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_*]

Jeff Bell has for some time been confidently predicting that Mike Griffin (who undeniably hates the Shuttle personally) will soon execute a Machiavellian scheme to get rid of it -- which will have to be done one step at a time in order to whittle away gradually at its political support (and to give all those Congressmen who made fools of themselves by funding it for decades better political cover to get rid of it gradually and quietly).

I don't know how accurate he is in saying that Griffin CAN do this; but yesterday another of the predictions he made to me some time ago came to pass. NASA, which had already announced that the Shuttle's main engine will not be used after all on the second stage of the small CEV launcher (a new version of the Saturn 5's J-2 engine will be used instead), is now saying that SSMEs may very well not be used on the first stage of the big Heavy Lift Booster either -- they may be replaced by the same RS-68 engines used on the first stage of Delta 4, since those are designed to be expendable and are thus cheaper to manufacture than the reusable SSMEs (which would never actually have been reused on either the HLV or the CEV launcher):
http://www.space.com/spacenews/businessmonday_060320.html

This would, of course, allow a shutdown very soon of the production line for the Shuttle's SSMEs. But the article says that there are some genuine technical stumbling blocks -- and Bell himself says that one reason for the RS-68's low cost is that most of its parts are currently being made by Russian workers who are as atrociously underpaid for their skills as the inhabitants of Termite Terrace were during the golden age of Warner Brothers cartoons.