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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."
I'm having nostalgia for when our space program was a national priority. This, despite having no memory of any time pre-Challenger.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
NPRs been running this, as have the Orlando area news media for a while now. Why am I reading this on /. from a source in Australia?
Gaaaa!
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?
+1 IDisagreeSoHeMustBeATrollOrAnAstroturferOrAShill
We'll outsource NASA, just like everything else.
The simple truth is that interstellar distances will not fit into the human imagination
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National Aeronautics and Space Administration
(or, National Acronym Society of America) In either case, not Nasa.
Life is short: void the warranty.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
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.
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
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?
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.
-516
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!
This is my sig.
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.
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
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.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
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.
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.
I believe at this point Lenin is supposed to break out of his glass case and zombie "MUST CRUSH CAPITALISM"
If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we shoot people for Apollo-related non-sequiturs?
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.
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.
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.
No they didn't. Buran made its first test flight a few months before the fall of the Soviet Union. Three additional orbiters were under construction at the time.
The Buran program ended because the R&D was prohibitively expensive, and Russia had much bigger fish to fry in the early 1990s.
Granted, it would have been nice if the remaining orbiters were kept in a building with a stable roof, but I suppose there's no point dwelling on all that now, even though I really would like to see it fly one more time....
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
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.
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
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.
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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.
http://www.nasa.gov/missions/highlights/schedule.html
There's the page that details the last launches in case you wanted to take the chance and see one. I've never seen one yet, but I'd like to. *gotta hurry*
No, we worried about our buildings being melted into heaps of slag by having 100 megaton H-bombs
No you didn't. There never was a 100 megaton H-bomb. The USSR designed one, Tzar I think, but it was more of a dick size experiment. The thing was the size of a locomotive. Way to big to be of any practical value. Hell, even they where afraid of the thing. When they tested it, they tested it at half yield, 52 Megatons.
Most US weapons where and remain in the 30-100+ KT range. The US does have some larger warheads in the megaton range but none above 10. Most of them, the B-83 I believe, 1.2 megatons. The Soviets did field more weapons in the megaton range than the US but most of those were under 5 MT.
The reason the US fields such smaller weapons that the USSR is accuracy. It has been said you can place a quarter in Red Square and the US could drop a warhead within 10 feet of it from anywhere in the world. Soviet weapons where not that accurate so the did use larger class warhead.
Once you get above a certain size nuclear weapons don't scale very well. While that 100 megaton weapon may look awesome on paper, truthfully it won't do much more damage than a 5 megaton hit. With that being said it makes more sense to blanket a area with several "small" nukes that hit with one big one. You would hit the target in a staggered overlapping pattern so that if one weapon failed its area would still be in the blast area of several others.
Don't ask me how I know all this.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
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?
The retirement will leave the US without orbital capacity for at least four years
That's a very misleading statement. We'll have no human orbital capacity, but plenty of expendable rockets for lobbing satellites and probes into space.
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
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.
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.
Yeap, them where the good ol' days all right. You didn't spend your time worrying about some religious freak taking your ass out with a car bomb. Our worries ran along the line some computer error taking out the whole damn planet. Nothing like the fear of global Armageddon to keep your mind focused.
I lived in Huntsville at the time which was a major strike area. I had at least 35 megatons pointed in the general direction of my ass for several years. I still have most of my nuclear war party pack. A folding lounge chair, a beach umbrella, sun tan lotion (SPF 45), straw hat, a pair cheap sunglasses, some flip flops, swim trunks, a bottle of tequila (the rest of the margarita fixings are long gone), salt, and a cassette of Jimmy Buffett (Songs You Know By Heart).
Yeap, I was ready.
Supporting World Peace Through Nuclear Pacification
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.