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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."
No joke. If you went back in time 20 or 30 years and told the NASA folks we'd spend the 2010s depending on Europe and Russia for our orbital needs, they'd smack you one.
I also find it sad that current launches go off with out much fan fare or press. It's like we as a Nation have become spoiled to the fact that we send folks into space these days.
I think most people don't realize (or have forgotten about it) the danger these men and women face during a mission.
Yes, but catching those derned ter'rists is WAY more important than science, education, helping people get off welfare, or anything else that money could possibly be used for. Ten billion a month, and all we get is death and destruction.
Show this to your friends and family that don't know what a real hacker is
I guess it'd be a priority if the satellites and space shuttles could kill Iraquis.
The money for developing Ares comes in large part from the money currently allocated for shuttle operations. Barring an increase in NASA's budget, any prolonging of shuttle ops will primarily postpone the gap, not shrink it.
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.
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
Yes, but it depends on how you look at it. I never really liked the cost inefficiency of the space shuttle program. Many lessons were learned, but I don't think this change is for the worse.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
On the economics, the shuttle was never the cheapest solution. Originally the idea was to be able to turn that thing around on the pad, and send it back up after fueling.
As it turned out, the refit of the shuttle after each flight is about as costly as a Saturn V launch. Now, the Saturn V could lift 100 tons into orbit, the shuttle 30. You can do the math on cost per pound.
I'm aging rapidly, I bought a new game and had no idea if my machine was good for it.
You know, there's more than one way to launch a satellite into Orbit. There's literally hundreds of different Rockets out there capable of such a thing.
Look at the thousands of satellites currently up there doing everything from broadcasting your TV and Radio to telling your GPS device where you are - you think they were all put up there by NASA?
Chances are, a lot of those commercial satellites got put into orbit with a small discount for allowing the Military to put a small, undisclosed payload into some spare space in the cargo area.
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
The private space industry has so far managed to make explosions and sub orbital hops. Those dastardly socialists at NASA managed to launch a rocket with a capacity of 130 tonnes and put men on the moon 40 years ago. It is a bit premature to start mouthing laissez-faire rhetoric about space.
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. There are some things the market just can't get to grips with.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
They are quite willing to cooperate with us Euros (although the countries allowing US interceptor bases and radar aren't on their Christmas card list at the moment). Most of the acrimony in our relationship with Russia is frankly America's fault. Or more precisely - its our fault for aligning ourselves so doggedly with America when it isn't America we have to live next door to and buy lots of gas off.
I would like to see congenial relations and cooperation on manned space flight with Russia (both of which they have made more positive moves towards than we have) - but my government seems intent on using this isle as a bloody aircraft carrier for a neocon American administration openly and aggressively trying to encircle Russia.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
Here is the paradox though. They just don't see the connection. There are people who lap up the advances of science and technology then piss on scientists and engineers. It always bugs me when creationists spew their garbage using TV and the Internet. If it were up to those sort of people, there would be no TV or Internet.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
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.
Given that we've had an active private space industry flying since the early 1960's... when exactly is the innovation, greater efficiency, and lower prices supposed to kick in?
Behind the joke is a serious point.
At the risk of being modded flamebait, I think I can say that Americas education system has never produced the quantity and quality of talent necessary for real innovation in space. The US has always relied on immigrants. Your victory in the space race was in part due to the fact that World War 2 drove the best rocket scientists out of Europe. Once they had retired and died, there wasn't the kind of people you needed coming out of your home grown education system, and no great cataclysm in countries with good education system to scatter geniuses for you to scoop up.
Your latest administration isn't helping matters either. Pushing widespread hostility towards evolution and climate change, leaning on NASA scientists to misreport results, and generally acting like a dangerous theocracy in many ways means that you'll have a harder time attracting the talent you are unable or, more likely, unwilling to develop at home.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
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.
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.
Yes but statistics without proper comparison are meaningless. How about looking at deaths per 100,000 employed in a given job? Or deaths per 1,000,000 man-hours of work?
The space program isn't extremely safe, but then again they're (in theory) on the edge of what our technology is capable of doing. Safety is important, but that's made the #1 concern to such a degree that everything else suffers horribly.
In terms of space exploration, we're not at the stage of impact-absorbing bumpers, 14 airbags, auto-tensioning 12-point seatbelts, etc. Our guys are lucky someone remembered to put a lap belt in :) Yet, people expect it to be 100% safe. If only people were more realistic.
You can get rich if you own a politician, but you have to be rich to buy one in the first place.
That is also why I think that the people making the decisions in our space programs are idiots.
