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Space Shuttle Goes Back to Work
dalewj writes "The Discovery rolled over from the Orbiter Processing Facility to the Vehicle
Assembly Building (VAB) at NASA's Kennedy Space Center this morning. May
15th is the scheduled launch for STS-114. I was at NASA last month and got
to see the
payload for the space station thru lots of glass and I have to wonder, how
far behind is the space station at this point?"
http://spaceflight.nasa.gov/station/assembly/
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I think it's more because that mission, STS-107, had been delayed several times. If you look back, a lot of the missions were flown out of order. And 107 was always purely scientific, so Columbia was a "good" choice, since the mission didn't need to go to ISS.
AFAICS, NASA assigns a new mission number pretty much every time someone gets it in his head that it would be a good idea to fly a mission to achive "x". In practice, not all missions that are assigned numbers actually fly - some get canned for various reasons. Missions don't necessarily fly in numerical order. Various reasons - delays, political expediency, changing degrees of importance, readiness of payload, crew, shuttle to fly, etc, etc, cause missions to occur out of sequence sometimes.
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Not very far behind ? Not quite sure how you arrive at that notion. We were supposed to be about 20-24 some odd launches along by now and I think either just have or just about to deliver the last bit of core complete construction payloads. At a launch rate of 10 a year that is almost 2 and half years behind if we start launching at the same rate we were before columbia which was the heavist launch schedule in the entire history of the Shuttle program.
Soyuz kept Station manned.... barely. We had to cut to two crew because they could not have supplied 3. Science upmass is all but nothing. 50kg or some such silly pathetic amount. Not knocking it but the program has not advanced in the interim. It has survived on a minimal existence.
Station is VERY behind. To the point where it is a very real possibility that its usefull completed life will be less than half of its planned life. It quite possibly will never house its inteded full crew complement of 7 for any longer than shuttle docking events. You want to know something crazy about that? If the Russians build and deliver their lab (doubtful at this point) and the COF and JEM get delivered, we will have more Labs (4) on Station than Crew (3).
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.
Also the reason those 'pure science' missions remained for columbia were two fold. ONE, as mentioned it couldn't take much payload to ISS orbit due to its heavier design weight as the first orbiter. TWO, it provided a science environment we were in charge of... unlike station which is an international effort.
Those science only missions for Shuttle should have been rolled into the ISS program and the shuttle fleet dedicated to its design specific task of supporting a space station. For those with short memories, Shuttle was in fact largely designed to support skylab and other as yet unconstructed space stations. Not to run as a science platform itself. The orbital payload delivery/recovery abilities are that of a support vehicle that was expected to spend minimal time in orbit and have a quick turn around. This was opposed to say the long mission durations desireable by a science facility. The payload bay science lab was a direct result of the shuttle program failing to get off the ground in time to save skylab from burning up in re-entry. When that happend they developed the science lab 'payload' and turned shuttle into an ad hoc orbital science facility that could only operate for a couple weeks at a time.
As things worked out a new station design didn't get off the drawing boards till the late 90's with the start of building the ISS. This means shuttles interim adhoc science ability has been utilized for far longer than it was even thought a shuttle would last. At least in terms of years. None of the shuttles have even come close to the end of the designed life cycle of 100 or so missions. Hell the whole program itself didn't pass 100 missions till 2001. So now almost everyone thinks it is a bad thing that shuttle only exists to go to station when in fact that was the whole idea to begin with.
I don't ask you to be me. I only ask you not expect me to be you.