Yeah, if radioactive materials got into the air, not a hell of a lot would happen except a localized increase in cancer rates...
I would hardly call the radioactive plume from Chernobyl 'localised'. It covered most of Europe and dumped enough radiation on parts of Britain to pose a serious health hazard to humans and animals. The people of the Ukraine and Belarus are going to be experiencing endemic cancers for at least another generation.
I agree the risk is remote, but the consequences of any accident are correspondingly massive.
You are well out of date on wind power, Denmark is already generating a sizeable portion of its demand from offshore wind farms where winds are more constant. The UK, Netherlands and Germany are following suit. Many of the problems can be overcome by dispersing turbines over a large geographic area - after all, its always windy somewhere.
Nuclear has a place, but only if its generation costs and associated costs are competitive. Here in Britain, nuclear is bankrupt and far more expensive than other power sources. Perhaps a carbon tax will make fossil fuel generation more expensive and nuclear will become competitive, but with the price of wind energy tumbling they might all succumb.
Quite right and the Russians are none to happy about the situation. So they're planning to move many of their operations to Plesetsk in the Russian Arctic. This used to be the busiest site in the World, launching military satellites into a polar orbit on an almost daily basis. Since the fall of the USSR, its been much less busy.
The problem with the site is that it is so far North that it is much more difficult to transfer into an equatorial orbit and the rockets get much less of a kick from the Earth's spin. So its possible that some rockets such as Soyuz and Proton will have to be retired.
The Russians have been working on a big new booster called Angara which should be fired for the first time next year. It's based on the existing successful Zenit rocket and has engines very similar to those built by the Russians for the new Atlas V.
I have no idea what is planned for the manned missions should the Russians abandon Baikonur.
I was out there in January and fell in love with the Nozomi Shinkansen; it looks and moves like something out of Star Wars. Remind me again, this is a country in a depression?
I'm not sure if they still do it, but the Shinkansen used to offer full refunds if the train was more than 2 minutes late.
Quite a contrast to the British definition of 'on time' which allows a train to be 10 minutes late. No, don't try to work that one out.
Oh I could take late, its just trains not turning up, or turning up and then breaking down that I can't stand. Being modern would also be a breath of fresh air.
And Italian trains will be nice and stylish - you can't deny that!
I think they all died in the end of Time too, and achieved nothing, but that was just a minor niggle in the whole scheme of things. I had almost forgotten about it until you mentioned the tables.
You know, I am so glad you remembered the sentient tables as well, for a while, after posting that I was thinking 'He can't have written about sentient cables, you're making that up - no one writes about sentient cables. Have you been snorting dandelions?'
But now I know I was right, either that or you were on the same stuff I was.
I've been mystified as to why that crap ever got published for a while now, I suppose he must have done something decent before.
Clearly he knows enough science to produce meaningful worlds, he obviously loves the space programmes of the 1960s, its just the plot, characterisation and dialogue that need work.
Which puts him well ahead of the likes of Clive Cussler - I know he's not really SF, but he dabbles with SF ideas. The prose has a crawling awfulness of its own, dialogue doesn't so much flow as congeal on the page, whole chunks of promotional brochures are neatly excised from their natural habitats and then cruelly stapled to the page with split infinitives and strained similes. There are positive pantheons of deus ex machinas, a hero who is borderline indestructible (yet in touch with his feminine side) and worst of all there are hundreds of these books!
If these books were movies, they would be a high concept buddy movie combining Dolph Lundgren's sensitivity with Robin Williams' martial arts prowess in Nora Ephron's Muppet musical version of 'Plan Nine From Outer Space' - no, on second thoughts that sounds far too much fun.
Cussler's books are so rank that everyone should read at least one; just to get a base level of how bad writing can be. But borrow a copy from a library - don't, and I mean DON'T buy one!
I never really believed sendo dropped their phone when it was ready for launch. May be it's a combination of crappy speed, horrible UI that really ticked off the company. It also explains why not that many phone makers are signing up to MS's smartphone platform either.
Sendo was certainly planned to be MS's big partner in the UK. Now they've jumped ship to Symbian.
Are there any other companies apart from Orange producing an MS phone for the European market?
I think you've got some good points there, (I will disagree about 'The Matrix', personally I thought it was great eye-candy, but offered nothing special on the intellectual side).
