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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?"
Otherwise, why should the vast majority of taxpayers care?
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
I think we're closer to it's decommissioning. They'll finish the ISS just before it plummets in a great fiery storm over the Southern Pacific (and subsequent sale of bits on eBay.)
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
"Shuttle launch costs: Varied; generally believed to be 350-450m$"
LOL. The shuttle program costs around $3.5 billion a year, I believe. The average launch rate has been about four a year, so that's close to a _billion_ dollars a launch.
It's true that the fixed costs are huge, so that if you could launch an extra flight a year it would only add a couple of hundred million, but that's not going to happen often with only three orbiters.
"However, there's a problem with that: a sizable chunk of the shuttle's budget goes toward research on improvements (which will have benefits to its successors)"
What shuttle 'improvements' will benefit the CEV, which is a simple capsule on top of an expendable commercial launcher?
"You get a greater payload, almost no fatigue wear, a very simple (and cheap to maintain) TPS, greater resistance to debris damage, and many other benefits that will hugely reduce cost per kilogram."
No, that's what you _want_. What you get is likely to be something completely different... if nothing else, it almost certainly won't have wings (and if NASA build it, odds are it won't meet any of your goals).
Good grief they BETTER not lose another one! If I had a fleet of 5 cars, and over the coarse of 10 years I had major accidents with them that resulted in the death of the passengers.. I sure wouldn't be allowed back on the road after #2....
How is it NASA gets away with homicide?
If I were an Astronaut my first thought would be, "Finally we are getting back into space!" Quickly followed by, "Oh crap I am gonna miss the midnight showing of STAR WARS!"
There are two kinds of fool. One says, This is old, and therefore good. And one says, This is new, and therefore better.