Section: Space Shuttle
Space Shuttle Atlantis is poised to launch to the International Space Station, and NASA is hosting a Twitter meet-up, or tweet-up, at the launch.
If you’re one of the 150 lucky invitees attending the shuttle launch as guests of NASA, I can tell you from personal experience that you are in for a huge treat. This is only the second time that NASA has opened the gates of Kennedy Space Center to space tweeps for a shuttle launch. By very good fortune, I was there for the first.
The confirmation email arrived while I was at work. I could hardly believe it; in fact I briefly entertained the thought that it was a prank on the part of some of my colleagues. But it was official: I was invited to attend the launch of STS-129. In no time at all I went from “hmmm, it’s a long way to go” (I live in Christchurch, New Zealand) to arranging leave and airline tickets. It was the chance of a lifetime, and as my very understanding partner explained it, “Don’t be an idiot, of course you have to go!”
100 New Friends
On the first day of the Tweet-Up we all met in the parking lot outside the Kennedy Space Center Visitor’s complex. I spotted the first of the other space tweeps while walking from my rental car to the registration table, and we quickly fell into conversation. One of the neatest things about the whole two day event was that whoever you talked to, you made a friend. The space tweeps were some of the most genuinely friendly people I have had occasion to meet. They came from all walks of life – teachers, IT people, an astrophysicist or two, a film-maker, even a couple of NASA employees. But no matter who you talked to, you had an instant common interest. By the end of the first day, when some 30 or 40 of us descended en masse on an unsuspecting Titusville restaurant, I felt like I had made 100 new friends.
One thing I didn’t do that I later regretted was to make up some contact detail cards to give out to the people I met. I had thought about it, but ran out of time before I traveled. Others had not only thought about it, but done it, and it proved to be a great way to swap contact details. Photographing people’s NASA-issued ID badges (with their permission, of course) was another good way of remembering faces, names and twitter handles.
Once we were registered on that first day, we had about half an hour to kill before the official kickoff at the Kurt H Debus Conference Facility. That was just as well, because the first thing you see as you walk toward the visitor complex is a tantalizing view of the rocket garden. After a quick reconnoiter of Titans and Atlases and a Saturn 1B, I discovered that the conference facility itself hosts the Early Space Exploration exhibit, which is well worth taking some time over. Not only does it have Neil Armstrong’s Apollo space-suit, but Gemini and Mercury capsules, and a lot more, including the original Mercury mission control consoles. Standing next to the space capsules, you really get an appreciation of how small and cramped they are. Frank Borman and Jim Lovell spent two weeks in orbit wedged shoulder to shoulder in a Gemini capsule, to prove that people could survive in space for the length of time it would take to get to the Moon and back. How they did it and stayed sane, I will never know. It’s a cliché to talk about the courage and endurance of astronauts, but it’s become a cliché because it’s the truth. I could have spent a lot longer looking through the exhibits (and did a couple of days later after the tweetup), but it was time for the day’s main event.
A piece of ‘frozen smoke’ - Part of the aerogel particle collector from the Stardust mission
We were all ushered into the conference room, which was set up with a number of round tables, so that we all sat in groups, and a small stage at the front for the speakers. Each table had an unusual object on it, some stranger than others, and we were invited to guess what they were. My table’s object was pretty easy – a Space Shuttle thermal protection tile. We all passed it round and felt how light it was. I’m still amazed at the thought that I got to hold a piece of the shuttle in my hand. Another table had one of the hold-down bolts that pins each shuttle solid rocket booster to the pad before lift-off. Probably the coolest one was a piece of aerogel, a small blue-ish cube of quite literally the lightest solid material imaginable. Aerogel is often referred to as ‘frozen smoke’, as it is 99 percent empty space. What made this particular sample so cool is that it was part of the particle collector from the Stardust space mission – it had traveled several million miles away from the Earth, collected samples of interstellar dust, and returned in its unmanned probe, and NASA was letting us hold a piece of it!
The ‘twitter-fall’ of of real-time tweets from #NASATweetUp
Next up was a series of talks from NASA officials, including astronaut Mike Massimino, and Wayne Hale, a former shuttle flight director, then shuttle program manager, now deputy associate administrator for strategic partnerships. When these guys spoke, everyone listened, and the stories they told were fascinating. Of course, this was a room full of twitter users, so the way everyone listened was heads down, keyboards out, and typing furiously. A twitter-fall of all the tweets in real time was projected onto large screens at the front of the room. Occasionally, the real-time feedback to the speakers was hilarious. “Oh- ok, so I know you’re all listening, even though no-one’s looking at me, because I just saw what I was saying on the wall!” With 100 people tweeting solidly all morning, the #NASATweetUp certainly got noticed in the Twitterverse - at one point we rose to number three on the trending topics.
