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Nasa Details Shuttle's Retirement
schliz writes "Nasa has announced that it intends to officially retire the aging space shuttle fleet by 2010, four years before it has a replacement craft ready. The space shuttle fleet will make ten more flights, mainly to add modules to the International Space Station and carry out repairs and upgrades to the Hubble orbital telescope. The retirement will leave the US without orbital capacity for at least four years, until the Ares booster programme is complete. European and Russian launchers will service the space station in the meantime."
I'm having nostalgia for when our space program was a national priority. This, despite having no memory of any time pre-Challenger.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
NPRs been running this, as have the Orlando area news media for a while now. Why am I reading this on /. from a source in Australia?
Gaaaa!
How come they're retiring the fleet 4 years before the next craft is ready? Is is actually more economical to pay the Russians or us Eurotrash to send them to space rather than the cost of maintaining and flying the shuttle?
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
We'll outsource NASA, just like everything else.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
- Douglas Adams
Come on, folks! It's News for Nerds, you should know better!
National Aeronautics and Space Administration
(or, National Acronym Society of America) In either case, not Nasa.
Life is short: void the warranty.
"Nasa"?
It's NASA, for cryin' out loud. That's almost as bad as the people who pronounce it "Nassau."
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
for a lot more than the 4 years claimed by TFA, particularly if Obama gets elected and carries out his plans to slash NASA's budget.
And if NASA goes that long without manned spaceflight capability, the "brain drain" that will result will make it even more difficult to resume manned flights even WITH the political will to do so.
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That's only six years away. Call me skeptical, but I bet it's more like 2018 at this point. With all the testing that is required and work remaining, I'd be really surprised if it's done in six years.
About time! Yeah! Efforts first started early 1990's to replace and retire these expensive, wasteful dogs. Who else would try to build a "truck" that needs to run at 100+ percent of it's original design specs every time you need to drive it. Even the Soviets had enough sense to give the concept up. Kudos to Mike G. for really getting this started and truly starting the rebirth of NASA as an exploratory agency and not a trucking company.
There has been a lot of talk that all is not well in the development of Ares I. It isn't just that they are developing a new launcher (always tricky) but that they are developing a type of launcher never attempted before; a manned launcher that is aerodynamically unstable and has the biggest SRB ever flow as its first stage.
It is quite easy to imagine a scenario that could cause serious delays to the project. It is also quite easy (and unpleasant) to imagine a scenario where the new booster causes fatalities. There are real concerns about it flipping over during flight or the booster exploding. A fatal accident at that stage could finish off NASA and thus serious manned space exploration in the US. Given the pathetic amount of backing given to efforts in Europe, Russia and China that would be a bad thing for all of humanity.
Being British, my nations contribution to space is through the BNSC ('who the fuck are they?' I hear you utter, to which I respond 'exactly') and the ESA. It pains me to see that neither are likely to do much in the way of manned flight, despite being full of smart, motivated people with good ideas for it, because the grey bean counters who run our country see nothing but the immediate bottom line.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpha_Magnetic_Spectrometer
The project has $ billions sunk into it already and international partners who will be most unhappy if the US can't allocate a shuttle mission to launch this baby to the ISS. Unfortunately, the article didn't list which missions had been selected. In fact, it didn't say much at all.
and take on of those Russian thingies back down. What a great way to immortalize them and add huge capacity to the space station.
And we spend > $100 billion on fighting an undeclared war in a country which has little capability or war to defend itself.
Colin Dean Go a year without DRM
Is the country finally realizing that the private space industry, as with any private industry, will lead to more innovation, greater efficiency, and lower prices?
... I am pretty sure that if a spy satellite needs to go up, or an old one needs to be fixed, the shuttles will be pressed into service. I doubt the US government wants even its allies handling that.
First test is scheduled for April '09. Less than a year, we're supposed to see Ares I-X go up from Kennedy. We may not be sending Homo Sapiens up on Areas for a while, but at least we'll have a candle to burn.
