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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.
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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.
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.
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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.
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 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.
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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.
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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
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).
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?
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