NASA Grounds Space Shuttle Fleet

Rytsarsky writes "This story (Reuters) at MSNBC explains why NASA has grounded the fleet. They have been grounded 'indefinitely after finding small cracks in propellant lines on the main engines of two shuttles.' This will 'delay the scheduled July 19 launch of shuttle Columbia.' Good thing this was caught before something catastrophic happened."

Comments

Endeavour

[Black Aardvark House]

No decision has been made whether to inspect 11-year-old Endeavour, which returned last Wednesday from a two-week mission to the International Space Station.

Might as well inspect it, all the others are undergoing the same process. It's sufficiently old to warrant it, and fresh off a two-week mission, no time is like the present.

Why they wouldn't do it would boggle me, considering the possible consequences.

Time to move on

[lindsayt]

Further proof that the Shuttles are dying and their time has passed. They're unnecessarily big, wasteful, and difficult to maintain. That's not to say that I have a replacement or that I'm smug enough to believe I know better than the rocket scientists though...

NASA has been crippled by budget cuts and the deadweight of maintaining technology that was designed 25 years ago (remember, the Enterprise test flights were in and around 1980, and by then the design was mainly done). Perhaps it's time for us to revisit Chuck Yeager's opinion that we should not use deadlift rockets but should instead fly into space. I've heard that the shuttle uses up more fuel to go the first 100 feet than a packed 747 uses for its entire flight. Now, if we could use a graceful system like horizontal launch to first break the inertia, then a rocket boost up in the 10K-30K feet range (3KM-10KM roughly) would be much more efficient and allow heavier cargo and more people in the same space as our current shuttles.

The rumor is that Chuck Yeager was struck down in the first place because of the political reality that rockets were more impressive and seemed a radical break with past technology, not because of superior lifting ability. I don't know that to be true however...