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."

Comments

Just plain sad

[ShadowRangerRIT]

I'm having nostalgia for when our space program was a national priority. This, despite having no memory of any time pre-Challenger.

Re:Just plain sad

[sm62704]

I think most people don't realize (or have forgotten about it) the danger these men and women face during a mission.

Most people don't realise the danger construction workers face doing their jobs either. Roofers alone are #3 in Wikipedia's list.

A dozen people died building EPCOT's "Spaceship Earth" alone.

The US has had less than one fatal accident per decade since the space program started; the Apollo fire and the two shuttle disasters.

I'd say their safety record is pretty good. I'd rather be an astronaut than a lumberjack.

Re:Just plain sad

[OwnedByTwoCats]

The wikipedia list of most dangerous jobs left off "President of the United States". 9524 out of 100,000 (i.e. 4 of 42) were killed. Another 4 died; one of those was from an illness contracted performing his official duties.

That death rate is way higher than the 122 per 100,000 listed for Timber Cutters.

How come?

[neokushan]

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?

Re:How come?

[Geoffrey.landis]

How come they're retiring the fleet 4 years before the next craft is ready?

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 budget they're using is the budget to fly the shuttle. So, in short, they can't develop new system until they free up money to do so by stopping flying the old one.

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?

Yes... up until the point when the Russians raise prices because they have a monopoly.

Re:How come?

[damburger]

Since when have us Eurotrash had a manned space capability? Given the Chinese seem to have forgotten about Shenzhou, the Russians have the market cornered. We have an opportunity to work on them on CSTS (A sort of bastard child of Soyuz and ATV that would provide cheap and cheerful manned access to the moon and beyond) but we are probably too bloody tight fisted to take advantage of it.

Re:How come?

[neokushan]

Suddenly it reminds me of that Speach Dick gives in Robocop...

"Take a close look at the track record of this company, and you'll see that we've gambled in markets traditionally regarded as non-profit: hospitals, prisons, space exploration. I say good business is where you find it."

Good business, indeed.

Re:How come?

[Geoffrey.landis]

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.

No, not really. A shuttle launch is about half the cost of a Saturn V, even by the highest-cost estimates for shuttle. Saturn V was not a cheap booster by per-launch calculations. It was cheap by per-ton calculations, but in the 70s there weren't any payloads high-lift vehicles.

Shuttle was intended to be cheap to fly when it was flown at high rate, because the fixed costs would go down. It never ended up flying at a rate high enough to make the assumption correct. The marginal costs of the shuttle are actually not terribly bad-- it's the fixed cost that is high. (Which is why it isn't good enough to simply reduce the flight rate-- you don't save much by decreasing the rate when most of the cost is in the fixed cost.)

The US may not have manned flight capability

[Ellis D. Tripp]

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.

About time! Kudos to NASA leadership

[pease1]

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.

Seems foolish

[damburger]

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.

Is the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer going up?

[maynard]

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.

Re:Is the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer going up?

[nacnud75]

No the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer is not going to fly, even though congress has offered the money for another flight in 2010. Nasa management doesn't seem interested. I think the only hope for the AMS is in a change of NASA management in 2009, that is if the ability to fly another STS mission hasn't already been lost by then, though I expect it would have.

The king is dead! Long live the king!

[InvisblePinkUnicorn]

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?

Tirst Fest!

[e03179]

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.

The Shuttle is a Cool Failure

[tjstork]

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!

crying shame

[jollyreaper]

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.

A flight remembered

[eekygeeky]

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.

Decadence

[mangu]

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.

Re:Decadence

[Big Hairy Ian]

To quote Von Braun on his reasons for surrendering to the American Forces "We were terrified of the Russians, we despised the French, and the British couldn't afford us."

Says a lot really

If you mod me down I'll go and make a cup of tea

Re:Decadence

[demachina]

It could also be that being a rocket scientist at NASA or one of their contractors is a really, really terrible job so there aren't many talented people in the U.S. that are even interested in it. It is a program that peaked in 1969 and has been down hill on the excitement and tangible results scale ever since.

