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Space

Shuttles Can't Finish Space Station 237

Posted by Zonk from the letting-us-down dept.
Doug Dante writes "The shuttle can't make the 28 flights now planned before it retires in 2010, according to Dr. Michael D. Griffin, the new administrator of NASA. It can only do about 15-23, leaving 5-13 planned missions to alternate lift vehicles. NASA is expected to consult space station partners on alternatives once they are approved by the Bush administration. Should the Space Shuttle be cut loose?"
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Shuttles Can't Finish Space Station More

Shuttles Can't Finish Space Station

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  • Well, ummmm....... (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 18, 2005 @05:23AM (#12850133)
    Is all I gotta say.
    They need to junk those things and buy shiny brand new ones, with lot's of chrome, some bigger thumpers, and an eminem logo custom painted on the fuel pod,yo.

  • Let it run it's course. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Adrilla ( 830520 ) * on Saturday June 18, 2005 @05:24AM (#12850137) Homepage
    Why cut it loose, let it complete the missions that it can, then retire it in a timely fashion, just because it can't do all that is necessary isn't a cause dismiss it entirely.

    • Re:Let it run it's course. (Score:5, Insightful)

      by Gherald ( 682277 ) on Saturday June 18, 2005 @05:53AM (#12850190) Journal
      And meanwhile, start building a better space shuttle.

      We spend all these billions on defense... if we were to scrap 1 or 2 of the least useful weapon systems, we'd have pleny of money to build a new shuttle and either colonize the moon or send someone to mars.

      • Re:Let it run it's course. (Score:5, Interesting)

        by ciroknight ( 601098 ) on Saturday June 18, 2005 @06:14AM (#12850223)
        Why not scrap 5 of the lowest success rate programs and do both at the same time. For that matter, set up a few more launch sites so we can have more than two shuttle crews in space at a time. Having more hands on deck to build ISS could never hurt.

        But, it's a pipe dream. Our government has no interest in space while the war on terror is still in vogue.
        • The US government hasnt really cared about space (or manned space flight specifically) probobly since apollo 17 left the moon.

          • Re:Let it run it's course. (Score:2, Insightful)

            by Anonymous Coward
            They didn't care about it back then either. It was just politically opportune given the whole americo-russian conflict.

        • It takes time to build success. Today's low success weapon is tomorrow's most useful weapon. Often it takes years to perfect the software in a weapon. It takes practice to become a sharp shooter, if the Army would get rid of all but the best they would soon have no sharp shooters as today's best retire. They need to train more all the time. Likewise, today's failure guided missile may be tomorrow's best after the bugs are worked out.

          Now if you had said drop all those old weapons that were once gre

          • Today's low success weapon is tomorrow's most useful weapon.

            Not always. Sometimes today's low success weapon is tomorrow's low success weapon. An excellent example would be the all big gun battleship, which never proved decisive during its entire existence, and nearly bankrupted several of the nations who engaged in the arms races to build them. They sure looked pretty, though. The battlecruisers that were inspired by the limitations on speed of the dreadnoughts were even a greater failure, as the sailors

            • The F-22 seems to be a prime candidate, as it looks like remotely piloted vehicles are rapidly approaching viability and no conceivable enemy has an aircraft more capable than the current generation of fighters.

              But not in air-superiority roles, and I'm leary of depending upon anything that can be nullified by jamming.

              and no conceivable enemy has an aircraft more capable than the current generation of fighters.

              Today.

            • Well of course, but you don't really know until after it is too late. There are clues, but as civilians we do not have access to them. (anyone with access to the clues won't talk, which is correct, but annoying for us trying to make judgments)

              Sometimes a low success is all you have. Maybe we only have a 1 in 10 chance of shooting down an ICBM, but the cost of saving just 1 in 10 cities is worth it. Perhaps too we can increase the chance with a lot of work. All maybes. Diplomacy is nice, but it

        • Not to mention the things NASA has brought to American Technology. TANG alone is worth cost of three shuttles. However on a serious note, NASA works on practical engineering. Their ideas are pirated by every Defense contractor and many other industries. This is the goose that lays golden eggs. Now I am going to go lay down on my Temperpedic bed and drink some TANG.
      • Hear, hear! That way the Chinese and Russians will have a great new shuttle system at their disposal while we Americans lament scrapping those defense systems.
    • It should be cut loose because the value of the missions that are performed on the space station are some of the lowest value for the money spent on them.

