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ISS Construction Resumes
avtchillsboro writes "The NY Times has an article detailing new construction on the International Space Station (ISS) and the additions via coming Space Shuttle missions through 2010. From the article: 'For more than three years, the International Space Station has floated half-built above the Earth. Maintained by a skeleton crew, the station — an assemblage of modules and girders — has not come close to its stated goal of becoming a world-class research outpost. But now construction, which has hung in limbo since NASA's space shuttle fleet was grounded after the 2003 Columbia disaster, is scheduled to resume. The shuttle Atlantis is scheduled to lift off next Sunday carrying a bus-size segment of the station's backbone that includes a new set of solar-power arrays.'"
How's about the rest of the world waste some of their cash to build rockets to pick up the slack?
They have been. Since the Columbia disaster the station has been largely serviced by Russian Soyuz spacecraft.
OK self-correcting my comment.
c eur.html
Heres a nice table of vehicles:
http://www.tbs-satellite.com/tse/online/thema_lan
STS is the heavy lifter currently to LEO.
What I cannot find is size and weight tables of each part of ISS. Not that it matters, the whole ISS plan is DESIGNED around the STS. If it were instead designed around the Proton D1...or Energia.
Anyway STS is not the only game in town.
They Live, We Sleep
Maybe, but a number of scientific projects have been canceled after a lot of money was invested. The superconducting super collider was canceled after it was partially built, and at least one NASA mission that was nearly ready to fly just recently got killed to cover the cost overruns in the manned space program.
a,e,i,o,u and sometimes w and y (at be if of up cwm by)
That's a bit of a straw man isn't it? Why don't they build some heavy lift vehicles?
They have. Several pieces of the ISS have been launched by Russian Proton and Soyuz rockets. The problem is that the entire launching strategy was pre-planned, with some parts launched and deployed by Shuttle, some by other vehicles.