-516
The reason given is that the development of the new launch system costs money. There is no added budget to develop it, so the money to design and build the new system has to come from some other part of the budget
The problem, really, is that the shuttle is too darned old. The program never really lived up to its promise as a cheap way to get into space. Originally, the Shuttle was supposed to bring launch costs down to something like $100/lb and have a two week turnaround time. What we have sucks! The Shuttle was to be a stepping stone for cheap space flight for everyone and what we have now is an overly expensive turkey. Imagine your commercial airliner whipping out a big camera to look at its underside to see if it is safe to land. That's what the shuttle does. It's a joke!
Among many problems, the shuttle's tiles have a knack for getting dinged or falling off on every flight, and that means a much, much more expensive turnaround. A built in design flaw of having the rocket on the side of the shuttle basically means that the already fragile tiles now have to get damaged. Then you have consumables to refill or refurbish that aren't as easy as topping off a tank, and instead of a reusable space plane that makes space cheap, we have expensive space plane that has to be semi-rebuilt every time we fly it.
Cool technology, in that, the shuttle is practically a space station in its own right... it has a nice big roomy crew compartment, and the cargo bay is cool. But, the job of the shuttle was to be cheap to fly, not so that space stations would cost 100 billion dollars, and have a few astronauts, but should be costing 2 billion dollars, and be like hotels.
All of these scientists bitching about the cost of manned spaceflight do have a point. But they forget they are bitching about the expense of manned flight in an era where NASA, by flying the shuttle, has seemingly invented the most expensive way to do it possible. There's nothing magical about the Russian space program or its expense.. just imagine, for the amount of money we've ploughed into NASA just to orbit the earth and do nothing in the shuttle, we could back on the moon AND mars.
So yeah, kill it. Bum a ride for a few years, then we go to the moon, to mars, and to asteroids, and get back to exploring space again.
I'm excited!
This is my sig.
The space program became too costly. The shuttle was announced as a cost-saving project, a reusable space craft. The problem is that they should have tried to crawl before they tried to walk.
There were projects in the late 1950s, the X-15 and the Dyna-Soar, to develop reusable "space planes", but not much came of them. The logical progression would have been to improve and expand these, but instead they chose to try to adapt existing disposable rockets into a reusable spacecraft.
Okay, government tried and ultimately failed, now private enterprise has started from where the X-15 and X-20 stopped. Let's see how it goes.
Man, the Apollo guys saw themselves as the vanguard of moon settlement, they thought they were the scouts. What comes after Apollo? Thirty years of dicking around in LEO. Isn't this exciting, boys and girls? What a sad, sad joke. What's our next goal? "Why, if we wish hard enough, we might finally be able to replicate the Apollo mission, successfully flown decades ago!" Whoopitie fuck. We're just going to go back to the moon and plant a flag? Oh, and still-President Bush says he wants us to plant a flag on Mars, too. Fucking wanker. Where are our LaGrange colonies, where are the orbital power sats, asteroid mining, space manufacturing? Where is the vision? The only vision at NASA right now is making retirement without fucking up too badly.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
Space was never a national priority. One-upmanship was, because of the fight for space dominance with the USSR. Give it some time, and history will repeat itself with China. Only China will probably win this time. Unless we find a better way to cooperate, of course.
I'm glad of this: It means that a few years down the road, I can visit the Space Museum and my sturdy young son will see with his new eyes, under the fierce and optimistic Florida sun, another step in the hopes of man to go further than their birth.
He'll be just as mad as I was, all those years ago, smelling the hot dusty grass and the tarmac and sea, looking at those mighty silver birds, purpose built by the best we hade within us, that he can't climb in the real one, and has to go inside to the mockup.
I hope what he sees was what I saw, so far away and yet so close to hand, all those years ago. I hope the shuttle means to him what the moon lander meant to me- untrammelled hope and faith in human endeavour.
Rest in peace, big old bird; even parked on the forever runway, we'll always look at you with untarnished eyes and souls full of wonder.