      The space station was never about the stuff that actually happened onboard, but about building scientific bridges with Russia. I think that at this point, after they let our guys re-write their economy that getting astrophysicists and exotic engineers to communicate isn't as valuable as it once was.

      Right now its best shot at life is as a rescue vehicl

      • Finally, someone with some sense around here. There is practically no science going on on the space station right now. If we do any work in space, I think it should be for equipment like the hubble, unmanned probes and commercial satellites. Everything else is a huge waste of money, especially given the deficit spending of late.

        There are no good reasons to put people in space other than the political ones, hence China. It's a publicity stunt that is not nearly worth the cost, so I agree with the above
      • The space program in general might be an interesting R&D venture, but I'd rather see my tax dollars going to research to find cheaper, more efficient water purifying techniques, or treatments to stop the spread of AIDS, or perscription drugs, or (ad. nauseum).
        My vote is for developing better energy sources. (And I don't mean ANWR).
      • ...but I'd rather see my tax dollars going to research to find cheaper, more efficient water purifying techniques...

        Funny you should mention that, one of the problems they're working on on ISS right now involves the design of newer, better water purifiers to recycle onboard water. The ISS right now is functioning as a real zero-G test lab for equipment that may eventually accompany a team to Mars -- invaluable research because there is no other way to get that kind of performance data over an extended per

        • The differences between water recycling and surface water purification are not insignificant. You have a very limited set of substances and organisms to clean from the water and a space system is very concerned about size, weight, and ability to function in a zero-g environment, all things that are inapplicable to a municipal water purification system (unless there are poverty stricken populations drinking polluted river water in orbit of which I am not aware, in which case forgive me).

          We all saw the cont

    • Why cut it loose? Because keeping it around costs a huge amount of money, and it won't be doing anything near enough to justify the expense.

      And ISS should be abandoned as well. It also has no purpose justifying the cost of operating it.

  • Junk the Shuttle -- and ISS while you're at it. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday June 18, 2005 @05:27AM (#12850142)
    'm sure many will disagree, but the cost of the shuttle program is horrendous, and NASA's insistence on using it has led to some cataclysmically stupid decisions. One example: the ISS (which is an utter joke compared to Skylab or Mir) was placed into a rapidly-decaying orbit not because that was a good idea (it isn't) but because the shuttle could get there.

    Most of the satellites that are "launched" by the shuttle suffer from the design constraint that they have to fit into the friggin' bay AND have room for the accompanying boosters that will put them into their real orbit once the shuttle lets them out. Again, the shuttle can't go high enough for real deployment.

    The idea of capturing and reparing satellites is inherently absurd; most aren't where the shuttle can get 'em and the total cost of the program utterly dwarfs the expense that would have been incurred had they said of the Hubble "Well, we screwed it up...build another one and get it right this time."

    The safety record sucks. After Challenger Richard Feynman put the probability of a fatal accident at one in fifty. So far, NASA's on the money and the nature of the shuttle is such that if someone dies, everybody dies.

    Lest I be misunderstood, I understand the romantic and scientific appeal of manned space flight, of the visceral sense of satisfaction we can have as a species when we look up to the skies and say "We live there." I'm a strong proponent of that. I also recognize the complaints that the money spent on that is money not spent on (feeding the hungry, housing the homeless, inoculating the sick, fill in your pet cause). The manned space program is hellishly uneconomical and a great deal of that can be laid at the feet of the shuttle program.

