Endeavor Launch Pad Being Rebuilt Piece By Piece 48
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."
Re:Cargo cult? (Score:4, Informative)
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!