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Start Saving To Buy Your Space Shuttle Now
stoolpigeon writes "With the retirement of the shuttle drawing near, NASA has begun to plan for museums that may want a used orbiter of their own. The Orlando Sentinel reports that NASA issued an RFI to US educational institutions, science museums and other organizations to see if they would be interested in the orbiter while also able to cover the estimated $42 million cost of 'safeing' the shuttle and transporting it."
My team and I were getting set up to work in a phased maintenance hanger. I was a new troop and this was my first Real Duty Assignment. Were were in the shadow of a real aircraft. I was drinking it all in. I look up at the tail of the bird we were about to take to task.
"Alright," I say, "I know the big numbers are the squadron and the tail number for the aircraft. But what are those two small numbers in front of the tail number?" My boss looks over and replies, "oh - that's the year of manufacture."
"Woah," I say in awe, "this thing is older than I am!" My boss turns to me... looks me over and sighs, "I'm getting too old."
It's not that these aircraft aren't well maintained. But they are well used. And they consist of very dated (if effective) technology that tends to be utilitarian in design to begin with.
But having said that - sitting in the seat of a jet fighter is an impressive sight. Even if you know the history of the technology in front of you. There's a cool factor that only a small percentage of people have enough exposure to eventually wear off.
I've never set foot on an actual shuttle. But I imagine the training mockups are close enough. And they impressed the same cool factor I got from both real and training mockups (we used to log unbooked time in the trainers) for the fighters I used to maintain.
I saw the Saturn-5 at the L.B.J. space center when I was five, I still cite it as one of the coolest things I've ever seen. You could touch it thats how close to it you are.
I've been inside of tanks, B-52's, subs, air-craft carriers and SR-17's that were decommissioned and beat to hell but were pretty awesome. No body gives a shit about the High Tech gloss, they care about the awesome engineering feats they are. Most people who are interested in the science and engineering of some of mankind's greatest projects don't really care about the fact that it's covered in oil.
If you go see the shuttle up close and your first thought is that it has a bad paint job, maybe you should just stick to playing with dolls.
Slashdot UIDs are somewhere over 1.27 million now... even if there are fewer than 500,000 active users, I'd chip in $100 toward buying a Space Shuttle...
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
That way the ISS gets extra accomodation, emergency toilets, emergency life support, and an emergency escape vehicle, all in one. Plus, a cool vehicle parked out the front.
It costs a small fortune to send a shuttle into space. That's where its most useful. If its on its last mission, and its never going to be relaunched, why bother bringing the thing all the way back, just to be decomissioned?
Leave it up there, where it's useful and happy!
Eric Baird
Some of the failings of the Shuttle's design can be placed squarely upon the DOD requirements for the vehicle that hamstrung the engineers. The original plan for the Shuttle was for it to have much smaller wings than the current design - indeed one of the Shuttle's engineers who spoke at an MIT lecture on aeronautical engineering stated that originally the Shuttle was either going to be a straight lifting body (like the X-23), or have a set of straight, narrow auxiliary wings.
However, one of the Defense Department's requirements was that the orbiter have a 1000 mile crossrange, i.e. that in a time of crisis the Shuttle could lift off from Vandenberg AFB, dump a DOD payload (read: spy satellite or orbital bombardment system) into orbit, and return and land at Vandenberg, without waiting for more than one orbit for the Earth to rotate into a more favorable position (or long enough for an enemy to calculate the payload's orbit). Without military support the Shuttle project would go nowhere, so the large delta wings that proved so vulnerable to foam strikes were there to stay.
The MIT lectures concerning this design compromise and many others are available on iTunes U. Another interesting fact is that apparently the lack of sophisticated CAD programs at the time of the Shuttle's design caused the engineers to settle on a less-than-optimal routing scheme for the main engine plumbing: if there were computers that could have calculated a better routing topology the engine system could have been designed as a modular unit that pulled in and out of the orbiter like a giant PCI card, shaving weeks off the turnaround time.