    It's a white elephant without a mission, a bastard child of a spacecraft and an airplane which like most gadgets that try to do two fundamentally different things does neither well. Its payload capacity compared to heavy-lift rockets is a joke, it's barely capable of crawling out of the atmosphere, it's presented a tremendous constraint to the rest of the space program by forcing many missions to be less than they could have been in order to be shuttle-doable, and it bears repeating that every fifty flights it kills everyone on board.

    It's time to ground the shuttle fleet permanently. Space isn't going anywhere. Stop pouring the hundreds of millions of dollars into the shuttle program and pour them into a new design effort. Slashdot is full of niggers. Scrap the silly "space-plane" concept and develop a family of lifters and craft that _can_ be used for many things but don't back NASA into a corner that forces them to use it for all missions. Make crew safety an inherent feature (recognizing that there are tradeoffs and that getting out of the gravity well is a fundamentally dangerous activity). Stop throwing good money after bad on that trinity dies ISS as well, and use the collective resources of the two programs to start over. It's not true that the second design is always better than the first (see again ISS and Mir/Skylab) but you're wise to play those odds.

    Let's do it over. And do it right.

    • Re:Junk the Shuttle -- and ISS while you're at it. (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Stop pouring the hundreds of millions of dollars into the shuttle program and pour them into a new design effort. Slashdot is full of niggers.

      A subtle troll? A troll nontheless...
    • Slashdot is full of niggers. Scrap the silly "space-plane" concept and develop a family of lifters and craft that _can_ be used for many things but don't back NASA into a corner that forces them to use it for all missions. Make crew safety an inherent feature (recognizing that there are tradeoffs and that getting out of the gravity well is a fundamentally dangerous activity). Stop throwing good money after bad on that trinity dies ISS as well, and use the collective resources of the two programs to start o
    • Some good points, and I was all set to mod up - until you brought out the "N word"

  • Urgh (Score:2)

    by m50d ( 797211 )
    Evil registration requiring link, and pretending to be googlebot doesn't work.

  • Bring back Energia! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by m50d ( 797211 ) on Saturday June 18, 2005 @05:41AM (#12850169) Homepage Journal
    Seriously, the Russians must have some form of heavy-lift capability, if not currently operational then one they can get out of mothballs fairly quickly, no?

  • Shuttle C? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by raptor_87 ( 881471 )
    Is there any chance that a few (unmanned) shuttle C flights could be used to launch the remaining pieces of the ISS? Or would it take too much time&money to build a few shuttle C orbiters? =/
    • lol the shuttle C isn't an orbiter. It's a one time type of thing, it doesn't return back to earth =)

      AFAIK I believe Griffin is actually planning on shifting the current shuttle production lines to produce the Shuttle C for heavy lift. 100+ tons into orbit with a Shuttle C =)

      I mean, why waste what we already have? The space shuttle stack is as powerful as the Saturn V stack!
      • There isn't a solid plan yet, however Griffin is very interested in the concept. I suspect he'll request a new study on it before summers end. I single Shuttle Derived Vehicle (SDV) launch could put a large portion of the space stations components in orbit in a single launch. Then just fly the astronauts up to ISS in the CEV and let them do the assembly work.

  • The Way to Go (Score:2, Interesting)

    by PakProtector ( 115173 )

    What we need to do is establish a base on the moon.

    It would require reinvention of heavy launch capabilities, such as Saturn V rockets (which embarassingly, the blueprints for which were 'lost' in a NASA 'housecleaning' exercise) to get material and personnel onto the moon.

    We will need shelter, which could be domes on the surface, or domes which could be buried or half-buried in the lunar surface to provide extra protection against Radiation. We will also need the ability to grow food, such as a greenhou

    • Lost Blueprints. (Score:3, Informative)

      by torpor ( 458 )

      The blueprints for the Saturn V were *NOT* lost. They are on micro-film at Marshall Space Flight Center. They're not going to be terribly useful: rocket-science has come a loooong way since the 70's, courtsey of a few other sciences (materials/manufacturing).

    • Saturn V (Score:5, Informative)

      by drxray ( 839725 ) on Saturday June 18, 2005 @06:10AM (#12850216) Homepage
      from sci.space via skepticfiles.org [skepticfiles.org].