The lunchtime break was a great time to explore the KSC visitor complex, and many of us tried out the Shuttle Launch Experience ride. Some of us more than once  And I suspect that the hundred of us put a noticeable blip into the gift shop’s sales figures for that day.
Tour to the Launch Pad
In the afternoon we boarded buses for a tour of the space center. Where I was really hit home for me as the bus turned a corner and the iconic towering bulk of the Vertical Assembly Building came into view in the distance. The bus continued on, and the VAB grew larger - and larger - and larger. That building is huge! I’d seen it so many times in pictures and on NASA TV, and now I was actually there. I could just imagine a giant Saturn V rocket emerging slowly from one of those massively tall hangar doors. Now, it houses the shuttles as they are stacked in preparation for flight.
Nestled at the base of the VAB is the launch control center, containing the firing rooms from which the complex process of launching a shuttle is directed. The bus continued on past that, to the dock where barges bring the big orange External Tanks from their assembly facility in Michoud. From there we went past the crawler park, where the tracked crawler transporters live when they are not taking a shuttle stack out to the launch pad (or in days gone by, a Saturn V moon rocket). Just past the crawlers, we saw several as-yet-unstacked sections of the launch gantry being assesmbled for the new Ares rocket, then we were on a road running parallel to the crawlerway, out toward the launch pads. We were on our way to meet shuttle Atlantis. About half-way to the pad, we passed a gantry-like building on our right, and our tour guide explained that that was the viewing platform from which members of the public were allowed to see the shuttle at the launch pad. But our bus kept on going right past it.
Shuttle Atlantis on the launch pad, mostly obscured by the rotating service structure
We got out of our buses, into a roped-off grassy viewing area, just across the road from the space shuttle on its launch pad. I stood and gaped for a while. Even mostly hidden within its rotating service structure, the shuttle stack was a thing of awe. Today it sat silent, waiting, being prepared and checked out for flight. Tomorrow its engines would roar for eight short minutes, and then it would be in space, traveling round the world at eighteen thousand miles per hour.
Launch Day
For launch day, we were all to assemble at KARS park, from which we would be bused to KSC proper and the press site where our tweet-up marquee was. We all thought the traffic would be terrible, and no one wanted to miss the buses. Consequently, we were all there far too early – some of us well over an hour – and a bit of an impromptu tailgate party ensued while we waited. Eventually the buses came, and we were taken to the press area just behind the VAB, with the grassy area in front of the countdown clock that you often see on NASA TV, and a view of the shuttle on the pad in the distance out beyond that.
Twitter Central with the Vertical Assembly Building in the background
We were once again well catered for, in a marquee with full wireless connectivity and streaming NASA TV on two large flatscreen displays at the front of the room. Outside, we got to mingle with all the press representatives who had come to cover the launch. Once again there were a series of talks, this time from the guys who prepare the shuttle for launch. You could tell these folks loved their jobs (and who wouldn’t). We learned all about the shuttle systems, right down to how the hatch is sealed when closing the astronauts in for the flight.
At the beginning of the day, conditions were looking iffy for launch - there was a layer of cloud, the likes of which had caused launch postponements in the past. We all told each other that it would burn off before the mid-afternoon launch time. We all hoped that we were right. Luckily, we were.
The launch of a space shuttle is a true spectacle. We were as close as you can get to the launch, without being in one of the rescue armored personnel carriers parked a little further up the crawlerway. That’s still four miles from the pad. They keep you that far away for a good reason: the energies released are gargantuan. First there is bright light, and the distant shuttle rises noiselessly and slowly into the air. It picks up speed, trailing a magnesium-bright flare of white-hot rocket exhaust atop a pillar of white smoke. Then the sound finally hits you, a rumbling, crackling roar that seems to intensify as the shuttle climbs higher and arcs over away from you, till it seems that its mighty engines are pointed right at you. Then the sound fades, you can just make out the solid rocket boosters separating, and the rapidly receding shuttle is just a bright point, well on its way to space. Then everyone is quiet, and contemplative, and you take a moment to reflect on the fact that what you just saw was a machine made by people, harnessing tamed energies equivalent to a small nuclear bomb, with courageous astronauts riding inside it, and while you’ve been thinking about that, they are already floating weightless in space. It’s a profound and amazing experience, and there aren’t really words to do it justice.