The end point of any uncertainty shouldn't just be to make us question what we've seen or read, but to leave us wanting to know the answer - I want a 'WOW! in my SF.
For instance, one of my favourites is 'Contact' by Carl Sagan. It was his first novel and his characterisation and dialogue definitely needed work, but I I can forgive all that as I just *love* the way the story flowed so easily from a kid in school through to the very biggest question of all.
The last couple of pages as the computer digs through pi just completely blew me away, since the idea was so amazingly profound and ingenious. No I'm not going to spoil it for anyone - it is a damn fine 'Wow!' and I want people to enjoy it.
The movie lost that thread - which was a real shame. But it did have Jodie Foster - mmmmm...
Agreed, and the first one suffers terribly by having the story told largely in 'flashback'. It's hard caring for someone when you know they are going to end up dead.
The geology is fabulous though - but as a geologist I have to say that!
Hold on, are you saying this is worse than 'Titan'?
Whoa! I think I need to sit down.
After all that involved taking some moderately likeable characters, putting them through hell, having them survive just long enough to be killed off by random acts of violence, deep frozen and then reanimated by sentient tables.
Can 'Time' really be that bad?
Best wishes,
Mike.
PS. And just to show I'm not ragging on Baxter for the sake of it, his 'The Time Ships' is a superb novel and a worthy companion to 'The Time Machine'.
His stuff is new to me, but he's written three books revolving around events in the same Universe - 'Revelation Space', 'Chasm City' and 'Redemption Ark'. I've only got through the first two as yet.
This is 'hard' science fiction and I have to admit that they do require quite a bit of concentration, but the reward is worth it. It's a Universe where faster-than-light travel is unknown. So although the galaxy has been colonised, there is no way of instantaneously jumping around. If you leave a planet, you are gone for decades - people come and go, things happen - and you remain ignorant. Which means that planets are isolated and develop their own cultures.
Chasm City is a sort of Bladerunner Extreme! city, a technological wonderland that has gone to the dogs (or is it the pigs) following an attack by a technological virus (did I mention the virus? How remiss of me!)
Humans have changed - some modify their bodies into bizarre forms, others become 'cojoiners' with machines, others remain pretty much like you or me. And all of these factions are playing off one another.
Not to mention the very strange aliens - but that really would be spoiling it!.
Well worth a look if you have time to read a book (you really can't pick them up and drop them). They start with 'Revelation Space', but you could probably read 'Chasm City' (which is admittedly a better book) first. The twist in the latter book is a real doozy, you'll catch on reasonably early, but the 'how', the 'why' and the 'what the f-' are terrific.
Hmmmm I have mixed feelings about all of Stephenson's books.
I can't fault the imagination, the characters or the core idea, but he really has no idea of when to end a book.
All of them have dragged on for far to long, at least 1/3 of the latter part of 'Snowcrash' could have been ditched and left a fine (if short) novel. And as for 'The Diamond Age' it really needed a damn good edit and the loss of a few tens of thousands of words. There was an excellent story in there somewhere, but it was buried under mountains of non-essential text.
'Hardwired' is like being hit over the head - repeatedly - with a mallet - wielded by a gorilla - with bad attitude.
Although Gibson beat Williams to the (re)invention of Cyberpunk, I always thought Williams was the better storyteller. In Gibson's work, the exposition gets in the way of the plot and the characters are so much a cipher that you don't really care for them. With 'Hardwired' you can't help but care for Cowboy and Sarah.
And the vision of a ruined World is so incredibly immediate and desolate. Literally everyone seems to be scrabbling for the lifeboats - even the rich and powerful are fighting to stay alive. Which means that no one is quite who they seem.
Then there is Weasel - quite simply the nastiest method of killing someone I've ever heard of.
Fantastic stuff.
Oh and have you tried his newest book 'Praxis'? First part of a series, very different, but very good again.
There were a number of lights visible in the area. The two brightest were white and probably belonged to the Orford Ness lighthouse and a lightship. The coloured lights appear to be the warning beacons found on transmitter masts.
Yes they were American troops in the woods at night in a relatively unfamiliar country - which only makes it more likely that they got confused by local geography.
They didn't record 'exceptionally high radiation' they claim to have found levels slightly elevated above background radiation - right next to a base storing nuclear weapons.
If this is the best that the UFO conspirators can come up with, then their 'evidence' is even less credible than we thought.
It's also used by Peter F. Hamilton in his 'Night's Dawn' trilogy. Earth has become an environmental nightmare thanks to uncontained energy useage and they are dumping people off as fast as they can manage.
Pop people in the freezer, dump them on a backwater planet with limited technology and get them to use the indigenous resources to start a viable colony. If you don't have high-tech, then go back to steam, no expensive alloys? Use wood.
So you have things like fusion-powered wooden paddle-steamers coexisting in a Universe with faster than light star-ships and energy weapons.
You had me until you called Seinfeld's four main characters "complex".
Look, I could write a PERL script to be George. All it would have to do is whine and piss me off and grunt and writhe around when I kick it lots of times in the balls. I REALLY hate that character.
First, Star Trek in its latest three incarnations either didn't do well in the ratings(DS9), or were reviled by most of the ST fans (Voyager and Enterprise).
Oh be far - it wasn't just the ST fans who reviled 'Voyager', those of us who hate and loathe all things ST despised it as well.
Oh, great. So every time a shuttle gets launched, that's another couple more spy satelites watching me. I feel safer already.
:)
I wouldn't worry, a billion of your tax dollars are being 'well spent' carrying girders up to the ISS so that they'll have something to attach other girders to in the future.
When I put it like that the ISS sounds like a colossal waste of money. Perhaps I should mention all the really useful science going on up there - umm... err... ahem...
Still, I'm sure its a very nice girder - the Rolls Royce of girders, the sort of girder that Harrods would offer to their clientele should they be in the building trade.
The Russians built a rocket with something like 30 engines, none of the launch attempts made orbit, some barely made it off the pad.
To be fair the causes of the N1 failures (4 out of 4) were varied. The N1 had been designed to cope with multiple engine failures and still achieve orbital velocity.
However, the death of Korolev - its designer, the appointment of the inexperienced Mishin and the ongoing wrangling between the Soviet design bureux (they had 3 Moon programmes running simulataneously) meant that the N1 was always a risk.
There were no full test facilities so they couldn't perform a static engine test, the budget was minimal and the deadlines insane - that they got anything was a near miracle. That they got such incredible engines (which are now being used in Atlas rockets) was a miracle.
For the record the N1 failures were caused by:
An uncontained fire from a leaking fuel pipe which caused the computerised engine management system to shut down motors. The rocket lost thrust and was destroyed. The engineers increased the resilience of the piping to deal with resonances.
An explosion in the liquid oxygen line to one engine after it ingested a fragment of welding slag. The failure itself was not critical, but the computers shut down the wrong engines, the rocket lost thrust and toppled back onto the launch pad, completely destroying the pad. The engineers improved welding techniques and fitted filters to piping.
A failure in the attitude control system, the rocket tumbled in flight and was destroyed.
A fire in the engine compartment which burned out of control. The rocket was destroyed from the ground, but was within seconds of achieving second stage ignition. It might well have made it to orbit had the controllers not intervened.
A fifth N1 was prepared for launch but the programme was cancelled on the direct orders of the Kremlin. America had won the race to the Moon and the Soviets were concentrating on space stations and a race to Mars.
As for the N1 being unusually unreliable, not necessarily so. The Soviets were always much more willing to fire their rockets and pick through the wreckage to determine problems than those in the West. So it was clear that the N1 was being debugged in the same manner.
The Proton which launched the Astra satellite had a terrible record in its first few years. It is quite possible that the USSR could have sent men around the Moon in a Zond capsule before Apollo 8 - however, the mission was cancelled when the Proton booster developed cracks whilst sitting on the launch pad, (a problem that also delayed the N1).
Nowadays the Proton is a genuine star - old but very reliable.
a twin with an engine out IS very dangerous because of the risk of losing control authority to the working engine, or of shutting down the good engine in a panic.
Not just a theoretical risk either
Indeed (see the N1), or most tragically the Kegworth disaster here in the UK when the crew shut down the wrong engine of a British Midland 737. They had been dealing with an engine fire and trying to make an emergency landing at East Midlands Airport. For some reason, which has never been clear, both pilots came to the same conclusion which engine needed shutting down. They chose the wrong engine, the plane lost all power and crashed into the M1 motorway, 47 people died, amazingly 79 survived.
It is possible for the US to send a space shuttle to rendezvous with the satellite and help it on to its intended orbit. However, that is very very costly and is probably not worth it for Alcatel.
It may be possible - it depends if the satellite is orbiting in an inclined orbit like the Shuttle or if it has been injected into an Equatorial orbit ready for transfer to geosynchronous orbit. If it is the latter then the Shuttle could not reach it.
The reason that they will not attempt it is that the Shuttle no longer has permission to handle commercial cargoes. These were all removed as an unnecessary risk following the Challenger disaster. If the Shuttle were to attempt a rendezvous (which it did do with a Hughes satellite that failed to achieve orbit), it would be approaching a satellite with a fully fueled booster. NASA wouldn't countenance sending men close to such a potential bomb.
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I would hardly call the radioactive plume from Chernobyl 'localised'. It covered most of Europe and dumped enough radiation on parts of Britain to pose a serious health hazard to humans and animals. The people of the Ukraine and Belarus are going to be experiencing endemic cancers for at least another generation.
I agree the risk is remote, but the consequences of any accident are correspondingly massive.
You are well out of date on wind power, Denmark is already generating a sizeable portion of its demand from offshore wind farms where winds are more constant. The UK, Netherlands and Germany are following suit. Many of the problems can be overcome by dispersing turbines over a large geographic area - after all, its always windy somewhere.
Nuclear has a place, but only if its generation costs and associated costs are competitive. Here in Britain, nuclear is bankrupt and far more expensive than other power sources. Perhaps a carbon tax will make fossil fuel generation more expensive and nuclear will become competitive, but with the price of wind energy tumbling they might all succumb.
Best wishes,
Mike.
The problem with the site is that it is so far North that it is much more difficult to transfer into an equatorial orbit and the rockets get much less of a kick from the Earth's spin. So its possible that some rockets such as Soyuz and Proton will have to be retired.
The Russians have been working on a big new booster called Angara which should be fired for the first time next year. It's based on the existing successful Zenit rocket and has engines very similar to those built by the Russians for the new Atlas V.
I have no idea what is planned for the manned missions should the Russians abandon Baikonur.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Oh damn - how could I have left out the gung-ho jingoism of the whole thing?
Hmmm although in comparison to Tom Clancy, Clive Cussler does come across as a bit of a liberal.
Best wishes,
Mike.
How could I forget?
I was out there in January and fell in love with the Nozomi Shinkansen; it looks and moves like something out of Star Wars. Remind me again, this is a country in a depression?
I'm not sure if they still do it, but the Shinkansen used to offer full refunds if the train was more than 2 minutes late.
Quite a contrast to the British definition of 'on time' which allows a train to be 10 minutes late. No, don't try to work that one out.
Best wishes,
Mike.
And Italian trains will be nice and stylish - you can't deny that!
Best wishes,
Mike.
German, French, Italian - we don't care, we'd just like something that moves at a reasonable speed.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Which is why the TGV captured such a huge share of internal travel in France.
Not to mention that it looks stunning.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Best wishes,
Mike.
You know, I am so glad you remembered the sentient tables as well, for a while, after posting that I was thinking 'He can't have written about sentient cables, you're making that up - no one writes about sentient cables. Have you been snorting dandelions?'
But now I know I was right, either that or you were on the same stuff I was.
I've been mystified as to why that crap ever got published for a while now, I suppose he must have done something decent before.
Clearly he knows enough science to produce meaningful worlds, he obviously loves the space programmes of the 1960s, its just the plot, characterisation and dialogue that need work.
Which puts him well ahead of the likes of Clive Cussler - I know he's not really SF, but he dabbles with SF ideas. The prose has a crawling awfulness of its own, dialogue doesn't so much flow as congeal on the page, whole chunks of promotional brochures are neatly excised from their natural habitats and then cruelly stapled to the page with split infinitives and strained similes. There are positive pantheons of deus ex machinas, a hero who is borderline indestructible (yet in touch with his feminine side) and worst of all there are hundreds of these books!
If these books were movies, they would be a high concept buddy movie combining Dolph Lundgren's sensitivity with Robin Williams' martial arts prowess in Nora Ephron's Muppet musical version of 'Plan Nine From Outer Space' - no, on second thoughts that sounds far too much fun.
Cussler's books are so rank that everyone should read at least one; just to get a base level of how bad writing can be. But borrow a copy from a library - don't, and I mean DON'T buy one!
Best wishes,
Mike.
Sendo was certainly planned to be MS's big partner in the UK. Now they've jumped ship to Symbian.
Are there any other companies apart from Orange producing an MS phone for the European market?
Best wishes,
Mike.
The end point of any uncertainty shouldn't just be to make us question what we've seen or read, but to leave us wanting to know the answer - I want a 'WOW! in my SF.
For instance, one of my favourites is 'Contact' by Carl Sagan. It was his first novel and his characterisation and dialogue definitely needed work, but I I can forgive all that as I just *love* the way the story flowed so easily from a kid in school through to the very biggest question of all.
The last couple of pages as the computer digs through pi just completely blew me away, since the idea was so amazingly profound and ingenious. No I'm not going to spoil it for anyone - it is a damn fine 'Wow!' and I want people to enjoy it.
The movie lost that thread - which was a real shame. But it did have Jodie Foster - mmmmm...
Best wishes,
Mike.
The geology is fabulous though - but as a geologist I have to say that!
Best wishes,
Mike.
Whoa! I think I need to sit down.
After all that involved taking some moderately likeable characters, putting them through hell, having them survive just long enough to be killed off by random acts of violence, deep frozen and then reanimated by sentient tables.
Can 'Time' really be that bad?
Best wishes,
Mike.
PS. And just to show I'm not ragging on Baxter for the sake of it, his 'The Time Ships' is a superb novel and a worthy companion to 'The Time Machine'.
A shame that it was spoiled by unnecessary sequels.
Best wishes,
Mike.
This is 'hard' science fiction and I have to admit that they do require quite a bit of concentration, but the reward is worth it. It's a Universe where faster-than-light travel is unknown. So although the galaxy has been colonised, there is no way of instantaneously jumping around. If you leave a planet, you are gone for decades - people come and go, things happen - and you remain ignorant. Which means that planets are isolated and develop their own cultures.
Chasm City is a sort of Bladerunner Extreme! city, a technological wonderland that has gone to the dogs (or is it the pigs) following an attack by a technological virus (did I mention the virus? How remiss of me!)
Humans have changed - some modify their bodies into bizarre forms, others become 'cojoiners' with machines, others remain pretty much like you or me. And all of these factions are playing off one another.
Not to mention the very strange aliens - but that really would be spoiling it!.
Well worth a look if you have time to read a book (you really can't pick them up and drop them). They start with 'Revelation Space', but you could probably read 'Chasm City' (which is admittedly a better book) first. The twist in the latter book is a real doozy, you'll catch on reasonably early, but the 'how', the 'why' and the 'what the f-' are terrific.
Best wishes,
Mike.
I can't fault the imagination, the characters or the core idea, but he really has no idea of when to end a book.
All of them have dragged on for far to long, at least 1/3 of the latter part of 'Snowcrash' could have been ditched and left a fine (if short) novel. And as for 'The Diamond Age' it really needed a damn good edit and the loss of a few tens of thousands of words. There was an excellent story in there somewhere, but it was buried under mountains of non-essential text.
Best wishes,
Mike.
'Hardwired' is like being hit over the head - repeatedly - with a mallet - wielded by a gorilla - with bad attitude.
Although Gibson beat Williams to the (re)invention of Cyberpunk, I always thought Williams was the better storyteller. In Gibson's work, the exposition gets in the way of the plot and the characters are so much a cipher that you don't really care for them. With 'Hardwired' you can't help but care for Cowboy and Sarah.
And the vision of a ruined World is so incredibly immediate and desolate. Literally everyone seems to be scrabbling for the lifeboats - even the rich and powerful are fighting to stay alive. Which means that no one is quite who they seem.
Then there is Weasel - quite simply the nastiest method of killing someone I've ever heard of.
Fantastic stuff.
Oh and have you tried his newest book 'Praxis'? First part of a series, very different, but very good again.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Best wishes,
Mike.
They didn't record 'exceptionally high radiation' they claim to have found levels slightly elevated above background radiation - right next to a base storing nuclear weapons.
If this is the best that the UFO conspirators can come up with, then their 'evidence' is even less credible than we thought.
Perhaps the best archive on this fiasco is http://www.rendlesham.com/.
Don't have nightmares.
Mike.
Pop people in the freezer, dump them on a backwater planet with limited technology and get them to use the indigenous resources to start a viable colony. If you don't have high-tech, then go back to steam, no expensive alloys? Use wood.
So you have things like fusion-powered wooden paddle-steamers coexisting in a Universe with faster than light star-ships and energy weapons.
Oh and they're also damn good books.
Best wishes,
Mike.
Look, I could write a PERL script to be George. All it would have to do is whine and piss me off and grunt and writhe around when I kick it lots of times in the balls. I REALLY hate that character.
OK, maybe I shared too much. : )
Yes, but don't you feel better for doing so?
Best wishes,
Mike.
Oh be far - it wasn't just the ST fans who reviled 'Voyager', those of us who hate and loathe all things ST despised it as well.
Best wishes,
Mike.
I wouldn't worry, a billion of your tax dollars are being 'well spent' carrying girders up to the ISS so that they'll have something to attach other girders to in the future.
When I put it like that the ISS sounds like a colossal waste of money. Perhaps I should mention all the really useful science going on up there - umm... err... ahem...
Still, I'm sure its a very nice girder - the Rolls Royce of girders, the sort of girder that Harrods would offer to their clientele should they be in the building trade.
Best wishes,
Mike.
To be fair the causes of the N1 failures (4 out of 4) were varied. The N1 had been designed to cope with multiple engine failures and still achieve orbital velocity.
However, the death of Korolev - its designer, the appointment of the inexperienced Mishin and the ongoing wrangling between the Soviet design bureux (they had 3 Moon programmes running simulataneously) meant that the N1 was always a risk.
There were no full test facilities so they couldn't perform a static engine test, the budget was minimal and the deadlines insane - that they got anything was a near miracle. That they got such incredible engines (which are now being used in Atlas rockets) was a miracle.
For the record the N1 failures were caused by:
- An uncontained fire from a leaking fuel pipe which caused the computerised engine management system to shut down motors. The rocket lost thrust and was destroyed. The engineers increased the resilience of the piping to deal with resonances.
- An explosion in the liquid oxygen line to one engine after it ingested a fragment of welding slag. The failure itself was not critical, but the computers shut down the wrong engines, the rocket lost thrust and toppled back onto the launch pad, completely destroying the pad. The engineers improved welding techniques and fitted filters to piping.
- A failure in the attitude control system, the rocket tumbled in flight and was destroyed.
- A fire in the engine compartment which burned out of control. The rocket was destroyed from the ground, but was within seconds of achieving second stage ignition. It might well have made it to orbit had the controllers not intervened.
A fifth N1 was prepared for launch but the programme was cancelled on the direct orders of the Kremlin. America had won the race to the Moon and the Soviets were concentrating on space stations and a race to Mars.As for the N1 being unusually unreliable, not necessarily so. The Soviets were always much more willing to fire their rockets and pick through the wreckage to determine problems than those in the West. So it was clear that the N1 was being debugged in the same manner.
The Proton which launched the Astra satellite had a terrible record in its first few years. It is quite possible that the USSR could have sent men around the Moon in a Zond capsule before Apollo 8 - however, the mission was cancelled when the Proton booster developed cracks whilst sitting on the launch pad, (a problem that also delayed the N1).
Nowadays the Proton is a genuine star - old but very reliable.
a twin with an engine out IS very dangerous because of the risk of losing control authority to the working engine, or of shutting down the good engine in a panic.
Not just a theoretical risk either
Indeed (see the N1), or most tragically the Kegworth disaster here in the UK when the crew shut down the wrong engine of a British Midland 737. They had been dealing with an engine fire and trying to make an emergency landing at East Midlands Airport. For some reason, which has never been clear, both pilots came to the same conclusion which engine needed shutting down. They chose the wrong engine, the plane lost all power and crashed into the M1 motorway, 47 people died, amazingly 79 survived.
Best wishes,
Mike.
It may be possible - it depends if the satellite is orbiting in an inclined orbit like the Shuttle or if it has been injected into an Equatorial orbit ready for transfer to geosynchronous orbit. If it is the latter then the Shuttle could not reach it.
The reason that they will not attempt it is that the Shuttle no longer has permission to handle commercial cargoes. These were all removed as an unnecessary risk following the Challenger disaster. If the Shuttle were to attempt a rendezvous (which it did do with a Hughes satellite that failed to achieve orbit), it would be approaching a satellite with a fully fueled booster. NASA wouldn't countenance sending men close to such a potential bomb.
Best wishes,
Mike.