Slashdot Mirror
Lacking Buyers, NASA Cuts Prices On Shuttles and Old Engines
Hugh Pickens writes "Russia's Space Shuttle, Buran, ended its days at a theme park in Moscow and was once offered for sale on the Internet for 3 million dollars. Now the NY Times reports that when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration put out the call in December 2008 seeking buyers for US shuttles from museums, schools and elsewhere, the agency didn't get as much interest as expected, so now NASA has slashed the price of the 1970s-era spaceships, available for sale this fall once their flying days are over, from $42 million to just $28.8 million apiece. 'We're confident that we'll get other takers,' says agency spokesman Mike Curie. The Discovery is already promised to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum but the Atlantis and the Endeavour are still up for grabs and it is possible that the Enterprise, a shuttle prototype that never made it to space, will also be available. The lower price is based on NASA's estimate of the cost for transporting a shuttle from Kennedy Space Center to a major airport, and for displaying it indoors in a climate-controlled building. As for the space shuttle main engines, those are now free. NASA advertised them in December 2008 for $400,000 to $800,000 each, but no one expressed interest. So now the engines are available, along with other shuttle artifacts, for the cost of transportation and handling."
One free shuttle engine.
One old impala.
Mythbusters
Best Show EVER!
'nuff said.
Ezekiel 23:20
The summary seems to imply otherwise. And not only almost finished or barely finished orbiters, also models for static tests, etc. Those also ended up as tourist attractions or in museums (or rusting in scrapyard)
In fact, the Buran, the one that made orbital flight, was probably destroyed by a hangar collapse in 2002... (along with the remaining Energia mock-up on which it was laid to rest...)
http://www.buran.ru/images/jpg/bbur90.jpg
http://www.buran.ru/images/jpg/bbur89.jpg
BTW, Should we really count Enterprise as a prototype? It couldn't made it into space...Columbia seems more appropriate. Or, if insisting on rules lax enough to include Enterprise, Endeavor seems a better choice as the "first", actually. Since it's a rebuild structural "airframe" that was used for static tests (so likely before Enterprise), to replenish the fleet with fully capable orbiter after Challenger disaster.
PS. Free Shuttle parts for the cost of transport?! Please, will somebody in the know confirm you don't have to be some large educational institution or venerable museum? ;)
One that hath name thou can not otter
I suspect you can build a set that looks like the inside of the shuttle for a lot less than the shuttle itself. And the exterior shots I figure you can do with archive footage for flying and bluescreen for boarding/leaving. Hell, it might even be cheaper with CGI, and it sounds like your movies will have plenty of it unless you want to take it into space again.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
We dont want this happening again..
Eternal fame and fortune await the first of us to privately assemble, launch, orbit the earth at least once, and return safely.
stuff |
Paint them black and Ming won't be doing many re-entries per shuttle... %-P
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
Does this mean they rejected all the existing bids? I thought about 20 applied, including:
National Museum of the United States Air Force, Dayton OH
Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum, NYC
Kennedy Space Center, Florida
Space Center Houston
Evergreen Aviation & Space Museum, Oregon
Tulsa Air and Space Museum
Museum of Flight, Seattle
Columbia Memorial Space Science Learning Center, Downey CA
Air Force Flight Test Center Museum, Edwards AFB, CA
San Diego Air and Space Museum
Palmdale Plant 42, CA
There's a company up the 101 in the valley that owns the complete mockup that was built for SpaceCamp. That single model has been enough for every LA film, TV show or other for the past 20 years or so; there really isn't a high demand for shuttle flight deck interior scenes. The set is actually a lot MORE intereting than the actual fligt deck, IMHO, since they never updated it with EFIS and it still has all of the original analogue gauges and gear (all completely accurate I might add). Even if you did want to buy a space shuttle to use in a film, you'd probably have to destroy the thing just to make it useable for shooting: running power and HVAC, tearing out walls, etc)
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
But look at the shipping and handling costs. That's what gets ya everytime. $1 space shuttle engine, $28.8 million shipping and handling. It's a rip off.
As I'm into house automation and such, I mostly work for filthy rich people. And those people really buy lots of incredibly expensive unuseful crap like hand-made custom choppers to display in their living room (I'm a biker and that pains me), castles as country house, Juan Miró paintings for the crapper and such.
If I was that rich, I'll *ride* the chops and I'll certainly never miss the opportunity of having my own space shuttle on my back yard. Don't you too?
--
El Guerrero del Interfaz
NARRATOR: Unfortunately, while it may be easy to purchase a used surplus NASA space engine, some of the logistics aren't turning out to be easy to handle!
Adam Savage: [Jamie's stupid toy space suit in background] When we bought this thing, we figured, great! Now we don't need to build our own engine. Unfortunately, it seems that the engines are actually too big to transport on any truck we've been able to find. So that's going to be a problem, but we'll handle it.
[Cut to scene of Jamie Hyneman wearing a welder's face helmet and blasting through sheet metal emblazoned "NASA" in those funny letters]
NARRATOR: So while the rest of the guys are getting the lot ready for the explosion, Jamie is busy disassembling the engine into parts!
