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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.
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.
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.
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?
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.