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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."
Are there any export restrictions?
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They're selling the space shuttle--But why? There's already a glut of novelty ashtrays on the market. They won't get much for it.
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"What do you mean, 'where are the keys for it?' Awwww man..."
Most military and government equipment only looks cool from afar. Up close, it looks like hammered dog meat.
Maybe it'll get some proper respect to the risks those people took climbing into it with several thousand tons of rocket fuel burning at their ass. I rather doubt many people would have the guts to fly the first airplane either once they realized they could put their foot through the wing without any effort.
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a Shuttle weighs 4.5 million pounds with a maximum payload weight of approximately 50,000 pounds
That's for the entire stack - orbiter, boosters, and full external tank. The orbiter itself has an empty weight of about 180,000 lb. So you're looking for a launcher that can put 200,000lb or so into orbit; there are only a couple: Saturn V, Energia, and the shuttle (remember, the orbiter goes into orbit too, plus whatever it's carrying).
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
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.
I can't find the original information, but I'm pretty sure the allocation of the shuttles won't be soley based on cash, but also on perceived value to the public for receiving one and consistency with the general mission of the museum. Keep in mind, the $42 million is supposedly for refurbishment for display, not to raise additional money. This first of all will mean cleaning up any potential hazards, like residues of hydrazine manuevering fuel. Of course, they get fairly weathered by each launch and re-entry, so there'll be some polishing to be done, and undoubtably ITAR-sensitive or high value equipment like the main engines will be removed and replaced with detailed replicas where applicable.
There's three orbiters surviving (Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavor). I suspect Kennedy Space Center will keep one and house it near their Saturn V that's on display. This is consistent with another article that says two orbiters and six engine display kits will be made available according to the RFI. With public accessibility being a likely major consideration, the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum is almost guaranteed one of the actual orbiters, to replace the Enterprise aerodynamic test vehicle which is currently housed there.
That's going to make it a tough grab for the remaining orbiter. Because McMinneville is roughly an hour-long drive from the relatively small and aerospace-vacant city of Portland, I think their chances of getting an orbiter are relatively slim, even though they have a great facility and can probably afford it.
The Intrepid Museum in New York Harbor is certainly prominent enough, but they would need to make a rather substantial addition to protect the shuttle from the elements. It probably wouldn't be possible to deliver it to the waterfront an SCA flight to New York, but if they wanted to put it on a barge like the Concorde they have on site, they may be able to float it straight up from Florida that way. I think they're also at a disadvantage because there will already probably be two shuttles on the East Coast (Florida and DC).
I think Johnson Space Center in Houstan and Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville are the two most likely locations not on one of the major coasts. Both of them already host two of the three remaining Saturn V's (the third is at Kennedy). On the west coast, I think the lead option is Boeing's museum of flight, partially because of their accessibility and ability to host a space shuttle, but also because of their involvement with the shuttle program (although that is due to their acquisition of Rockwell).
I would bet one of these three locations will get the third orbiter. That still leaves Enterprise after it leaves the Smithsonian, which only did glider and procedural tests, but would still be a major attraction. Maybe Evergreen has a chance at getting Enterprise, but I think more likely a second of the above three will get her. There is also a ground-test mockup called Pathfinder currently at MSFC in Huntsville that would likely get a new home if one of the orbiters went there, but it's only externally representative of the flight vehicles.
A commenter on another site had a fantastic idea, in my opinion: before sending the last of the orbiters to a musuem, use the SCA to take it on a tour of the US. This would be a great opportunity for millions to see it and the modified 747 together.
If I had the money, I'd buy the thing, set up a launch pad and a refueling station, and rent flights out to NASA. After all, they're retiring the shuttle five years too soon, so I figure I can make a few billion in rentals until the Orion starts up.
Except it sounds like Obama wants to kill the Orion project.
I can't understand how they could be so keen on throwing $500 billion at failed banks and mortgage deadbeats, yet they have no problem cutting NASA's $30 billion budget. And then there's Obama's national health insurance which is bound to cost a few hundred billion, if not a trillion or two when it's up and running.
Here's an idea: don't bail out the banks that made bad loans and investments, and let the mortgage deadbeats be foreclosed. That's the way our system is supposed to work. And take about $100 billion of that bailout money and put it into R&D, including space exploration. In the medium to long term, we will reap much richer economic rewards for such an investment.
it's = "it is"; its = possessive. E.g., it's flapping its wings.
That's the expense to put it in orbit. It wouldn't cost as much to just to fly the thing.
"flight" is a relative term when dealing with the shuttle. It doesn't fly so much as fall in a controlled fashion.
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I'm sure all the engineers that see the stuff are both amazed by the audacity of most of these designs and by the fact that they ever even approached the reliability they have with such complexity.
Exactly. I look at the space shuttle and I don't just see kludge of unfortunate design trade offs. I see the huge, hairy balls of the engineers who not only thought they could make it work, but actually did it.
Of course, this means I have no interest in buying a Shuttle even if I could afford one, cus who wants that imagery in their head all the time?
The enemies of Democracy are
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.