Jeffrey F. Bell, in an op-ed in Space Daily, says what I have been saying for years; that it is time to retire the fundamentally-flawed Space Shuttle fleet:
"Today, the dwindling army of Shuttle cheerleaders are talking about yet more studies, yet more safety upgrades, yet more money and time dumped into this gaping black hole. We should ignore them.
There simply is no modification or upgrade that can make the Shuttle system acceptably safe from debris strikes. The original design decision to place a fragile heatshield alongside a foam-covered cryogenic tank and fly them at supersonic speeds was wrong. The whole history of aerospace craft tells us that this kind of basic design error can never be fixed by retrospective band-aid modifications.
And why bother? The only thing we can get in return for the $25-30B now budgeted for Shuttle operations between now and 2010 is more heartache and more delays in the new space initiative. Every day that Shuttle cancellation is put off, another $15,000,000 is wasted and the return of humans to the moon is delayed by another day."
He also points out that Mike Griffin has stated that there will be only another 16-20 Shuttle missions, rather than the 28 needed to finish the International
With this reduced workload, the Station will never have the functionality that is its raison d'etre. It will never be a useful laboratory in space, with the crew spending all their time simply maintaining the station. Even with this reduced workload, there is a high probability of the loss of another orbiter (based on the age of the fleet and the badly flawed design).
Technorati Tags: Space, NASA, Space Shuttle, International Space Station
1 comment:
Well, the United States isn't the only nation on earth that can explore space. The Russians launch men into space regularly. The Chinese have launched men into orbit and are currently training female astronauts. And the European Space Agency (ie mostly France and Geermany) have launched tons of stuff, and currently have a satellite orbiting Mars. The Ukraine makes Dnepr rockets.
However, I'd really like for everyone to get away from the idea that it takes a nation to launch stuff into space. Burt Rutan proved last year that private companies can do it too, and much less expensively: the $26 million spent on Space Ship One paid for the research and development of the ship plus three flights to suborbital space, whereas the rocket that sent Alan Shepard to suborbital space cost $80 million (both figures in 2004 dollars).
Elon Musk of SpaceX is about to show (sometime this year) that he can send a rocket into orbit for much less than NASA can do it too.
BTW, there's nothing wrong with reading Arthur C. Clarke. He came up with the idea of Geostationary orbits, upon which so much of our communications is dependent today. Read some Robert A. Heinlein too.
Post a Comment