The Last 10 Days In The Space Shuttle's Bunker?, Atlantis apparently to be scrapped in 2008 |
The Last 10 Days In The Space Shuttle's Bunker?, Atlantis apparently to be scrapped in 2008 |
Guest_BruceMoomaw_* |
Feb 21 2006, 03:05 AM
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Guests |
http://dsc.discovery.com/news/briefs/20060...lantis_spa.html :
"Under orders to retire the shuttle fleet by 2010, NASA plans to cancel shuttle Atlantis' next scheduled overhaul and mothball the ship in 2008. "Rather than becoming a museum piece, however, Atlantis will serve as a spare parts donor for sister ships Discovery and Endeavour to complete assembly of the International Space Station. " 'People are already calling us and asking us can they display one of our orbiters in their museum after we're done. I'm not giving anybody anything until we're all agreed the station is complete and the shuttles' job is done,' shuttle program manager Wayne Hale told Kennedy Space Center employees during a televised address on Friday. " 'We're going to keep (Atlantis) in as near flight-ready condition as we can without putting it through a (modification and overhaul) so we can use those parts,' Hale said. ____________________ Jeffrey Bell has recently finished a piece for "SpaceDaily" proclaiming that the wholesale cancellation of other NASA projects in the FY 2007 budget to keep Shuttle and ISS going is actually just part of Michael Griffin's Machiavellian strategy to get both of the cancelled, by making it clear that they can be saved now only at the cost of a swarm of other projects (including Bush's lunar program) which are now more popular. Certainly that is the overwhelming message being conveyed, whether Griffin planned it that way or not -- I haven't seen a single newspaper editorial yet that favors retaining Shuttle at this point. (Bell also claims to see other, subtler evidence of this strategy in Griffin's moves over the last few weeks -- and also signs that he definitely plans to throw ISS from the train as well, by just giving it to the Russians half-finished in a few years and paying off the ESA and Japan for their unlaunched space lab modules. These include the fact that he's cancelled work on the unmanned cargo variant of the Crew Exploration Vehicle that will be necessary to take up replacement Control Moment Gyros to the ISS after the Shuttle is no longer available.) |
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Feb 21 2006, 08:17 AM
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Founder Group: Chairman Posts: 14434 Joined: 8-February 04 Member No.: 1 |
One of Maggie Thatchers few highlights - not involving the UK in Hermes and infact, despite there being a Union Jack in the ISS, as I understand it, we're not involved in Columbus either. We don't spend much on space here, far far far too little, but what we do spend, at least wasnt poured down that particular black hole...
HOWEVER... I still maintain that the US HAS to complete it's obligation to international partners with ISS. Bush called for international cooperation in the VSE, and he's simply not going to get that if they scew over Japan and Europe with ISS. NASA can do that however it wants - using STS or something else - but it HAS to do it. ITAR makes international cooperation harder now than ever before ( ask the Canadians working on PHX ) - so the US, if it is serious in wanting future involvement with other agencies, HAS to do what it signed up to many many years ago. Reading the excellent 'Titans of Saturn', I'm more convinced of that than ever, I take little notice of what Bell says, he has an agenda in everything he says and interprets everything to support his agenda, it's hard to take him seriously as a result. He occasionally flags up a good point, but rarely more than that, his article reads more like a forum ranting than a piece of journalism. The early Atlantis retirement makes a lot of sense, and shows to me that Griffin really does want to get rid of STS as quickly as is reasonably possible. The scrapping of plans for a cargo CEV shows, perhaps, that he's prepared to take commercial options for shifting smaller loads into orbit (Delta 4, Atlas 5 etc ). An alternate interpretation of that particular piece of evidence. Doug |
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