      Despite a widespread belief to the contrary, the Saturn V blueprints
      have not been lost. They are kept at Marshall Space Flight Center on
      microfilm.

      The problem in re-creating the Saturn V is not finding the drawings, it
      is finding vendors who can supply mid-1960's vintage hardware (like
      guidance system components), and the fact that the launch pads and VAB
      have been converted to Space Shuttle use, so you have no place to launch
      from.


      Also, I think the moon is fairly low in metals, so mining it to build spacecraft isn't a great plan unless you want to build them out of rock. Building a moonbase by remote control would be pretty awesome though.
      • Metals aren't hard to find on the moon; silicon, titanium, aluminum, iron, magnesium, calcium, and sodium were all found in oxide forms in the rock and regolith samples brought back by the Apollo missions.

        What's rare on the moon are the elements vital to life, primarily hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen, with less essential elements like sulfur and phosphorus not exactly on the plentiful side, either.

        • All of which are elements common in the Earth's crust, if I recall correctly, and I believe that said samples were one of the key pieces of evidence that added weight to the theory that the moon was created when another proto-planet crashed into the Earth early during its formation -- the debris, largely from the crust, reconstituted itself in orbit into a satellite (or, more aptly, Luna and Terra should be called a Binary Planet...)

          But anyway, thank your for supporting my contention that all the essential

      • Re:Saturn V (Score:3, Interesting)

        by pfdietz ( 33112 )
        Building spacecraft on the moon is not something that will be done soon. Not because metals are scarce, but because spacecraft are complicated devices that require enormous industrial infrastructure behind them. You're not going to transplant that industry to the moon anytime soon, and you're not going to save money (even considering launch costs) when the cost of labor on the moon will be many orders of magnitude higher than on Earth.

        Somethings we may see sooner are mining the moon for propellant (lunar

        • Re:Saturn V (Score:3, Interesting)

          by sjames ( 1099 )

          Building spacecraft on the moon is not something that will be done soon. Not because metals are scarce, but because spacecraft are complicated devices that require enormous industrial infrastructure behind them. You're not going to transplant that industry to the moon anytime soon, and you're not going to save money (even considering launch costs) when the cost of labor on the moon will be many orders of magnitude higher than on Earth.

          It's not going to happen in the next 5 years, but there are significa

      • Also, I think the moon is fairly low in metals, so mining it to build spacecraft isn't a great plan unless you want to build them out of rock. Building a moonbase by remote control would be pretty awesome though.

        The moon does have water though, so perhaps we could build a large chunk of the base out of concrete with fibreglass instead of rebar as it's cheaper to transport?
    • The story that NASA lost the Saturn V blueprints is an urban legend.
    • you can lose as many blueprints as you want... as long as the master drawings that are used for the contact prints are still around you can just run off a fresh set...
    • the true purpose of a moon base would be to mine materials from the Moon itself that could be used in the construction of spacecraft which can neither be built nor launched from the surface of the earth, due to the High Gravity Well

      So let me get this straight: you propose to lift thousands of tons of exploration equipment to the moon, along with a bunch of geologists who have to find good stuff to mine, and then lift tens of thousands of tons of mining and mineral processing equipment to the moon, along

      • Let me get this straight: You want me to take all this gold I have, and use it to get you three ships, a whole bunch of sailors to crew those ships, expensive navigation equipment, food for a voyage you don't know how long it will take, all to travel to a place that might not even exist. You want me to spend all that gold, so I can get even more gold, but you're not even sure if I can get the gold back in the first place?

        Colombus, you're a boob.

        Yeah. That is exactly what I'm saying parent. The point i

      • Yes, you have it more or less correct. You will have to launch up to a million tons of stuff off the Earth (as a source of volatiles, labor and precision equipment) in order to create an industry upon the Lunar surface that will be capable of launching seemingly endless billions of tons into LEO, Cislunar and Interplanetary space for the purposes of conducting a space-faring civilization.