Jamie Hyneman: [Lifts up welder's mask] This is turning out to be a lot of work, but if we're going to test this myth, we've got to get our water recycling machine up into space, bwwwwssssh [makes vertical "blast-off" gestures] and we'll be drinking our own pee and sweat in no time!
The perfect place for Enterprise might be next to the Buran at http://speyer.technik-museum.de/exhibits/spaceshuttle-buran/sp_610.html. At http://sinsheim.technik-museum.de/node/27, they have both a Russian Tupolev TU-144 and an Air France CONCORDE on display.
Easier for them to just buy one of the successors of Russian RD-170 (the most powerful liquid-fueled rocket engine that ever existed); which, while most likely much simpler, have remarkable efficiency.
Plenty of places use those too, so there shouldn't be much a problem with finding one...
As a matter of fact, even US actively uses them: "Another variant, the RD-180 used on the Atlas V, replaced the three engines used on early Atlas rockets with a single engine and achieved significant payload and performance gains." ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RD-170_(rocket_engine) )
One that hath name thou can not otter
This thing really needs to be sitting in the middle of a Las Vegas casino. They could line it with slot machines and run high-stakes card games in the cargo bay.
Nothing worthwhile ever happens before noon
They are being given away. $28.8 million is the estimated "cost to complete display preparation for each Orbiter and ferry the Orbiter to its ultimate display location".
And private collectors are not invited: "Organizations responding to this RFI must be: 1) a U.S. museum, institution, or organization dedicated to education or educational outreach, including NASA Visitor Centers; 2) a U.S. Federal agency, State, Commonwealth, or U.S. possession or any municipal corporation or political subdivision thereof; or 3) the District of Columbia."
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/transition/home/int_orbiter_rfi.html
Heinlein did it first, and better, in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress. He threw multi-ton canisters of rock at earth.
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Actually you could get a little something done if, instead of using a Panavision or Arri body, you used a Canon 7D or 5DmkII (or RED Scarlett, whenever those become available), since its body and lenses are small enough to move around. But you need to have a minimum of like 10 people on the set at any one time, to act, direct, operate camera, pull focus, makeup, production design, grip, and light, and then you actually have to have proper lights for the scenes; it's complicated. You could only make it work if you were doing something verite or Dogma-95 style, and those movies generally don't make enough money to cover the $20 million you spent buying the thing :)
Don't blame me, I voted for Baltar.
You see this situation all the time with miliary/government surplus.
For a hundred bucks or even less, you can pick up all kinds of neat surplus gizmos that Uncle Sam paid thousands and thousands of dollars for. The reason is that the gizmo is sure to perform some highly demanding task that nobody has any use for except in the exact original application. That's why you don't see cheap surplus trucks or aircraft -- lots of people have a use for that kind of stuff. The "bargain" stuff is more likely to be an assembly used to collimate the target sights for a huge and obsolete field artillery piece, or an oddball large format camera (sans lens) designed fit in the nose of a 1960s era fighter plane.
If you buy this kind of stuff, you are almost certainly doing it for one of two reasons. Either it's as a conversation piece, or you're taking it apart for things like lenses, mirrors and such. You don't need any of the things that made the gizmo expensive. Neither does anyone else.
That's the situation for the SSME. IIRC, it's an outstanding engine, but it's most important characteristic is that it is reusable. It has a remarkable track record of success at that, but you'd have to be building a reusable launch vehicle to want that. In other words the only people who'd have a use for this thing would be people building their own shuttle.
Maybe if you wanted to build *one* disposable rocket, you might find this thing a bargain. But who in their mind would want to do that? You achieve economy on a disposable rocket by building lots of nearly identical copies. For that you don't give a damn about getting the first engine cheap. You want an engine that is cheap to build over and over again, which of course the SSME wasn't designed to be. Even *we* have no use for these things, even though we intend to build a shuttle replacement.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Regarding focus pulling, when you can't get more than about three or four feet away, you'll be using such a wide angle lens for even a simple two shot that I'd expect your depth of field to be almost infinite no matter what you do....
Your director, PD people, etc. can be physically outside the shuttle watching the feeds on a monitor. Think of it as being much like shooting a scene in a restroom stall. All the people are watching it on a screen because the camera operator is blocking the view of the entire set. :-)
You're also not going to have much room for lighting in that space, as you alluded to earlier. You could try using natural lighting for authenticity, though you'd probably get some pretty high contrast images that way.... You'd probably end up hanging a couple of LED panel lights in appropriate places with velcro or something---you know, the ones that are half an inch thick and wouldn't hurt much if they fell down on your head. Either way, it's an entirely different kind of lighting, and it's going to pretty much have to be "set it and forget it". By the time the camera person walks in the room, the lighting people would have to be out. It can be done, though.
Makeup people? Again, off the set. Actors walk out the airlock, makeup people work on them in the cargo bay.
In short, all the problems are solvable if you don't mind your entire cast and crew hating you for all eternity. It would lend itself best to a much smaller than normal crew, e.g. three people---the director/camera/lighting engineer, the audio/lighting engineer, and the makeup person. Or at the very least, lighting people who don't have a cow when the camera operator moves the LED panel three inches lower to get rid of a shadow for one shot.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.