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_*]

No doubt this explains why the Russians have never lost people on Soyuz flights. (Well, no: four people dead in two entry accidents. Would you argue that the US would never have accidents like those? We came fairly close to losing the US crew of Apollo-Soyuz to an accident similar to Soyuz 11.)

Forgive my lack of confidence in your ability to flawlessly predict these alternate-history outcomes. And I'm not sure what this CEV-type vehicle would have been doing; certainly neither DOD nor NASA had any interest in such a thing in the time frame we're discussing. For that matter, I'm not sure what the current CEV is supposed to be doing either

"Flawless prediction" has nothing to do with it. The types of accidents that happened on Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11 were the result of the incredibly shoddy design and assembly techniques used by the Soviets, as opposed to the US -- and those kinds of accidents, and ALL the kinds of dangerous accidents suffered by US capsule missions, are the sorts of things that could also have happened on a Shuttle. I never said that capsules equipped with escape rockets are totally safe; I said that they are by their basic nature much safer than a large winged craft, and the fact that neither fatal Shuttle accident would have happened on a capsule vehicle is further proof of that.

You are, of course, right that NASA had no interest in that kind of vehicle in that time frame -- because, and only because, there wasn't enough taxpayer-provided money in it. As for the DoD, see my article for one other fascinating little tidbit from Thompson's testimony:

"We then [after Nixon's secret decision] undertook obviously to build the Shuttle first, and then a modular, zero-gravity space station second...As the thing evolved, we started with the Shuttle, and the requirements for the Shuttle were driven 99 percent by what we wanted to do to support the space station. It also happened to give the Air Force the kind of payload volume and the kind of capability they wanted, although they really wanted to be at higher orbits for their work.

"So the Air Force came in and said, 'We will plan to use the Shuttle, and we will also take on the task of building the Interim Upper Stage, which was part of the low-Earth-orbital infrastructure. So NASA embarked on the Shuttle. It wasn't necessary to commit to a space station at that time because the Shuttle had to be built and operational before you commit to the space station, and the President at that time -- Nixon -- had other things on his mind. He didn't get up and make a great big speech about low-Earth-orbital infrastructure.' "

Thus we have further confirmation that the Air Force didn't demand that specific design for the Shuttle; NASA told them that it was a magic Dr. Feelgood elixir for all the Air Force's needs (and so safe, too -- only a 1 in 100,000 chance of a launch accident!); and so the Air Force agreed to go along, although even after that sales job it wasn't really what they wanted. By 1985 -- before the Challenger accident -- they had already realized that NASA had royally screwed them; the vehicle wasn't even remotely as capable and cheap as NASA had promised it would be, and their own estimates gave it a 1 in 56 chance of launch failure. So, thank God, by mid-1985 they had already demanded that the Titan production line be started up again -- and if they hadn't done that, the Challenger disaster would have had much worse consequences for this country than it actually had.

As for what the current CEV is "supposed to be doing": why, it's supposed to be doing exactly what Shuttle and Station were always supposed to do -- siphon massive amounts of taxpayer money into NASA and into the Space Pork Complex. Like them, it has no other real purpose. But at least it's safer and more economical than they are, and it has the potential to gradually evolve into future types of manned vehicles that might someday actually be useful for something.

Because the vast if not overwhelming majority of their constituents don't care what "ESA and (to a lesser extent) JAXA" do.

Of course, the same thing is true of the vast majority of European and Japanese citizens. Lo and behold, their nations have fair-sized space programs anyway. So I repeat: why wouldn't the US? Are we supposed to believe that the US government and its citizens are THAT idiotically addicted to purposeless manned space flights?

Incidentally, the Huygens and Hayabusa missions seem to have attracted considerable interest and support from European and Japanese citizens, without a single astronaut being involved -- just as the Voyager, Hubble and MER missions did here.

[Guest_AlexBlackwell_*]

Of course, the same thing is true of the vast majority of European and Japanese citizens. Lo and behold, their nations have fair-sized space programs anyway. So I repeat: why wouldn't the US? Are we supposed to believe that the US government and its citizens are THAT idiotically addicted to purposeless manned space flights?

Incidentally, the Huygens and Hayabusa missions seem to have attracted considerable interest and support from European and Japanese citizens, without a single astronaut being involved -- just as the Voyager, Hubble and MER missions did here.

You know, Bruce, for someone who claims a political science degree, you are stunningly (if not purposely) ignorant of Realpolitik as it applies to space programs. Often, comparative rationality, whatever that means, has absolutely nothing to do with political decision making. No doubt there are a few U.S. senators or representatives who make political decisions on a "logical" basis, but the vast majority are guided by parochial concerns. For instance, if a Member of Congress has a company in his/her district that manufactures components for manned space flight, then that fact will trump anything related to, say, whatever "considerable interest and support from European and Japanese citizens" have about their respective space programs.

Frankly, I think your argument is a typical case of oversimplification. There are enough differences (political, cultural, historical, etc.) among the various space-faring countries of the world that drawing direct comparisons is, at best, problematic. At worst, it's simple hand waving.

[hugh]

I wouldn’t have called Bruce’s posts a “rant”. I don’t find his tone helpful, but neither is this:

you are stunningly (if not purposely) ignorant .

A bit touchy, no..? There is no way we can be sure if congress would react in the way Bruce described, but the assumption that the end of manned spaceflight would mean the end of ALL spaceflight seems a stretch. The Russian experience doesn’t help, because their record of failure after failure with unmanned probes compared so badly with their relatively successful manned program-the opposite of the American experience. The economy collapsed, something had to go- which program would you expect to be cut, in those horrible circumstances? They punished failure and rewarded what looked like success. If that happened with NASA, what would the space budget look like?

In any event, I find this thread provocative and thoroughly entertaining. How the Manned Spaceflight mess is resolved affects planetary exploration so profoundly that I don’t see how you can stop people getting obsessive and emotional. It’s important stuff, and how it all plays out is going to be fascinating.