Unless you’re seriously into cameras, don’t spend the launch hiding behind a viewfinder. Put all your gadgets down at t-10 or so, and just watch, and listen, and drink in the experience. If, as the shuttle arcs skyward, you find yourself swallowing a lump in your throat, or blinking away a tear, don’t worry about it, you’ll be in good company.
Freedom star and the return of the solid rocket boosters
I’m not normally a pessimist, but I’ve followed the Shuttle long enough to know that there is no guarantee of an on-time launch. Because I was coming from so far away, I was determined that I would see the thing launch even if it were delayed, and so I planned my trip to stay in Cocoa for several days after the nominal launch date.
Perhaps because I was so well prepared for delays, it was a flawless countdown and on-time launch. Not only did it give me a chance to visit the Orlando theme parks, but it had one unexpected side benefit: On the Thursday morning after the Monday launch, the booster recovery ships returned to port, towing the two white solid rocket boosters that had lofted Atlantis for the first two minutes of her journey to orbit. To get back to the processing facility, they have to come through the lock at Port Canaveral, which is a perfect time to catch them for a photo:
The Freedom Star and a Shuttle Solid Rocket Booster
It meant an early start on a cold morning, but sure enough, the booster recovery ship Freedom Star came gliding past, with Atlantis’ right hand solid rocket booster in tow.
[Update 5/15 - Somehow, I managed to get my wires crossed. STS-129 was Atlantis, not Discovery. Corrected]
Hey there folks, Rob the many-Moons-ago OotC founder here. (Sorry, Ken, Lunar Library pun very definitely intended ::vbg::)
I still check in on the place regularly, and I have to say I’ve been really impressed with what Ken’s been doing. Someone at NASA must have been as well: Recently, we got invited to attend the STS-129 Shuttle launch Tweet Up and Blogger meeting. Ken couldn’t make it because of LEAG, so with his permission I took the opportunity to travel over from my home base, New Zealand, and represent OotC at the launch.
Which I have to say is a pretty darn cool thing to get to do!
You can follow our coverage of the launch on Twitter via @RobOotC, and also here at the website. Hopefully you’ll get an interesting perspective from a first-time Shuttle launch watcher, and visitor to KSC.
Tomorrow the hundred NASATweetUp guests will be meeting at Kennedy Space Center for the first day of the tweetup event, and a guided tour of KSC. Then on Monday we get to live-tweet the launch (if that’s the right term) from the KSC press area beside the big countdown clock you often see on NASA TV.
Tune in for more over the next few days!
Howdy Everyone! Welcome back to The Carnival of Space, which stops again here at Out of the Cradle with an all new show, its 31st ever!
[Update: Thanks to Alan Boyle at Cosmic Log for the heads-up on the broken links. They should all work now]
I’m Ken Murphy, the Lunar Librarian here at Out of the Cradle and your guest Ringmaster for this week. We’ve got an exciting show lined up, so let’s get started and blast off to Cislunar Space.
READ MORE…
50 years to the day after the space race began, the US Senate has voted to commit an extra billion dollars to NASA’s budget.
…because there isn’t a shower.
“Sweat doesn’t fall of you. The water just accumulates until it gets too big and agitated and falls off like a sphere of water. It then floats around until it hits something. It takes a lot of water to fall off.” Imagine huge water balls of sweat bouncing and crashing around mid-air.
Um, yuk. Especially when you take into account that the station crews have to spend an appreciable portion of each day exercising to keep healthy in zero-g. I’m sure the mechanics of making a shower work in microgravity are tricky (the toilet is bad enough), but this sure sounds like a human factors problem waiting for a solution. I wonder what floating globs of sweat do to station electronics?
Good to see that construction on the ISS is continuing, although not without some hiccups. There was a problem with the command and control computers in the Russian segment - all six crashed simultaneously, a failure that must have really gotten the attention of everybody on board, and everybody in mission control. Four days of troubleshooting led to a work-around that has the computers back up and operational, but the work-around leaves me a little uneasy. The exact source of the problem is still under investigation, but the immediate symptom was that the surge protection on the computers’ power supply would trip. The ‘fix’ was to have the ISS crew use jumper cables to bypass the surge protectors.
I’m sure that’s a configuration they wont want to stay in for very long.
In the meantime, the visit by shuttle Atlantis and the installation of the new s3/s4 truss and solar array wing went pretty smoothly. Atlantis had a problem with a thermal protection blanket on one of the orbital maneuvering system pods peeling back, but with a little ingenuity and a medical stapler, spacewalking astronaut Danny Olivas has tacked it back down again. Luckily, the problem was in a place where there is not enough thermal heating on re-entry to place the shuttle in danger.
