I would not make so much simplistic statements, as reality was (and is still) very complex: different individual people can have very different motives, and a given individual can have several motives, conscious or unconscious, idealistic motives that they keep in their mind and down-to earth motives that they put forward to earn funding (or the countrary).
That people have power or money motives is pity for them. Anyway when these people pass, they ultimately have earned nothing. What I retain is that there are worthy motives to keep exploring: knowledge, emotion of discovering the universe we are living in... even if our lives are a glimpse of light between two eternities, at least this light is beautiful. That we need to put forward money motives to earn funding from politicians is pity for them. By the way, we can still vote to select those politicians... |
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