        In short, you will have to make a significant investment in order to gain returns over a long time. I'm sure this is

  • Christ yes! (Score:4, Insightful)

    by william_w_bush ( 817571 ) on Saturday June 18, 2005 @05:46AM (#12850177)
    Jesus let this $1B a launch albatross sleep in the deepest oceans. We spend more maintaining and compensating for its way overbuilt and ancient design than we do on the missions it's sent on. That and it's starting to get the smell of the old carnival ride "death trap", which no matter how many times you hose out, still smells funny.

    Please, let this abomination of attempted Reaganomics and the Cold War die and stop sucking away our already pathetic space budget. The space shuttle has been the biggest obstacle to our conquest of space for the last 25 years, and that's just sad.

    p.s. what moron designs the next generation space vehicle that is so advanced it cannot go to the moon or basically do much of anything besides flop around in orbit for a few days? Do we also design submarines that can't go into the ocean?

    • Re:Christ yes! (Score:3, Insightful)

      by pjt48108 ( 321212 )
      The space shuttle has been the biggest obstacle to our conquest of space for the last 25 years, and that's just sad.

      Actually, the biggest obstacle has been not the shuttle, but the myopia of our leaders and the people who elect them. There is a pervasive belief that we can't spend another dime on space travel, exploration, and development.

      If this nation REALLY wanted to move beyond the shuttle, there is money for it, many times over. But a great many entrenched interests will have to give up their pork
  • Whatever you might think about the "Bush vision for space" the focus of that vision is from earth orbit outwards. The part of the journey from surface to earth orbit should be bought from commercial providers. This market is already waking up. Just imagine what a big client like NASA will do to launch costs.

    NASA, get out of the launch business!

    But no. They are now planning their own new shuttle-derived launch vehicle [spaceref.com].
    • A shuttle derived heavy lift vehical may make sense. It's worth noting that no commercial launch vehical can lift more than ~25 tonnes into LEO. (and rather less on an earth escape trajectory) For a manned Moon or Mars mission, you need the equivalent of 100-150 tonnes to LEO, assuming that you are going with a lightweight (eg: Mars Direct) program.
      • For a manned Moon or Mars mission, you need the equivalent of 100-150 tonnes to LEO

        Who says you have to lob it up in one piece? In fact, orbital assembly isn't really necessary: most of that weight is going to be fuel anyway. Fuel can be divided down into any size you like for multiple launches.

        Fuel is the ideal commdity for orbital delivery by multiple competing commercial providers that have different payload capacities. The only thing that counts is cost per lb to orbit, not what size or shape of pack
      • A Shuttle-derived heavy-lifter vehicle is actually a bit mis-named. It is not derived from the Shuttle itself; it's instead derived from a launch platform that has much of the Shuttle removed. What is most important are the Shuttle main engines. They are marvels of modern engineering, and a lot of Shuttle investment was spent to simply develop them. We should think of those engines are the modern Saturn lifters, and we should use them as such.

        A derived vehicle will simply be a large (100ton+ capacity
    • Let SpaceX do unmanned launch services for relativly cheap and tSpace (Scaled Composites) fly the manned payloads. Even better have them both compete with each other and others for cheap space access.

  • Pay Attention: This Is Old News (Score:5, Interesting)

    by reallocate ( 142797 ) on Saturday June 18, 2005 @06:01AM (#12850201)
    >> Should the Space Shuttle be cut loose?

    Pay attention. That's been the plan for some time. It's been in all the news, you know.

    The CEV will succeed, not replace, the Shuttle. When the CEV flies, the Shuttle stops flying. If ISS construction continues after that, it will need to be with redesigned payloads launched on new vehicles.

    Even if the CEV was not in the works, the Shuttle is approaching the date at which the entire system would need to be requalified for flight. That would be very expensive. the Administration has no intention of asking for those funds and Congress has no intention of providing those funds for a vehicle that is considered fundamentally flawed.

    Don't lament the future of the Shuttle of the ISS. Both served to justify the existene of the other. Now that NASA has a real mission with real targets, the Shuttle isn't very relevant.

