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Endeavour Launch Delayed For At Least 48 Hours

Posted by Soulskill on from the safety-first dept.

shuz writes "At 10:15 am Eastern time the launch of Endeavour has been scrubbed for a minimum of 48 hours. The scrub is due to two failed Auxiliary Power Unit heaters." The delay is surely a disappointment to the biggest crowds since the Apollo days; let's hope it gets back on track more quickly than Discovery did for its final launch.

3 of 40 comments (clear)

  1. Not The Largest Crowds by cusco · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The largest crowd that I know of for a NASA launch was the third liftoff of Columbia, which I hitchiked across the state to view from Cocoa Beach. That was just over one million. This one is estimated at 500,000 to 750,000.

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  2. Re:Shoestring budget by FTL · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Sorry, your facts are reversed. NASA's budget is $17 billion. China's space budget is $1.3 billion. Russia's space budget is $2.4 billion.

    For eight times the money, the US manages to reach approximate parity with the Russians. This is the result of the badly designed Space Shuttle program which over its lifetime has cost $1.5 billion per launch.

    Looking forward, SpaceX is on track to cut US launch costs by a factor of ten. That will make the US the #1 place to launch rockets -- for the first time since the 1970s.

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  3. Re:Shoestring budget by DerekLyons · · Score: 4, Informative

    For eight times the money, the US manages to reach approximate parity with the Russians.

    How many probes do the Russians have one the surface of Mars? How many in orbit around it? Or Mercury? How many of the station components have the Russian's delivered?
     
    For our budget we do a hell of a lot more than Russians - whose space program consists mostly of a taxi and FedEx service to the station, the GLONASS navigation constellation, and power points outlining their brave new future.
     

    This is the result of the badly designed Space Shuttle program which over its lifetime has cost $1.5 billion per launch.

    Actually, the Shuttle only costs $250 million to launch (that is, the cost to add a Shuttle mission to the manifest.), the balance is the individual flight's portion of the fixed costs. The funny thing is when you add up the costs of the Soyuz and Proton boosters needed to replace a single Shuttle launch... you come in around $300 million dollars. (Mostly because of the horrible crew:passenger ratio of Soyuz.)