The space program and aerospace in general goes through constant boom and bust cycles and when its in a bust cycle you can't find work. Depending on whose president, the whims of Congress or whose NASA administrator the project you spend years on can be snuffed out over night.

NASA is a horrible bureaucracy. Most of the civil servants are contract monitors shuffling giant mounds of paper to hire contractors to do the cool work, and that job sucks. Contractors maybe do cool stuff sometimes but there are a lot less frustrating and more rewarding place to work than for a horrible bureaucracy or for the kinds of companies that doing government contract work.

It could also be the U.S. did about everything worth doing by about 1969 and realized it wasn't really worth it. Other countries are retracing the same ground to gain the prestige but they may well realize eventually its not really worth it too. When the U.S. decided to sink decades and over a hundred billion on ISS they didn't really think it through and completely killed off excitement for manned space exploration. ISS is an inherently extremely boring project. The Apollo veterans had already figured that out with Skylab. One of the space documentaries on Discovery recently had footage of an Apollo veteran saying exactly that, and that after the moon landings it drove them nuts to work on Skylab. Watching a tin can spin around the earth in LEO doing nothing interesting is BORING and so far it has yielded almost no useful return past the mere experience of building a big thing in LEO and living in it for a long time(ground Mir had already covered on a smaller scale). Its not clear landing the Moon again will generate that much excitement in the U.S. again. People were already bored with moon landings by about Apollo 12.

For space exploration, especially manned exploration to gain relevance again you need to either:

A. Move warfare in to space in a big way, and use your dominant position in space to dominate Earth. Fortunately we have mostly refrained from doing this. If it happens it will probably be really expensive and really ugly. I'm talking about putting serious weapons platforms in space, attacking your adversaries assets in space and on the ground from space. Right now ground launched ballistic missile and spy satellites seem sufficient and a lot cheaper and safer. If someone decides to finish what Reagan started and put lasers or other beam weapons in space and start a really weapons race..... shudder. It would spur the space program though...

B. Start doing something in space that actually yields tangible economic returns greater than the cost of doing it. We have done this to some extent with GPS, weather and communication satellites but this business is already saturated. I imagine fiber optics are making comm satellites somewhat obsolete. You would need to make the next big leap to asteroid mining, mining the moon for fusion reactor fuel or generating power in space in a big way. Until you make that difficult leap people are mostly going to way you are wasting money on it... though the U.S. has wasted hundreds of billions on Iraq to no good end too

C. Space tourism maybe, but its a little bit of a stretch because right now it a niche thing for rich people with a lot of money to burn. Its going to take a pretty huge leap to cut costs enough for ordinary people to get in orbit and live there for a week, and also for it to be safe enough to not kill people on a regular basis. We seem to be having trouble people just flying people in jets economically lately.

D. Make it to Mars and start a permanent colony there. This is a somewhat dubious undertaking since it would be hugely expe

Problem is that the shuttle would be in the way...

[Ellis D. Tripp]

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.

Re:Shuttles are Unsafe

[Geoffrey.landis]

The Space Shuttle is a complete failure on almost every level, especially safety.

Yes... and no.

The shuttle had twenty-four sucessful launches in a row before the first loss-of-vehicle accident on the twenty-fifth launch; this is vastly more successful than any other orbital launch vehicle ever built, by any country, in history. Following that it had a hundred successful launches in a row before the second loss. This is, really, quite unprecedented.

Basically, launching into space is dangerous, and new vehicles are dangerous.

It has killed 14 people, much more than Apollo.

What? Apollo lost zero astronauts in the first 14 launches. Shuttle likewise lost zero astronauts in the first 14 launches. Hard to say shuttle is less save than Apollo, since Apollo had vastly fewer launches. That's like saying that the Wright 1908 flyer is less dangerous than a Boeing 747, because only one person was killed in a 1908 flyer crash.

Lessons for the ESA

[bEwre4am]

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.

B.S.

[Anonymous Coward]

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.