  • YES (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Konster ( 252488 ) on Saturday June 18, 2005 @06:17AM (#12850228)
    "What we need to do is establish a base on the moon."

    Because, as you all know, building an orbital station with the collective strengths of many nations has been a roaring success. Oh wait.

  • Just deorbit the barrel of pork... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Eukariote ( 881204 ) on Saturday June 18, 2005 @06:22AM (#12850235)

    ...and kill the shuttle too. Seriously. The international space station is useless pile of orbiting pork. It represents how the US subsidizes industry. No real science gets done up there. The last few years it had only a skeleton crew, barely sufficient for maintenance work.

    Kill it. Kill it now. It will free up tens of billions. The shuttle flights alone are $500-800 million a pop. Put the money into real space science and development of cheap launch systems.

    Oh wait! Looks like http://www.spacex.com/ [spacex.com] is already doing the latter. With private money. Why not go with them? Well, cause that robs the US of an instrument of industrial policy: order way-too-expensive space systems from Boeing and blame the Europeans for subsidizing Airbus.

    • The ISS is most definitely not useless. It is essentially the world's only permanent microgravity laboratory. In addition, if the station reaches assembly-complete, it would have low-g capabilities a la the Centrifuge Accommodation Module (CAM). Not only should we have the CAM installed, but we are obliged to. The Japanese agreed to fabricate the CAM only if the USA would provide its lift to the ISS. As of now, the completed CAM is sitting in Florida collecting dust. It would be an international gaffe
    • There's a slight difference between SpaceX and the Shuttle. SpaceX's current launch vehicle, the Falcon I, can carry only 580 kg--1,276 lbs--to the space station. Their Falcon V, which is supposed to fly sometime next year, is supposed to be able to carry 5,450 kg--nearly 12,000 lbs--to the space station. The space shuttle can carry, by comparison, 65,000 lbs--more than 5 times as much.

      Call me when SpaceX has a comparable vehicle, and we can start talking.
  • And get someone else to do the job.

  • politics (Score:2, Insightful)

    by rctay ( 718547 )
    Look at the US states were NASA has a large presence. Count the electoral votes they represent. Do you really thing the US Congress or President is going to slash and burn that much federal pork until a substitute is found. What the hell do you thing this new trip to the moon and beyond is about? Washington has no interest in exploration, just protecting their power.
    • Spot on target!

      But since the Dubya regime can't kill NASA, the
      administration intends to usurp its mission --
      civilian space exploration and the answers to
      questions of pure science. Dubya replaced one
      neo-con lacky NASA administrator with another
      from USAF Space Command. This administration
      and the US military-industrial complex wants an
      autonomous robotic military space presence, and
      developing those capabilities takes deep pockets.
      Since the US military is so heavily invested in
      the Iraq (oil) war, it makes sen
  • Manufacture 4 energya rockets. Each capable of handling cargo+smaller stearing truster to handle a mission that would of taken 3 shuttle launches.

  • Reality check (Score:2, Insightful)

    by Black Parrot ( 19622 )

    So, we're going to build a base on the moon with non-existent transport, when we can't even finish the ISS with transport we actually have?

    The moon base will never happen. The trip to Mars as currently conceived won't ever happen. All we've got now is a faith-based space program to go along with our faith-based anti-missile defense, our faith-based homeland security plan, and our faith-based social security plan. Our national decision makers are completely out of touch with reality.

  • each flight costs $500 million! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by distantbody ( 852269 ) on Saturday June 18, 2005 @07:43AM (#12850373) Journal
    The space shuttle program was ruined in its early days by too many government/military/nasa requirements, in short they wanted it to be a "jack of all trades", but because most of the shuttles functionality and specifications are rarely used, it turned out to be "a master of none" because of all the bloat. each flight costs in the order of $500 million rather than initial projections of $10 to $20 million!

    The Crew Exploration Vehicle appears to be on the right track, just as the shuttle concept was, lets just hope they dont make the same mistakes again! oh well, if they mess this one up too we can always look forward to the future European EADS Phoenix reusable launch vehicle!



