Endeavour Launch Delayed For At Least 48 Hours

shuz writes "At 10:15 am Eastern time the launch of Endeavour has been scrubbed for a minimum of 48 hours. The scrub is due to two failed Auxiliary Power Unit heaters." The delay is surely a disappointment to the biggest crowds since the Apollo days; let's hope it gets back on track more quickly than Discovery did for its final launch.

Re:Shoestring budget

[DerekLyons]

For eight times the money, the US manages to reach approximate parity with the Russians.

How many probes do the Russians have one the surface of Mars? How many in orbit around it? Or Mercury? How many of the station components have the Russian's delivered?
 
For our budget we do a hell of a lot more than Russians - whose space program consists mostly of a taxi and FedEx service to the station, the GLONASS navigation constellation, and power points outlining their brave new future.
 

This is the result of the badly designed Space Shuttle program which over its lifetime has cost $1.5 billion per launch.

Actually, the Shuttle only costs $250 million to launch (that is, the cost to add a Shuttle mission to the manifest.), the balance is the individual flight's portion of the fixed costs. The funny thing is when you add up the costs of the Soyuz and Proton boosters needed to replace a single Shuttle launch... you come in around $300 million dollars. (Mostly because of the horrible crew:passenger ratio of Soyuz.)