The Russians have already threatened military action if we deploy our proposed missile defense shield in their former states. I wonder just how willing they will be to give us a ride if their military is marching toward one of our sites to wipe it out.
...all part of the devious plan of the red menace from the get-go. That's what we get for dropping our guard against C O M M U N I S M !!!!!
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
I am sure we'll end up outsourcing this, too.. so... someone will develop a satellite by outsourcing the work to India, the manufacturing to China, and launch it into space on a Russian space vehicle.
My question is, what the hell does anyone need the US for anymore? The US doesn't actually DO anything except act as a giant bureaucracy.
When a nation is no longer able to excel in a technology they pioneered, it's very difficult to come back. It started in the 1970s when, instead of continuing on lunar exploration, they decided to cut back on the Apollo program.
Ultimately, what will define how technology will evolve is not the day-to-day improvement but the grand vision. It doesn't matter what the immediate gains from lunar exploration were in 1973, but how long and how much effort it would take to get something practical out of the moon. Once they decided to cut back on the difficult part, the USA couldn't hold its competitiveness in the easy parts.
Today Europe is the leader in commercial space flight, with Japan, Russia, and China trying to gain more significant shares of the market. Without NASA actively developing space technology, the US industry seems to be unable to keep up with external competition.
Visiting NASA at Cape Canaveral a couple of years ago with my wife, I can't help feel like the whole place was a shrine to Apollo age. I would talk to people at NASA and they would just talk about the "Good old days", not once did they talk about the Shuttle or ISS. Honestly, I think we need a new Space Agency, one who can look to the future instead of being stuck in the past.
The same thing happened after landed on the Moon. After the first couple landings, TV viewing fell off dramatically, to the point where the last Apollo mission was nearly ignored.
"The fuel tank and the combustion chamber are the same thing,"
How is that any different than a solid rocket booster? It isn't, but with a hybrid you at least have the option to abort the run or only do a partial burn.
The reason that hybrids have not been used for orbital flight is that they tend to have a lower specific impulse than liquid fueled systems and are more complex than solid fueled systems.
See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
Would you rather have a car thats expensive to run or no car at all and have to rely on friends to give you rides?
#2 on the list? Pilots. You know, people who fly.
Only China will probably win this time
China is not this all powerful colossus that some people seem to think she is. They have serious problems that they need to overcome:
1) Their cities that are so polluted the air is barely breathable
2) The rural poverty that they still haven't managed to overcome
3) The fact that they are just as dependent on foreign energy sources as we are and making themselves more so with each passing year. We might even be in a better position than they are here too -- we have access to oil from friendly nations (Canada) and more domestic resources (the Gulf of Mexico) than they do. We also aren't investing in bringing millions of new carbon powered automobiles onto the road each year either.
4) The fact that within a generation they are going to have 200,000,000 - 250,000,000 more males than females (something completely without precedent in human history) as a result of the one-child policy.
It would be a huge mistake to underestimate them or the problems that we ourselves need to overcome but I'm growing weary of hearing people say that they are going to dominate or somehow beat us in the 21st century. They are no doubt going to compete with us -- but I'm optimistic that we'll hold our own. Western Civilization didn't fold the last time it was challenged -- it successfully beat a Great Depression and powerful directorships that aimed to slice up the World -- why assume it will this time?
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
I agree the shuttle should be phased out, but a 4-5 year gap until Orion is silly. The decision is more political than for safety or financial.
The space station only will have a single option for manned transport and two options for unmanned resupply during 2011 - 2015.
NASA has to decide two years in advance, beacuse it takes that long to order new rockets for a launch. Plus these rocket factories will be mothballed then with decreasing chances of ressurection.
No they didn't. Buran made its first test flight a few months before the fall of the Soviet Union. Three additional orbiters were under construction at the time.
The Buran program ended because the R&D was prohibitively expensive, and Russia had much bigger fish to fry in the early 1990s.
