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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."
Why fix an old piece of hardware when you can get a new one faster, smarter, more shiny, etc. How about a donation to a university to rip it apart or try to fly it again.
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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
Place the Atlantis, intact, into the Simthsonian.
Just make sure all the toxic monopropellants have been thouroughly cleaned out.
So when Discovery and Endeavor are mysteriously trapped in space and/or unable to respond to a global space-related emergency, an astronaut crew will be pulled from retirement (or useless promotion) to pilot Atlantis to the rescue! (...and possibly destroy it/themselves in the process of saving the world)
Mark my words: it will be on television if not in the movie theatres.
$nice = $webHosting + $domainNames + $sslCerts
Space Shuttle, 89,908,732* miles on the clock. Spares or repairs.
Phone: 202.358.0001
*
In fact, NASA also has good news for us.
Two weeks ago, the important Landsat-8 was confirmed while NASA also saves a lot of money by simply adopting interoperable practices.
Now, if only NASA Worldwind (and Punt) could get more popularity over Google Earth...
Animoog.org
Doctor Weir, Atlantis' director, and Lieutenant Colonel Shepard, ranking military officer assigned to the project, were unreachable for comment. Doctor McKay, on the other hand, griped for several minutes without a pause about the "typically boneheaded" move, stopping only to eat an energy bar and mumbling something about low blood sugar.
Why is the acronym for Orbiter Maintenance Down Period "ODMP" and not "OMDP"? Does it have something to do with there being less gravity in space?
NASA is so 1900's - I think the Chinese will leapfrog the shuttle fleet long before we can figure out what to do about any shuttle replacement. There's been talk about replacements since I was in elementary school. Now my own children are about to enter elementary school and very little has changed.
... no university could/would spend their **entire budget** to get the thing to fly a single mission, not to mention the price to fix it up, apply for the proper licenses from the http://ast.faa.gov/ AST, etc. Better to start from scratch and get a real education in things like high speed aerodynamics and propulsion along the way.
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
I believe they plan on replacing the Shuttle with the CEV (Crew Exploration Vehicle). Which they claim will have the best technologies from the Apollo and Space Shuttle programs. There is a moon landing targeted for 2018.
Crew Exploration Vehicle
"All great things are simple & expressed in a single word: freedom, justice, honor, duty, mercy, hope." --Churchill
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
My girlfriend claims anti-gravity rooms exist because "They used one to film that movie!"
I keep trying to tell her they don't exist, and she keeps saying I'm wrong. (She also didn't know what Chernobyl was...)
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
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.
You don't know much about flying aircraft then. Even if they wanted to get new parts, the companies that created them most likely no longer exist. Big time political donors usually don't get "big" parts contracts since they are anything but, big. Most components on the shuttles and military aircraft are repairable, so they get recycled rather than pitched.
The plan is to increase NASA's ability to launch missions by removing the albatross of the shuttle progrm from around its neck. The pace is ridiculously slow with the shuttle program because the shuttles themselves are ridiculously complex, ridiculously expensive and ridiculously dangerous to operate. Their new plan to strap payloads to retrofitted SRBs, while a bit Mad Max, is the best idea they've had in years. Still might be too little too late, though.
Gene Roddenberry must be turning in his grave. If you ask me, the space program needs more support and more money; but less protesters and hippies. Honestly, I don't care if we ever meet alien life. My biggest concern is that once we use up all the resources on Earth, we'll have to start strip-mining other planets instead. Plus, eventually we'll run out of room for people.
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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.
We can't abandon atlantis while the wraith are still a threat!
The rockets are disposable.
I would not be surprised to see a future admin use private rockets to get crew and small loads to the ISS. Why? Just to keep us with the capacity to have multiple crew launch systems.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
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...?)
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Actually, that should be just enough time to lose a good portion of our "corporate knowledge" re:manned missions. I'm not sure being an astronaut that is going to be looking at a 10 year (optimistically speaking) hiatus from flight is going to be a real career incentive. These folks tend to be driven and tenacious, but with the schedules the way they tend to slip, I don't think I'd stay in the corps. (I was never a real astronaut-candidate, though I considered it at one point early in my NASA career).
I'm not really sure that getting people into space ius really that big of a deal anyway, unless you plan on doing something other than invesigating the effects on humans in LEO. Most of what is done, that isn't just for show, is controlled remotely. I'm a big "Rah! Rah! Manned Space Flight!" kind of guy, but there really is a limit to the value we're getting for our manned space flight dollars. Right now, I think it's money down the tubes, but if we're really going to be ambitious, we need to be a bit more proactive in getting a replacement vehicle up before we lose the in house expertise in manned spaceflight. I mean, lets face it, the only people with orbital spaceflight experience in this hemisphere are the ones currently doing it at JSC. Lose them, and we'll get to start all over in a couple of decades when the next program is finally ready to get off the ground.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
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.
Maybe, just maybe, when they decide to build another spacecraft they could possibly get around a few of the issues they've had with the current space shuttles. You know, falling foam, bad o-rings, things that tend to make them explode into giant balls of fire! Pretty much though, as long as we're putting satellites into space, we're going to need a way for people to get up there and work on them. We'll at least need to continue finding new ways of putting them up, if we ever get to the point where we just let them fail and replace them with another one.
Either way, there will still be advances in spacecraft technology even if they don't end up taking us to another planet.
Nam et ipsa scientia potestas est - Sir Francis Bacon
no.
Enterprise hardly had any parts that were useful to the real shuttles. Endeavour was built from a brand new set of spares that NASA wanted built "just in case". They were entirely new parts, not reused ones from Enterprise.
I thought that All the shuttles were already retired. I haven't heard of any planned launches lately.
Enterprise never carried any propulsion parts as all that was needed was boilerplate parts of the same mass for the drop tests. Mod parent up. This is entirely correct. Enterprise was mostly a shell, other than the cockpit, hydraulic systems, APU, flight controls and airframe. No engines or exo-atmospheric / on-orbit gear to speak of. Also remember that Enterprise whoilly consists of original equipment...it has never been upgraded so at this point in the lifecycle, very little could be used on the other orbiters.
I really can't believe they're getting rid of Atlantis when there's older ones still going. Just look at SG-1!
Yes, I know. Don't bother telling me.
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.
I am not sure how many people realize the historical context of these ships. These are the first true space ships, one of the earily milestones for space travel. Imagine, when space travel is as common as air travel today, when a flight to Mars is easy as a flight to China today or when Google actually establishes a moon base. How will we look back to these space shuttle? I dare say these shuttles maybe more important than the Wright brother's KittyHawks. Who knows, these shuttles may even (AND SHOULD) out live United States itself! We need to preserve these machines for the sake of history.
With the announcement of the pending retirement of Atlantis the Ancients have filed a formal complaint. When interviewed the Atlantian spokesperson is quoted as saying "Silly bastards they don't need to retire Atlantis. Get three fully charged ZPMs and Atlantis will be spaceworthy again." When we contacted the facility manager at the Airforce facility at Cheyeane Mountain CO the existance of Atlantis (and stargates, Goual'd, Asgard, whatever they are) was explained as being the result of "people [are] spending too much time watching tv. Particularly that Wormhole Extreme crap."
Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups. -- 0 1 My two bits
NASA To Retire Atlantis by 2008
I think Sci-Fi will keep it at least to 2009 or 2010.
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
"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.