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Discovery Heads Into Retirement
dweezil-n0xad writes "Technicians in bay No. 2 of Kennedy Space Center's Orbiter Processing Facility remove shuttle Discovery's forward reaction control system (FRCS) on March 22 as part of the ship's transition and retirement processing. The FRCS will be completely cleaned of all toxic fuel and oxidizer chemicals, which are used for the steering jet system while a shuttle is in orbit. NASA says the FRCS will then be put back into Discovery to help prepare the shuttle for future public display." These photos are pretty cool.
It actually looks like they are being very careful with this process. Odds are they are doing it in a way that they could return them to flight if they needed to.
Uh, no. The parts production line was mostly shut down a year or two back; there will be no more external tanks after the currently planned flights, and they'll presumably be laying off shuttle workers before long.
Restarting the program now would be expensive and complex; restarting it in a couple of years would probably cost as much as building a new spacecraft from scratch.
The current vehicles are already essentially a Mark II (or III or IV ...). There is actually not much more than the airframe/skin left from the originals. They've upgraded the engines, replaced the computers and flight instruments, etc. Each vehicle underwent an extended downtime in Palmdale to be refurbished/rebuilt.
Also, the problems that lead to loss of life are inherent in the design, so the only way to "fix" them is to build something else. In retrospect, a staged vehicle with stages and tanks side-by-side is a bad idea. Both Challenger (first stage SRB punctured the tank) and Columbia (tank debris damaged the vehicle) would not have happened in a stacked setup (like basically every other orbital launch system has used). Obviously, there were a number of contributing factors, both in design and management, but the basic fact is that a stacked vehicle (with the crew at the top) would not have had these failures. Columbia wouldn't have happened at all, and Challenger at worst would have been a survivable event.