I am sure they see the need for some sort of backup plan for those people on the space station, yet don't think that it would be easy enough to send up one shuttle, and LEAVE IT THERE IN CASE OF EMERGENCY and send another up to bring back the folks that drove up the first one...I am not sure what the cargo load is for coming back down, but i think that if we could figure out the rotation, we would end up with a shuttle left up there in case any one up there needs to come back down immediately... or maybe for parts for the station in case etc....who knows...dont just disassemble them for the sake of saying "we passed the expected date, so now we crunch it!"
If it still works, and we paid for it, then leave it as is.
I would venture to say that no country has ever really produced the quantity and quality of purely home-grown talent necessary for anything like Apollo. The whole point of the United States used to be that it was where the best and brightest could excel, and where hard work could be rewarded. Any time you have a nation that attracts these people you end up ahead. I agree that recent US policy has made it both more difficult and less desirable for such people to come here, but disagree that it has much to do with our educational system. No educational system could compete.
E pluribus unum
No, but it is Obama's fault for targeting an agency that represents about 0.6% of the national budget, when there are so many bigger wastes of money to go after.
The amount of money he is talking about would make a HUGE dent in NASA's ability to continue to the moon/mars/beyond, but would be like pissing in the ocean to the agency the funds will be given to (Dept. of Education).
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I thought the logical progression would have been to improve rockets and work on the materials and engineering technology necessary for the space elevator (the latter of which is being done, although it is arguable that it could proceed more quickly, especially if we gave more support to our education system.) The space shuttle's main engines have to be rebuilt between flights, so it's really not all that useful; it would be better to just have rockets with some or all stages recoverable and eliminate that military-encumbered boondoggle.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
US universities are some of the best in the world and attract plenty of foreign and domestic talent. The real problem is that NASA doesn't have the budget to hire legions of talented engineers and private industry isn't interested in doing the research.
Hey, say what you will about the Cold War but we didn't worry about airplanes flying into our buildings back in those days.
No, we worried about our buildings being melted into heaps of slag by having 100 megaton H-bombs exploded over top of them. That's when "ground zero" still had its original meaning, and "duck and cover" was the only thing we could come up with to reassure the kids. Yup, that was sooooo much better.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
The education system in the US can produce as much good talent as anywhere else in the world, but the cash flow in this particular society trumps all other things. Why make a relatively paltry living as a scientist when you can make oodles of cash as a lawyer, running a business, or even to a lesser degree, writing software?
There's no prestige in this country in being a geek in a lab coat. The prestige is all in being the guy in the suit making the deals and living large. 18 year old kids don't even bother thinking about being that geek in the lab coat with his middle class income.
I think the implication of a decline in technology in the U.S. that is implied by "decadence" is a little unfair.
A little but not by any means completely. In the 40's and 50's, kids learned as they played. Want to go fly a model plane? You had to learn how to build it and, in the process, learn a bit about aerodynamics. 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. So tell me--where is NASA supposed to be finding someone to help design the next launch vehicles if there's no talent growing up in our country? 360/Wii/PS3 are all mental decadence.
"We can categorically state we have not released man-eating badgers into the area." - UK military spokesman, July 2007
In other words, keeping a Shuttle in orbit would be more trouble and expense than it's worth. If you want to do that sort of thing, do it with a Soyuz.
Or, if we'd had any sense, we'd have kept our Saturn V technology around and used it instead of the Shuttle. In dollars per pound of launch cost, the S-V was much cheaper to operate despite the fact that you threw away the entire system every launch. The Shuttle's biggest cost is inspecting, reconditioning, refurbishing, and repairing it between launches which takes months and costs millions of dollars. Far from being the cheap, reliable "space truck" NASA sold the public on, the Shuttle is an expensive, finicky system that in no way improved upon its predecessor. The only thing the Shuttle can do that the S-V couldn't is return orbiting hardware to Earth. That capability has always been of dubious value, as the cost of putting up a satellite and retrieving (via the expensive Shuttle) has been greater than the cost of de-orbiting the satellite and launching a new, improved one.
We could go further on the boondoggle that is the ISS, which exists mainly to give the Shuttle a place to go to. And why does the Shuttle still exist? To build the ISS. It's circular reasoning at its finest, and it's sucked up all of NASA's budget -- which could've had a permanent lunar outpost in place by now -- since the early 1970's. What a disgrace.
In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet and say to us, Make us your slaves, but feed us. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky
I wish I had mod points for you. The Shuttle was a lie from the get-go, though I don't think the original intent was malicious. I suspect they were "overly optimistic." Additionally, the Shuttle's mission objectives were fungible, which only results in programmatic feature-creep. The individual launch cost exceeding USD$1B doesn't help matters. You'd expect the cost to go down once they figure it out right? Nah, that only happens in an environment where there's a competitive alternative. Otherwise, no incentive exists to reduce costs.
In a rational world, the Shuttle and the Saturn V could co-exist. They have very different mission capabilities, and should be considered complimentary resources. Unfortunately, we don't live in a rational world, and politicians were intent on destroying the legacy of their predecessors. The Saturn V stood as a monument to JFK, and folks from the Republican Party saw an opportunity to tear it down and replace it with the Shuttle. Burns my bacon, it does.
MAD seems to work on nation-states -- even batshit crazy ones. Nazi Germany was deterred from using chemical weapons due to fears of massive Allied retaliation. They didn't even use them towards the end as the Red Army was encircling Berlin.
I've never understood why people think we can't deter Iran. There are other reasons to stop them from getting a nuclear bomb (allowing the NPT to collapse would have far reaching consequences beyond the Middle East) but this idea that Mullah's somehow aren't going to be moved by the prospect of their cities disappearing into clouds of nuclear fire strains creditability.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Your victory in the space race was in part due to the fact that World War 2 drove the best rocket scientists out of Europe.
Oh, surely. I mean, it was just by a WHISKER that we beat all those Euros into space, wasn't it? The proof, of course, is in all those successful European space flights that came soon after, the European moon mission, etc.
I mean, just how big a deal is national will and determination, and a can-do attitude, anyway?
The US has always relied on immigrants.
Wilbur and Orville would certainly be surprised to hear that. As would Robert Goddard.
Unless you want to say that all Americans are immigrants. But that's true of a LOT of folks all over the world, isn't it?
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.
The question though, is the Iranian program truly civilian in nature? I'll admit to not really believing it is, nor following the situation closely enough. At some point, nations are going to start needing nuclear power - we need a framework to give them the ability to have a strategically sound nuclear power infrastructure, without the fear of weapons proliferation. I thought that's part of what the UN Atomic oversight committees were about, but how do you make something like that palatable to arguably third-world tin-pot dictators?
With all due respect I think this overglorifies. Yes it was a great achievement, especially with the technology of the time. But for the most part it got done because of money, not extreme talent. Any largish nation, willing to spend the money could have done it. Only the relative speed at which it succeeded could be credited in some way to a more than usually talented bunch of scientist (as compared to other talented scientist).
Here is my response addressing MAD -- which I think is what you were referring to. I'd rather live under MAD between nation-states then the constant threat of being blown up every time I go to work, the movies or out for pizza.
All indications are you're far more likely to die in a car crash this month than a terrorist incident in your lifetime. 58,000 Americans died trying to turn back communism in Vietnam. MAD was more deadly. And now while we may squabble with the Rooskies, we at least have some level of cooperation; Europe hasn't been this peaceful since, well, pretty much ever. And China has probably boosted our standard of living to the tune of $4K a person or more with their cheap prices.
I lived the first half of my life during the Cold War. I like now better.
Ooh, a sarcasm detector. Oh, that's a real useful invention.
Since it is much like a Space Station already... instead of retiring the fleet on the ground, why not fly them up to the ISS and leave them in orbit?
Maybe they could be of use to us in the next missions.
Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?
Unfortunately, what the USA is actually doing is encouraging the collapse of the NPT. Under the NPT Iran has a complete right to produce nuclear fuel and operate nuclear power stations, but that is exactly what they are being told they won't be allowed to do. At this rate they will have no reason not to simply withdraw.
The Russians won everything except the moon. First satellite, first animal, first person, first space station, first robot to the moon, first robot to venus, first robot to mars. Up until soft landings and manned landing on hte moon, the Soviets won everything. Nasa landed people on the moon in 1969, and hte soviet landed a robot on the moon that took off and flew back to earth in 1970. If the Soviet program went differently, if a few accidents hadn't have happened, that very well could have been a manned lander they built instead, the technology was there, just not the budget by that time, if the US hadn't be so desperate for a change of fortune after loosing everything else, they probably wouldn't poured such phenomenal amount of money into it and sent men, it was only because they were totally mad for the moon. It could very easily have gone the other way.
The space race didn't end with the moon landing, it's one of those races that doesn't have a finish line. The Russian space program survived the collapse of the USSR, it's not going anywhere soon, is NASA that resilient?
What if Tetris was invented by Nazis?