Shuttle Retirement In 2010 Under Review

An anonymous reader alerts us to an Orlando Sentinel report based on a leaked NASA email, indicating that NASA is looking at options to extend the Shuttle program. The fighting between Russia and Georgia has put a strain on plans to rely on Russian boosters until the Shuttle's replacement flies in 2015. Yet extending the Shuttle's life is no sure thing. According to a former NASA program manager, "We started shutting down the shuttle four years ago. That horse has left the barn." And NASA Administrator Michael Griffin has told Congress that if the Shuttle fleet were to fly two missions a year until 2015, "the risk would be about one in 12 that we would lose another crew. That's a high risk... [one] I would not choose to accept on behalf of our astronauts." And then there's the matter of finding the $4 billion a year it would take to keep the fleet operational. The Sentinel mentions that John McCain has called for additional Shuttle flights, but doesn't mention that Barack Obama has made the same point, as the BBC reports.

Comments

Nothing is 'safe'

[Entropy98]

Not that we shouldn't try and make space travel safer, but the idea that loss of life is completely unacceptable I find very strange when we have no problem sending people who may or may not understand the risks into a myriad of dangerous situations where the loss of someones life is all but guaranteed. War, crab fishing, oil drilling, car driving, and on and on.
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Re:Nothing is 'safe'

[Snowspinner]

The average joe understood the space program just fine in the 60s when it was about doing something. The problem with justifying funding for the space program is that, frankly, the shuttle didn't justify funding. It did virtually nothing of merit in its entire lifespan. If the space program actually became about doing something - exploring, discovering, and pushing our way out into the universe - then it would be trivial to generate support for it. But short of a pretty-looking launch every month, which understandably got boring after 20+ years, the space shuttle does nothing of interest.

Returning to the moon, or going back to Mars, or making a sustained push to research Io, a moon that likely has liquid water? Any of those things would be trivial to justify to the American people.

Re:Nothing is 'safe'

[Anonymous Coward]

If we spend billions of dollars to blow people up, it's not going to sell so well to the public.

That's called the war effort. Wrong thread!

Re:Nothing is 'safe'

[bonehead]

It did virtually nothing of merit in its entire lifespan.

That is entirely untrue. It functioned quite well as, shall we say, an "SUV" (Space Utility Vehicle). It carried satellites and other payloads into space, it carried astronauts to perform repair work on, perhaps most notably, the Hubble and the ISS. It hosted a variety of scientific experiments.

To say that the shuttle accomplished nothing is absurd. The problem with the shuttle is that it was too expensive for what it did. The reusable nature didn't reduce costs in the way it was hoped when it was designed.

The shuttle accomplished a great deal. The problem is that most of those things could have been accomplished for less money.

Re:the shuttle sucks anyway

[eln]

I think suspending manned space flight for that long would be a disaster. At some point, if we have no space flights going on, the new shuttle replacement becomes "restarting manned space flight" rather than "continuing our manned presence in space". Congress will be a lot more likely to simply cut the program entirely if it's seen as starting an entirely new program rather than an evolution of our existing, and continuing, efforts.

Re:the shuttle sucks anyway

[Snowspinner]

Because it's there. It's there, and it's big and unknown, and we're humans. And if we don't explore every bit of space that we can get to, we'll sit around itching to go. We go to space for the same reason we went to the south pole, or why we go up mountains that haven't been climbed yet. Because they're there, and we can.

The insidious lie of the modern space program is that there's more to it than that. That space stations and endless low earth orbit missions provide some sort of useful science, and are worth doing. They're not. The point of space is the unknown. So yes. Take out the solar system. Go to every frozen rock we can reach, and start thinking about the frozen rocks we can't. Because they're there. They're places people have never been. And fundamental to the human spirit is the sense that something that seems utterly crazy and impossible is the most important thing there is to do.

Re:If the best we can do in "manned space flight"

[meringuoid]

ISS is a fucking joke, it's smaller than Skylab

Skylab massed 77,088kg; the ISS at present masses 277,598kg, and if ever completed it will mass 419,600kg.