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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
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 |
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? ;)
Confirmed. And if you have Amazon Prime, it's free 2-day shipping.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
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.
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!
In regards to the Enterprise, it was intended to make it into space. The original plan by NASA was to retro-fit the Enterprise to fly into space once the initial landing and approach tests were completed. An older vehicle that was used as a test article was eventually converted into the Challenger, and the Endeavor had a somewhat similar history. Both when the Challenger blew up and the Columbia burned up, the thought of finishing the job to make the Enterprise fully spaceflight worthy had been brought up, but rejected due to the costs involved in such a conversion. That is certainly much closer to going into space than most other vehicles that I can think of.
Clearly the Enterprise did fly on its own as an independent vehicle on at least three different occasions, and did contribute significantly to the development of the Space Shuttle program that we know today. For me, it clearly belongs in any list of shuttles that you could mention, and does count as a prototype by every definition of the word.
Now if you want to quibble over the Pathfinder, that is one you can certainly debate. That is the vehicle which was used to be a full mock-up of the Shuttle that could be used to train technicians assembling the parts of the Shuttle and to check ground clearances for moving the Shuttle around if they just wanted to see if it could fit or not. It certainly seems better to screw up on a cheap hunk of steel that won't ever go into space than to make a mistake on a vehicle that cost over a billion dollars to build in the first place. That hunk of steel was never intended to go into space at any time, and barely looks like a Shuttle.
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
The vehicle designators reveal the original plans for the orbiters and test articles. They are:
MPTA-098 non-flight worthy mockup Pathfinder (Its current appearance is largely decoration added after the fact)
STA-099 became OV-099 Challenger
OV-101 Enterprise (The first of the orbital vehicle series. Originally intended to undergo the conversion STA-099 went through)
OV-102 Columbia
OV-103 Discovery
OV-104 Atlantis
OV-105 Endeavour
It was determined that it would be cheaper to make Challenger out of STA-099 rather than perform the necessary upgrades to bring Enterprise up to space flight worthiness. Only cost concerns prevented it from becoming an operational shuttle.
I am becoming gerund, destroyer of verbs.
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.
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.
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