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_*]

But I'm wrong with metronomic frequency -- and if I wasn't, I would never, from my childhood on, have found space exploration unpredictable enough (in both its scientific revelations and its historical developments) to be interesting in the first place. It's precisely, and only, when I AM wrong in predicting something that things get interesting for me.

On this subject: I've just finished plowing through as many of the new LPSC and EGU abstracts as I can without endangering my already precarious mental health, and one of the most dramatic revelations I've found in them is Brett Gladman's new LPSC abstract ( http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2006/pdf/2165.pdf ) showing that one of my most cherished beliefs about astrobiological research may be totally wrong. I've been claiming for years that the discovery of life on Europa would actually be far more important scientifically than the discovery of life on Mars, because Martian life might very well have evolved on Earth and just been transferred to Mars via meteorite (or vice versa!); whereas Europan life, if we find it, must have evolved separately and would thus prove that life had evolved twice in the same solar system -- thus proving that life must indeed be common in the Universe, instead of just evolving on one world in this particular solar system by extremely long-shot luck and then getting meteor-mailed to a second world in the same system.

Well, sir: Gladman and Luke Dones have just finished their long-promised study of the frequencey with which Earth meteoroids may get transferred all the way to Europa -- and it turns out that hundreds of meteoroids from Earth have probably hit Europa during its history. Admittedly they all hit at very high speed -- 20-30 km/sec -- since Europa (unlike Mars) has no atmosphere to brake them; and that impact speed alone will greatly reduce the chances that any one of them could deliver living Earth germs to Europa. But the possibility really does exist, and so the importance of finding Europan life has just been perceptibly reduced -- if we find it, we can NOT eliminate the possibility that it came from our own world (or that both terrestrial and Europan life both originally came from Mars!)

There are quite a few other very interesting abstracts from both conferences; and I've already been planning to try to point some of them out to this site's other readers in the next day or two. (If, that is, Doug doesn't kick me out of it first because of my statements on this thread -- on a subject, which, frankly, is beginning to bore the hell out of me, since we all know damn well that the US government will never develop a remotely rational space program in any case.)

I'll leave you with the last word in our debate in this thread, Bruce. Bitter experience has shown me that you will not be budged from any position in which you have a great deal of emotional investment, especially when you're convinced that you're absolutely correct, a not-too-uncommon occurence, I might add.

Why? Show me where my arguments are wrong; as I've said before, I find that revelation interesting more frequently than I find it insulting.

[Guest_AlexBlackwell_*]

On this subject: I've just finished plowing through as many of the new LPSC and EGU abstracts as I can without endangering my already precarious mental health, and one of the most dramatic revelations I've found in them is Brett Gladman's new LPSC abstract ( http://www.lpi.usra.edu/meetings/lpsc2006/pdf/2165.pdf ) showing that one of my most cherished beliefs about astrobiological research may be totally wrong. I've been claiming for years that the discovery of life on Europa would actually be far more important scientifically than the discovery of life on Mars, because Martian life might very well have evolved on Earth and just been transferred to Mars via meteorite (or vice versa!); whereas Europan life, if we find it, must have evolved separately and would thus prove that life had evolved twice in the same solar system -- thus proving that life must indeed be common in the Universe, instead of just evolving on one world in this particular solar system by extremely long-shot luck and then getting meteor-mailed to a second world in the same system.

Well, sir: Gladman and Luke Dones have just finished their long-promised study of the frequencey with which Earth meteoroids may get transferred all the way to Europa -- and it turns out that hundreds of meteoroids from Earth have probably hit Europa during its history. Admittedly they all hit at very high speed -- 20-30 km/sec -- since Europa (unlike Mars) has no atmosphere to brake them; and that impact speed alone will greatly reduce the chances that any one of them could deliver living Earth germs to Europa. But the possibility really does exist, and so the importance of finding Europan life has just been perceptibly reduced -- if we find it, we can NOT eliminate the possibility that it came from our own world (or that both terrestrial and Europan life both originally came from Mars!)

As much as I hate reviving this thread, Mark Peplow has a news@Nature.com story on this.