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Endeavor Launch Pad Being Rebuilt Piece By Piece
dangle writes "The Exposition Park museum in LA is working to rebuild the Endeavor launch stack, a display that will take thousands of pieces to complete due to parts that are scattered at NASA facilities, museums and other places across the U.S. Most are one of a kind and impossible to replicate. Dennis Jenkins, who spent his entire 30-plus year career sending the shuttles into space, is playing a key role in locating essential parts using his own and his colleagues' institutional memory. Employed by NASA contractor Martin Marietta, he helped write the software used in loading and controlling the liquid oxygen needed to launch the 2,250-ton shuttle assembly into low Earth orbit. Now, with the program part of a bygone era of exploration, the 57-year-old works for the California Science Center, helping officials figure out how to rebuild Endeavour."
Did we get these from another space-faring civilization with whom we've lost contact or something? I'm betting the launch pad isn't going to be holding a new rocket, so making a copy of a piece in plastic shouldn't be THAT disastrous, or am I missing something?
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Considering that it was how we moved big stuff in to space and current relations with Russia going south (with Russia being our only ticket to the ISS), we better get to those "potential future programs" pretty damn fast.
You mean spending $250 million dollars to restore Endeavor to its original flight worthy condition through the use of original, certified parts so that it can be on display for middle schoolers for their field trips to the Science Center may not be a particularly sound idea when "this ship has been in space dozens of times" would still have them saying WOAH! even if a 30lb retention bolts shown connecting the shuttle to its fuel tank couldn't really hold the sheering force of a launch?
Thirty four characters live here.
Thousands of years from now archaeologists will uncover the previously unknown LA launch site and will confuse the hell out of them.
"The discovery of this launch site is extraordinary in that we never knew of this location being used for launching the Space Shuttle. It doesn't appear in any NASA records we're found so perhaps this was a top-secret location. We are, however, puzzled as to why they would have a launch facility in the middle of such a large sprawling city. One theory we have is that this was a decoy launch site used to confuse the Japanese during the second world war. This finding may rewrite history!"
You... don't really get "museums," do you? They're trying to preserve history. Are you really saying a museum shouldn't try to use the original historic parts when they're available, just because it's harder to acquire a few of them? Do you really think middle schoolers are the best metric to rate the value of a preservation effort?
Here is - quite literally - a fu*king rocket scientist devoting his time and energy NOT towards building a better world or improving the advancement of our society. Instead, he's spearheading a massive effort to construct a self-congratulatory museum-piece.
If you want a textbook illustration for the meaning of "decadence" in the context of a civilization, you can read it in the above.
This rocket scientist has had his career, he's put in his 30. If he wants to devote his retirement to helping make sure people don't forget what we were once capable of, more power to him.
You know a woodpecker once delayed a shuttle lunch by a month, right?
TFA says the money was raised through a $250 million campaign. Donors WANT this. The parts are free, they just have to be found, and the museum just has to cover the shipping and paperwork costs. Doesn't sound wasteful to me, sounds like the obvious and worthwhile thing to do. Or would you prefer these parts to be sold wholesale for scrap?
That's the rub... the museum can rais $250M to install a shuttle exhibit but if you asked those same people to pay that much in taxes that was guaranteed to go to NASA they would balk. .75% of the total budget (historically it has been as high as 4.5% and is currently about .5%). If the government as a whole could operate as efficiently as NASA does we'd have solved world hunger, provided free healthcare to all Americans, and have free mass transit in every city.
Most people labor under the false impression that NASA has a tremendous budget, perhaps almost as large as the military budget when in reality NASA's portion of US spending is about
Over the SST program lifespan NASA spend about $192B on the entire thing. For comparison: the US Air Force's F-35 program is expected to cost $857B over its life span (figure you need to double that to get to the number we'll actually wind up at).
The US spends about $220B on interest payments, so we could re-build the entire SST program for the price of 1 year of interest payments!
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