Slashdot Mirror
NASA To Retire Atlantis by 2008
SirBruce writes "As reported by Space.com, Spaceflight Now, and elsewhere, NASA is now planning to retire the Space Shuttle Atlantis by 2008, after just 5 more flghts. By doing so, they would avoid a costly and time consuming scheduled overhaul, and could still fly the remaining 12 missions (17 total) with Discovery and Endeavour, which are just now completing their ODMPs (orbiter maintenance down period). Atlantis would be kept for spare parts to keep Discovery and Endeavour flying until the shuttle program is shut down in 2010."
Are we going to create another suttle-type craft, one that can be flown more ecconomicaly? Or are we just going to make a bunch of disposable rockets?
Didn't anyone see the movie way back in the 80s, just after the Challenger exploded? Atlantis is the shuttle they "used" in the movie....
Just my T-minus-10-9-8's worth....
-RickTheWizKid
It almost sounds like White Star lines retiring the Titanic.
Space Shuttle: brave idea but mired in beaurocratic machinations. We could have designed better and didn't. We could have built better and didn't. Now NASA's announcing the retirement of a vessel that they can't agree is ready to launch again. Sounds to me like a PR ploy to keep NASA's name in the news with something approaching a positive light.
This plan leaves no margin for error at the program level. The flight schedule needed to complete the ISS probably cannot be met by a single vehicle. Suppose a year from now they discover a craft-specific problem with one of the remaining shuttles which requires it to be grounded (while the other flies following inspection which determines it to be free of the hypothetical problem)?
The NASA plan already calls for completing the construction of the ISS and then grounding the shuttles, immediately. This of course leaves no way to get to the newly constructed ISS to do research. The plan also doesn't seem to accomodate lifting new modules to the ISS during its fully functioning research lifetime, which was originally part of the ISS vision for a living breathing station.
NASA is in trouble. The Bush Administration has saddled it with goals that are unrealistic given its funding level. A vague return to the Moon, and eventual trip to Mars, as well as completing the construction of the ISS to kinda sorta meet our international obligations on that project are all likely to fail if we cannot choose between them.
Space research needs a reliable transportation system. This might mean more than one new vehicle. Without a significant increase in funding to NASA, the Space Shuttle should be scrapped immediately and the ISS should be mothballed if possible, scrapped if not. NASA should focus on fixing the problem -- reliable access to space is needed before other lofty objectives can be met.
If you mod me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.
My understanding is that Enterprise is pretty much stripped at this point. A lot of Endeavor is actually Enterprise, and Enterprise never carried any propulsion parts as all that was needed was boilerplate parts of the same mass for the drop tests. What is sitting at Dulles is an airframe with some sheet metal and spare tiles slapped on it.
You can only drink 30 or 40 glasses of beer a day, no matter how rich you are.
-- Colonel Adolphus Busch
Not to be cynical- but keeping Atlantis for spare parts doesn't put money in anyone's pockets.
It does indirectly. The budgets costs of parts and Atlantis support infrastructure will be applied directly to the CEV, the new moon rocket, and lunar lander. The new budget reality is taking hold. This is good news. For the first time in 30+ years the US is back in the business of space exploration.
an ill wind that blows no good
They have more or less concrete plans to decommission the shuttle fleet, and even if they don't have plans they won't be able to keep them flightworthy much longer. While the replacement or next gen seems to be this vaporous imagineering of something or other with perhaps an 8 or 10 year gap between the last shuttle flight and its replacement. Doesn't that seem like they're just quietly putting manned missions down for good?
We'd better be friends with the Russians and the Chinese who will have the only manned launch capability at that point.
NASA is planning on using the SRB as the basis for all their future designs. The new Crew Launch Vehicle is basically an Apollo-era capsule strapped to the top of an SRB. Thank god we invested so much money in this program just to wind up back in the 70s.
Nothing. At this point, having three shuttles probably merely just increases the risks of cutting corners in order to meet launch schedules. Face it, the only significant mission of the US space shuttle program is the same as the TV show Quark; haul garbage from the ISS. To paraphrase a the quote made at the K7 bar in "Trouble with Tribbles". "The Space Shuttle should not be hauling garbage, it should be hauled AS garbage". I will take that back if NASA actually implements a mission to refurbish the Hubble Space Telescope. (Me bitter? What makes you think that...?)