Granted, it would have been nice if the remaining orbiters were kept in a building with a stable roof, but I suppose there's no point dwelling on all that now, even though I really would like to see it fly one more time....
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
"Markets are generally bad at space flight, because a market (and those people in it who succeed through accepting the tenets of the market) perceives redundancy as waste and precise standards as bureaucracy. In space flight, extensive redundancy and anal retentive detail are survival techniques."
Your second sentence refutes your first. Obviously redundancy is necessary for these things to work, and so any company that ignores that in order to cut corners is going to fail. Your argument only seems valid if one assumes that a word ("redundancy") in one context can be blindly applied to other contexts.
The way you talk, one would think RAID is unheard-of among companies.
"European and Russian launchers will service the space station in the meantime."
Well, we'd better not piss off the French over the next four years, then...!!
The Space Island Group is proposing that we use the empty external tanks to build space stations.
Those things are the size of 747s! They're already basically in orbit when we throw them away. They contain cryogenics that can easily be let to boil away cleanly. Why not use them?
http://www.spaceislandgroup.com/home.html
The Space Shuttle is a complete failure on almost every level, especially safety.
It has killed 14 people, much more than Apollo.
On top of that, it is much more expensive ($500MM per launch) than other means of launching humans into LEO.
The constant safety failures of the system have caused NASA to delay other important programs and focus the energy of smart people away from science.
The private sector has the capability of launching material into orbit at a lower cost, and the Russians can launch humans into orbit at a lower cost. Therefore, the Shuttle can't be grounded soon enough.
Having lived before there was a shuttle I've observed how the image of a space-plane replaced that of a rocket-ship in space prowess. I recall a James Bond movie first using a shuttle-like space plane (2001 had non-shuttle space planes). Then there came movies like Species-2 sending the shuttle to Mars or Deep Impact send it to asteroids, even though it was never designed for this.
The Orion replacement is so "retro" going back to rocket ships. I wonder how long that will take to replace the shuttle icon.
Probably 7. #8 will be aborted or experience critical problems in flight which will lead to the cancellation of 9 & 10. Remember that there were originally Apollos 18-20 too. Fact is they can barely keep it running now. And lets not make too much of Ares. Now there's a 4 year gap. Expect that to creep to double that. And with an 8 year window you and I both know they will chuck the whole thing. Eventually we will be going to orbit on Russian and Chinese platforms. Hell the ESA wants to be able to put people in space. And don't forget India and Japan.
Bottomline, manned spaceflight performed by the US will end in 2009-2010 never to return again. It's over.
With no launch activity (manned) think of the economic and employment hit that Florida, not to mention Texas and California, are likely to take when the shuttle program is retired.
Mark my words. There will be action by Congress or the President to extend and maintain the Shuttle program to "bridge" the gap until Orion is ready to go. Likely on a yearly basis.
As much as I am not a fan of the Shuttle program, we're just not going to accept the 4(or more) years between Shuttle and Orion.
Look at Pathfinder(s), Cassini, Galileo, programs. Granted, they are a different beast, but they were all extended. Same will happen here.
If NASA wanted to continue flying the shuttle until the Ares is operational, they would need a MASSIVE budget increase to build a parallel infrastructure.
The shuttle needs to retire so that the existing launchpads, crawlers, service structures, assembly buildings, control rooms, etc. can all be rebuilt/upgraded/revamped to handle the new launch vehicles. If they were to keep the shuttle flying, all that infrastructure would need to be built from scratch for the new program, and the existing facilities would then be useless when the shuttle was finally retired.
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Regardless of that, I predict there will be an extension.
Barring any critical failure between now and then.
What is interesting is they they are sending up the last flight 3 months prior to the official program termination date.
Season 6 has started and Episode 3 aired last week. As you can probably guess they took on NASA. Despite everyone's love for it, they too found NASA floundering. The future is private space flights, with NASA folding the agenda.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
http://www.nasa.gov/missions/highlights/schedule.html
There's the page that details the last launches in case you wanted to take the chance and see one. I've never seen one yet, but I'd like to. *gotta hurry*
Looks like I've got less than 20 months before I'm in the unemployment line.
