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Senate Bill Adds Shuttle Flight, New Shuttle-Derived Vehicle
simonbp writes "The Senate Commerce Committee this morning marked up a compromise NASA Authorization Act that rolls back some of Obama's plans for NASA, while keeping others. The bill adds at least one more shuttle flight, keeps Obama's technology demonstrators and commercial access to ISS (albeit at reduced funding), restores the Orion crew capsule, and replaces the Ares rockets with a Shuttle-Derived 'Space Launch System' for going to the ISS and Beyond, which could be ready as soon as 2015."
Plus, as has been discussed somewhere the Senators evidently were not around to hear, the Shuttle program is dead. It's been dead as a program for about five years. Production lines are closed, staff fired, supplier contracts ended. Anything beyond the one additional mission that parts exist for would be hugely expensive, as the production would need to be started up again from scratch. (Consequently, that last one won't have any rescue shuttle on standby.)
With reasonable men I will reason; with humane men I will plead; but to tyrants I will give no quarter. -- William Lloyd
Uh-huh. I had a nice grant from ARPA at Pixar to work on movie-making software. Why, because they wanted to make 3D technology in the states economically viable. That way, they'd have it if they needed it for war. Unfortunately, not even I could keep SGI afloat with my one little grant.
So, that was my military mission. I don't really mind more like that happening.
Bruce Perens.
I've got a dumb question. Why do they return the shuttle back to Earth? Or, why not build a part of the space station out of shuttles; you design the vehicle to serve as the body of the launch vehicle, and as part of the ISS. You could leave off a lot of those tiles if you weren't planning to return.
The crew returns to Earth via a reentry vehicle. Fill the vehicle with supplies, send it up there, and the crew comes back on a specialized reentry bus.
Best regards.
Personally, I would be in favor of keeping it going as a servicer for the ISS until the next generation of craft is actually up and running.
Soyuz is cheaper and safer. There's no scientific or engineering reason not to use it.
They've had a few close calls, but unlike the shuttle, the Soyuz capsule has modes of failure in which the cosmo/astronauts aboard do not die. Hell, a Soyuz rocket once exploded on the pad, and the astronauts aboard walked away from the incident with nothing more than minor injuries.
-- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose