Lacking Buyers, NASA Cuts Prices On Shuttles and Old Engines 131
Hugh Pickens writes "Russia's Space Shuttle, Buran, ended its days at a theme park in Moscow and was once offered for sale on the Internet for 3 million dollars. Now the NY Times reports that when the National Aeronautics and Space Administration put out the call in December 2008 seeking buyers for US shuttles from museums, schools and elsewhere, the agency didn't get as much interest as expected, so now NASA has slashed the price of the 1970s-era spaceships, available for sale this fall once their flying days are over, from $42 million to just $28.8 million apiece. 'We're confident that we'll get other takers,' says agency spokesman Mike Curie. The Discovery is already promised to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum but the Atlantis and the Endeavour are still up for grabs and it is possible that the Enterprise, a shuttle prototype that never made it to space, will also be available. The lower price is based on NASA's estimate of the cost for transporting a shuttle from Kennedy Space Center to a major airport, and for displaying it indoors in a climate-controlled building. As for the space shuttle main engines, those are now free. NASA advertised them in December 2008 for $400,000 to $800,000 each, but no one expressed interest. So now the engines are available, along with other shuttle artifacts, for the cost of transportation and handling."
Re:Hollywood? (Score:4, Insightful)
I suspect you can build a set that looks like the inside of the shuttle for a lot less than the shuttle itself. And the exterior shots I figure you can do with archive footage for flying and bluescreen for boarding/leaving. Hell, it might even be cheaper with CGI, and it sounds like your movies will have plenty of it unless you want to take it into space again.
Keep them for reference (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:What about already submitted proposals? (Score:3, Insightful)
If Kennedy wants it, they should get it.
Re:Keep them for reference (Score:4, Insightful)
This is crazy. It is as if a software engineer instead of implementing a new algorithm would wrap old LAPACK functions written in Fortran, oh wait ...
Re:Eternal glory awaits the astronaut farmer (Score:3, Insightful)
The problem is getting these to orbit costs more than any of them whole.
Likely, you'd be better off designing one from scratch. That's why they are getting scrapped too...
Re:There would be international buyers I am sure (Score:4, Insightful)
You see this situation all the time with miliary/government surplus.
For a hundred bucks or even less, you can pick up all kinds of neat surplus gizmos that Uncle Sam paid thousands and thousands of dollars for. The reason is that the gizmo is sure to perform some highly demanding task that nobody has any use for except in the exact original application. That's why you don't see cheap surplus trucks or aircraft -- lots of people have a use for that kind of stuff. The "bargain" stuff is more likely to be an assembly used to collimate the target sights for a huge and obsolete field artillery piece, or an oddball large format camera (sans lens) designed fit in the nose of a 1960s era fighter plane.
If you buy this kind of stuff, you are almost certainly doing it for one of two reasons. Either it's as a conversation piece, or you're taking it apart for things like lenses, mirrors and such. You don't need any of the things that made the gizmo expensive. Neither does anyone else.
That's the situation for the SSME. IIRC, it's an outstanding engine, but it's most important characteristic is that it is reusable. It has a remarkable track record of success at that, but you'd have to be building a reusable launch vehicle to want that. In other words the only people who'd have a use for this thing would be people building their own shuttle.
Maybe if you wanted to build *one* disposable rocket, you might find this thing a bargain. But who in their mind would want to do that? You achieve economy on a disposable rocket by building lots of nearly identical copies. For that you don't give a damn about getting the first engine cheap. You want an engine that is cheap to build over and over again, which of course the SSME wasn't designed to be. Even *we* have no use for these things, even though we intend to build a shuttle replacement.