Me, I'm FAR more interested in the exploits of SpaceShipTwo et seq., and all the other private-enterprise efforts. Those projects are actually going to get us into space to STAY.
The fact that NASA has a plan to "get us back to the moon" in about 20 years tells you all you need to know about how government space programs' relevance went out with the death of the "Buck Rogers" television show.
Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced.
Unfortunately, the retirement of the shuttle fleet has nothing to do with our president being an idiot. This would have been too simple an explanation. The shuttle program was supposed to pave the way to affordable space launch technology: $100/lb with a two-week turnaround. This never happened. If anything, the cost of putting a pound of payload in orbit has increased. NASA's reusable launch systems turned out to be far more expensive than Russia's single-use launchers.
Geoff Landis is deeply correct, as should a long-time NASA contractor and MIT Professor of Aerospace Engineering.
The wonderful Saturn V was killed deader than a doornail (nobody bothers to shred all blueprints and jigs for doornails) in order to politically force the Shuttle program into exitence.
Nixon, basking in the unearned glow of his "most hostric phonecall ever made" (to Tranquillity Base) chose the worst of the 3 Shuttle options presented to him, killed off the two connected proposals (LEO to cislunar Manned Orbital Maneuvering Vehicle, and Lunar-orbit to Lunar-sirface round-trip buggy), authorized the useless 1/3 of the system, then apparrently "forgot" to properly inform the Office of Management and Budget
Rockwell lied to Congress about the real costs of the Shuttle, which had cargo bay to fit spy satellites, and wings for crossrange capability to land if nuclerar war was going on and made the usual landing sites not desirable.
I say: launch the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer, fix the Hubble, and be glad the time will come soon when we don't need to hitch a ride. I, for one, welcome our totalitarian masters, who have a tradition of highly reliable if clunky K.I.S.S. block-change launchers and vehicles in space engineering.
-- Prof. Jonathan Vos Post
(formerly a Software/Systems Engineer in the Space Shuttle Division of Rockwell, and other stuff not germane to this posting]
The retirement will leave the US without orbital capacity for at least four years
That's a very misleading statement. We'll have no human orbital capacity, but plenty of expendable rockets for lobbing satellites and probes into space.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
china/russia will still be the first people to colonize space while our shitty robots sputter around
The retirement of the shuttle in favour of a space system based on the Apollo program should be a lesson for Nicolas Sarkozy as he tries to reform the ESA to give its missions "a political pilot" as well as a scientific one. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7482232.stm The DynaSoar-Apollo-Shuttle-Orion saga illustrates how political motivations can be a hinderence to the development of effective spacecraft.
Replying to myself to correct HTML stripping:
"initialisms pronounced as a word (acronyms) are treated as proper nouns"
"In American English initialisms and acronyms are just capitalized."
Just as another tidbit: the word "laser" is the perfect exemplar of this process. It began as an acronym (L.A.S.E.R), dropped the periods to LASER, was then subsequently referred to as a 'Laser' for a while before becoming the generic word 'laser' we have today--with many people not even knowing that it's an acronym in the first place. Cf. "scuba".
The retirement will leave the US without orbital capacity for at least four years
Gee, what did we rely upon in the 60's when there was no shuttle and the 70's when they couldn't even keep the shuttle tiles from falling off ..much less get it into space? How does the US Air Force and private companies such as sea launch put satellites into LEO? The space shuttle is a vehicle in search of a mission, just like the space station. Remember skylab? Nasa botched that one as well, but for a while it worked great ...without a space shuttle.