    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_shuttle [wikipedia.org] Read how the shuttle designers were forced to compromise because of poor funding, and how that initial 'saving' has turned into another allmighty cost blowout. Those near-sighted politicians!!

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EADS_Phoenix [wikipedia.org] What the shuttle should have been. Leave it up to the Europeans to get it right!

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_exploration_ve hicle Congress/US Defence force, don't stuff this one up, k thnx

    • Re:each flight costs $500 million! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by tjic ( 530860 ) on Saturday June 18, 2005 @09:37AM (#12850815) Homepage
      Leave it up to the Europeans to get it right

      You yourself said that the shuttle was a reasonable idea when it was early on the drawing board, and it went bad as the project came to fruition...and now you're comparing the ACTUAL American shuttle to a THEORETICAL European shuttle.

      The theoretical ANYTHING is always better than the actual ANYTHING.

      If the ESA ever gets a shuttle up and running, then we can compare apples to apples.

      Until then, your argument holds no water. It's like saying "the party I'm thinking about having is better than that party that you actually had, because your party sounded good, but then when you actually held it, things went wrong".

    • Re:each flight costs $500 million! (Score:4, Insightful)

      by pfdietz ( 33112 ) on Saturday June 18, 2005 @10:22AM (#12851047)
      > The space shuttle program was ruined in its early days by too many government/military/nasa requirements,

      But it *had* to do that. The economic case for the shuttle only made sense if you launched it a lot (remember those 50 flights/year projections?), and that required that it serviced as many markets as possible (real and imaginary).

      If it had been tailored to a specific purpose, its launch rate would have been far too low to ever recoup its development cost. As it was, this was the case anyway.

      The correct decision would have been to do what the Soviets did and continue to incrementally improve expendable launchers.
  • Seriously, they have a solid space program. What's the exchange rate like these days?

  • Wrong Question (Score:3, Insightful)

    by luna69 ( 529007 ) * on Saturday June 18, 2005 @08:14AM (#12850469)
    > Should the Space Shuttle be cut loose?"

    Perhaps...but there's a better solution: cut the STATION loose.

    ISS has been a big hole in the sky into which we pour money that would be better off spent on alternative manned programs and pure science. With two people onboard, essentially zero science is being done up there, or was being done prior to shuttle flight delays.

    NASA ought to return to its strengths: scientific exploration and exploratory manned programs (Mars, Moon). Sitting in low Earth orbit, watching seeds sprout in microgravity while being fed by expensive Soyuz and SST flights is simply a waste.
  • What we need is something like a Crew Entry Vehicle, but really more like the Shuttle EXCEPT it cannot carry much in the way of cargo. Of course, the Russians are already working on a similar replacement for their aging, though practical, Soyuz ferry [russianspaceweb.com], so maybe this is an opportunity for Russia and the US (nay, more international partners) to chip in together on a common crew ferry.

    There are plenty of light and medium-lift boosters. The ESA has it down with their Ariane rockets, though they haven't much to
  • ... is how can the shuttle even think of retiring with the social security system the way it is right now.
  • A collosal waste of money on a poorly conceived project with even worse execution.
  • Manned exploration in general, and the Shuttle specifically, just isn't practical as long as the flight technology depends upon Newton's Third Law.

    As long as we are using any form of propuslion employing the Third Law manned missions will NEVER match the economies and returns, financial, technical or scientific, for robotic explorers.

    Adding a human to the payload of the missions to Jupiter, Saturn, or the asteroids would have put those missions out of reach for even the American economy even if there were
    • Especially when we begin to feel the pinch of fossil fuel exhaustion, which in now in the early stages.

      There is now more known oil in the world than there has even been before. We are no where near the end of fosil fuel production. The only thing that *might* (and that's a BIG might) be near exhaustion is easy access to high quality (low sulfer) oil supplies. And the primary reason why fuel production from low quality oil is a problem is because we only have a couple of plants that can process it. Th

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