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_*]

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.

Alex, that is exactly what I said earlier in this thread -- if by some (desirable) miracle, the US manned space program WAS shut down, the huge size of this country's existing Space Pork Complex would cause us to have a considerably bigger unmanned program than Europe and Japan have. NOT a smaller one, as dvandorn suggested.

I take for granted that the manned space program in this country will actually not be shrunken until the fiscal strains on the government from other sources (the coming glut of retirees; rising oil prices; the costs of the Megaterrorism War) force it to do so -- and that the government will probably then respond as irrationally as possible by cutting the unmanned program to a comparable or greater extent, regardless of the actual cost-effectiveness of the two programs. But I reserve the right to continue yelling that shutting down the manned program is what SHOULD be done. And it is not at all unrealistic to hope that we may at least be about to get the incubus of Shuttle/Station off our backs -- and that it may not be replaced with a manned lunar program as bloated in size and speed as Bush's absurd version is.

[RNeuhaus]

I take for granted that the manned space program in this country will actually not be shrunken until the fiscal strains on the government from other sources (the coming glut of retirees; rising oil prices; the costs of the Megaterrorism War) force it to do so -- and that the government will probably then respond as irrationally as possible by cutting the unmanned program to a comparable or greater extent, regardless of the actual cost-effectiveness of the two programs. But I reserve the right to continue yelling that shutting down the manned program is what SHOULD be done. And it is not at all unrealistic to hope that we may at least be about to get the incubus of Shuttle/Station off our backs -- and that it may not be replaced with a manned lunar program as bloated in size and speed as Bush's absurd version is.

I think that the next biggest goberment money glut is the conversion of any oil energy to a non-pollutant energy. That would be the top priority since without this program, the Earth will go with a crazy weather.

Rodolfo