There is a cheaper faster alternative that NASA HQ would rather you didn't hear about, DIRECT. It involves using a reconfigured ET/SRB stack to make a vehicle called Jupiter 120 (one stage, 2 engines in the core, no engines in the second stage). It can service the ISS and other missions currently flown by the shuttle, with the Orion crew capsule with an extra 24mT (metric Tons) of payload (same as the Shuttle). It can be ready in 2012 just two years after the Shuttle retirement for far less money as it reuses the basic ET (External Tank) in a slightly different form (core), the current existing 4 segment SRBs (Solid Rocket Booster) and two already developed RS68 engines which just need man rating (a certification process). The Orion would be placed on top of a 10 meter high 8.41 meter (current ET diameter) wide fairing to hold any extra cargo required by the mission.
Lunar flights would be handled by two 232 Jupiters in a upgraded configuration (two stages, 3 engines in the core and 2 engines in the second stage) with the same SRBs, 3 of those man rated RS68s and a second stage using 2 J2Xs (another engine currently being man rated already). The payload fairing would be bigger to accomodate the larger LSAM (Lunar Surface Access Module) or the standard fairing for the EDS (Earth Departure Stage) needed for TLI (Trans Lunar Injection) burn like the Saturn V third stage did during Apollo. The Orion with its SM (service module) does the LOI (Lunar Orbit Injection) burn and the TEI (Trans Earth Injection) burn like the old Apollo SM did. The two Jupiter 232s would carry the Orion and all of the above into orbit separately and the Orion links all of the pieces together for the critical TLI burn. This could be accomplished by 2017 just seven years after Shuttle retirement even at a smaller budget than now being spent. An Apollo 8 type mission checking out the EDS could be done two years prior in 2015.
The Jupiter 232 could launch up to 100mT into LEO allowing for much larger ISS modules than the current Shuttle can do (20mT).
Here are some links for further information:
http://www.directlauncher.com/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DIRECT
The Soviets didn't have enough sense to cancel the concept, they just didn't have enough money. Too bad they didn't have enough sense to stop the crazy spending on space development that bankrupted their country, I don't know if I would be proud of something that basically caused the civilian population to suffer over the short filled thrill of being first.
Actually I remember watching a Discovery Channel or History Channel episode where they had an actual glide flight of the shuttle like vehicle the Soviets built, they showed pictures of it and the screen switched to a Russian scientist standing in front of a giant rocket being built talking about it.
In the end though I think America came out with more practical results and will be remembered more in history for what they did in space than the Soviets.
Nowadays you want to fly a plane? You load up Flight Simulator. While this might teach you the controls, it won't teach you squat about centers of gravity, airfoils, structures, or thrust.
You're talking about an arcade flight simulator (or a good flight simulator set to arcade mode). Arcade flight sims are not much different to arcade shooters or pac-man. Of course you're not going to build skill.
MS flight simulator 2004 lets you model C.O.G., you can tweak parameters for thrust and weight, and though it takes more skill you can create entire models with GMax etc. and learn about structure to some degree. How many people bother to do that though? There's good reason for this. Last year's sim ends up on this year's junk pile and you have to start again or spend significant effort remodelling.
With a giood flight simulator you also learn about wind and weather, air traffic control, flying using instruments, navigation, programming flight computers etc. You're not going to learn that from flying an r/c plane. In fact even if you get a private pilot's license there are things you can learn about flying big iron that your PPL would never give you....and these days how many people can afford that PPL? You can spend about $600-$1000 and get a pretty damned good sim. (Of course you can get obsessed and spend thousands on flight sim software and hardware too, but you don't need to do so to learn about some pretty advanced stuff). Is it just like the real thing? No. Hell no. Don't believe marketing like "As real as it gets". Do you learn a lot. Yes. Hell yes.
You can still buy remote control planes. In fact I fly them. I also use a sim to practice so I don't crash planes often. (1 bad crash in over 2 years).
Simulators are a tool which have their place. I wouldn't want to go backwards and not have them around. Like all tools they have to be used the right way.
Arcade games are frivolous fun. That has it's place too but it's hardly going to be educational.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Give the military's budget to NASA. We'll have lunar bases full of space babes before you can say "Set phasers to AWESOME!"