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Shuttle Retirement Costs Divert Science Funding
FleaPlus writes "Although overall NASA funding is expected to increase next year, NASA has announced plans to divert money from its science program to help pay for the expected cost overruns for flying the Space Shuttle safely until its retirement in 2010. A number of science projects are being canceled or delayed indefinitely."
The US modules for the ISS are designed with the shuttle's payload bay in mind. In particular, they expect the loads during launch to be applied from fixtures mounted along the sides and bottom of the bay. For expendable launches, you need to design the modules to take their loads from their bottom end. Converting a module would be very expensive.
If you wanted to, you could launch the module in a sort of adaptor that held the modules as they would be if the shuttle was carrying them. However, that would be heavy, to the point where even a Delta-IV Heavy may have trouble launching the module+adaptor combination.
Oh, and how about the fact that SpaceShipOne can't even get in to orbit? I'm sorry.. but it always frustrates me when people go on how much cheaper SS1 is for getting to space... when they neglect the fact that it can barely carry any load, and promptly falls back out of space just after getting there. Wake me when they create an orbital vehicle...
If SETI makes contact anytime soon, I could see the Shuttle becoming a pop-culture phenomenon in alien societies. Of course, it would be popular in the same way that the Jamaican Bobsled Team and William Hung are. The shuttle and the ISS might be the least efficient fleet of spacecraft that will ever exist in this universe, which might be good in the long run as the aliens will take pity on us and hand over the Warp Engines so we can stop going in circles.
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If we knew the shuttle would end up like this, I don't think we would have bothered. We've spent $145 billion on the shuttle for just over 1,000 days in orbit. This makes the math so depressingly simple even the president can do it in his head.
The lifetime cost of Voyager, Pathfinder, Spirit and Opportunity, Galileo, Cassini-Huygens, and the Hubble Space Telescope combined is about $10 billion, while the ISS alone has cost $35 billion so far. Why throw good money after bad, pull the plug already and rethink the strategy.
There's no point sending humans to the moon (or anywhere else for that matter) unless we plan to stay. There may be large deposits of Platinum-group metals (PGMs) on the moon, and PGMs will be a cornerstone of the hydrogen economy, since each fuel cell needs a few ounces. There isn't much on Earth, and mining/refining the quantity needed to run a full scale H2 economy might cancel out the environmental benefit of fuel cells.
Moonrush by Dennis Wingo is a great read on the subject - http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1894959108/103-9
Our only saving grace is the work being done by small entrepreneurs like Burt Rutan. It looks like the X Prize actually did a good job of jump starting the space economy.