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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."
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.
From what I could find, Obama only plans to cut the Constellaton program, which is Bush's plan to send people to Mars (I guess to search for oil or terrorists). He has stated he supports funding other programs (see spacepolitics.com for examples).
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.
If a spy sattelite (or any other sattelite) needs to go up, heavy boosters such as the Delta or Atlas will be used. If its an old one that needs to be dealt with, they would probably just shoot it out of the sky like they did last time.
Sorry, you've been misinformed. The Constellation program is the program to build the Ares I and Ares V launch vehicles, along with the Orion crew capsule and Altair lander module. The roadmap of the Constellation program includes an eventual flight to Mars. However, no funding has been allocated for that leg of the program, nor has any planning in earnest been done.
If Obama kills the Constellation program, the United States will be left without a manned space program. Period. End of story.
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