There is no America. There is no democracy. There is only IBM and AT&T and DuPont, Dow, General Electric, and Exxon
The sad thing about the Shuttles going away is the uncertainty about ever getting into space again. It's an era I hate to see over, if for no other reason than memories of all the good SF I used to read before good SF stopped being written a few decades ago.
I consider the odds of the US ever landing on the moon again to be remote and the likelihood of a manned Mars mission to be just about zero. A project like that requires national resolve (not to mention resources and willingness to take risks) that we no longer have. I now believe western civilization peaked sometime in the '60's, coincidentally around the time of Project Apollo: nowadays we can't even keep our roads and bridges maintained, we're poised for the apocalypse in a few years when cheap energy runs out, and the decline of the social system is accelerating rapidly towards anarchy and warlord culture.
While China might manage a manned moon mission, I doubt they'll survive what's going to happen in the rest of the world before long, at least not in any condition to advance science. They're more likely to be the remnant that survives the next Dark Age (like Ireland was last time) and recivilizes / enslaves the savages living in North America in 500 years or so.
Sad, I wish we could have held out a little longer and walked on Mars just once. Maybe next time.
That's a major issue. For all the whining about pork, it would be a major disaster if the manned space flight program was shut down while a new vehicle was designed and constructed. All of your institutional knowledge walks out the door, never to return. Aerospace engineering never really recovered from the shutdown of Apollo. Central Florida used to have the world's most highly educated cab drivers.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
I work on the shuttle. We already take parts from shuttles that aren't currently flying (like Endeavor) as needed to kee Discovery launching. We part swap all the time. So this is just the same thing, but on a more official scale. Otherwise, we have to go on Ebay to find parts for things like non-flight computers (like in the launch control room). Stuff was made too long ago. Factories have since shut down.
...that Atlantis is the best-built of the shuttles. I work on all three shuttles, and we all know that Atlantis was the best-built one. The rate of problem reports taken on Atlantis is almost half of Discovery or Endeavor. This is a shame, but these are smart people making tough decisions...you gotta do what you gotta do.
The real question is, will we beat the Chinese to a permanent or semi-permanent manned presence on the moon?
We used to think it would be the Russians. Little did we know how far China would come in 60 years. When you consider it took the United States approximately 7 years to go from the Mercury program to the Apollo program then the launch of Chinese men into orbit is at the Mercury stage.
When looking at that we could estimate that China will reach the moon by 2012. And do not think for one moment that Chinese didn't learn from our Apollo and Shuttle programs. I think they'll be looking to put down a manned presence just to thumb their noses at the rest of the western world.
Fuel is not a real consideration here. Fuel is cheap (IIRC a few dollars per kg). The real crippling factor for the Shuttle was the low launch rate. There are huge fixed costs per year (eg, maintaining an army of workers and the launch facilities) that come up whether or not you launch anything. This is going to be the same problem with the new launch vehicles that will replace the Shuttle. For example, the heavy lifter is planned to launch around four times a year, which is a ridiculously low launch rate.
"There is no useful research remaining to do in a poky little LEO space station."
Here's a somewhat old article that discusses some of the research done in microgravity.
One of the interesting comments from the article is that the problem with using the Space Shuttle is that it's flight time of about two weeks are not long enough for statistically meaningful research.
Anyway, read the article.
Umm... Not exactly.
e d_plans ), or even orbital bombing ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silbervogel ).
The Germans were foremost in many aspects of nuclear physics, and would almost certainly have developed the Bomb (and the delivery systems for it) well before anyone else if Hitler and his policies had not repressed many of the scientists working on it.
I suppose you are not actually talking about atom splitting (Rutherford, New Zealand/UK), but about the full chain reaction. That was Szilard (Hungarian). But the earlier work on which he was relying was that of Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann, and it's interpretation by Otto Robert Frisch and Lise Meitner (all German). They invented the concept of releasing energy from the nucleus of an atom, and if Hitler had not suppressed this work as 'Jewish Science', Europe might well be speaking German, and America a still radioactive mass after bombardment from intercontinental or submarine launched ballistic nuclear missiles ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/V-2_rocket#Unfulfill
And this was late 1930s. Read it and weep!