This photo of the ISS, taken by the departing shuttle, gives a good overview of the changed station layout. It sure looks bigger and better with that new solar array wing on board.
Well, very soon you will be able to find out for yourself. Head on down to the Kennedy Space Center’s Visitor Complex, and go for the ride of your life on their soon-to-be-opened shuttle launch simulator.
 When the countdown started for today’s attempted launch of Space Shuttle Discovery to the International Space Station, weather forecasters put the chance of acceptable conditions at only thirty percent. The shuttle is now heading toward launch less than an hour away, and all constraints are green right across the board.
Amazing how things can turn around. Looks like we might be about to see the first night launch of a space shuttle in four years.
Follow the live video feed from NASA TV, or the Mission Status Center live blog at Spaceflight Now.
[Update]
Discovery is safely in orbit, and on her way to ISS.
In this artist’s concept, the Orion CEV docked to a lunar lander,
is depicted orbiting the moon. Credit: Lockheed-Martian
Associated Press reporter recounts his experiences as he tries out Lockheed-Martian’s mock-up of their Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle, (CEV). Fresh off of receiving an $8 billion contract to build it, Lockheed-Martian gave media a chance to look over a rough mock-up of the capsule, said to have been built to “get a feel of the geometry” involved with the craft.
The article is posted on MSNBC’s news site.
Heidemarie Stefanyshyn-Piper, an astronaut on the STS-115 mission, collapsed twice Friday, a day after she returned to Earth in the shuttle Atlantis, and officials attributed her wobbles to the adjustment from 12 days at zero gravity. Wobbly and light-headed, Stefanyshyn-Piper collapsed while speaking publicly at a welcome-home ceremony.
Fellow crew members caught her as her legs buckled under her, lowering her to the ground. She rested there for a few moments before rising back to her feet and attempted to centime.
Speaking again for less than a minute, gripping the podium tightly for support, she once again became dizzy and stopped speaking. Stefanyshyn-Piper was lowered to the floor. After resting a few moments again, she was helped to her feet and escorted out through a side door.
“She’s doing 100 percent well,” husband Glenn Piper said by phone from home later in the day. “Basically, she’s embarrassed.”
Smith Johnston, the crew’s flight surgeon, who was at Piper’s side when she fell, said astronauts typically lose 10 percent to 14 percent of their blood volume while in space, usually regaining it in a day or two. Hospitalization was not required and Stefanyshyn-Piper was allowed to go home a few hours later.
Piper, 43, of St. Paul, Minn., is a commander in the Navy and was a mission specialist and cosmic electrician aboard the shuttle. She carried out two of the spacewalks, joining an elite club of only six other U.S. women and a single Russian woman who have made spacewalks.
We wish her the best and a speedy recovery as she regains her “Land Legs”.
 Atlantis is home safely. Or, I should say, her crew is home safely. For the shuttle herself, I don’t think that being tucked up in a warm hangar at Kennedy Space Center counts as being ‘home’. If you’ll allow me a little poetic license, I believe that her home is ‘up there’ - and it’s sad that she gets to go there so infrequently.
The shuttle system is aging and expensive, and the decision to retire the fleet in 2010 is the right one. Today we need much more prosaic access to space: cheap, reliable, and regular - things that we all wanted the shuttle to be, but we were perhaps asking too much of her.
In her native environment of low Earth orbit, she’s nothing short of breathtakingly beautiful:
The shuttle is an amazing and capable machine, and it may be a while before we see her like again. As we watch her gracefully fly out the remaining flights leading to her retirement, I think it’s important that we take the time to recognise that what we are giving up is something very special indeed.
 Space shuttle Atlantis’ landing has been delayed by at least a day, to give mission managers time to investigate an object seen floating close by that may have fallen off the shuttle. The object was spotted on footage from a payload bay camera, floating between the Shuttle and Earth in very nearly the same orbit, leading experts to speculate that it may be ice or something from the payload bay that has been shaken loose by thruster firings performed as part of pre-landing checkout operations.
There is also talk of an impact registering on one of the shuttle’s wing leading edges, but that may have simply been the sensors registering the same landing checkout thruster firings.
In the meantime, the delay will extend the time that there are three crewed spacecraft operating in LEO - Atlantis, the Soyuz carrying the Expedition 14 crew and fare-paying astronaut Anousheh Ansari, and the International Space Station itself. With the undocking and de-orbiting of an automated Progress supply freighter happening at the same time, it’s been really busy up there in low Earth orbit.
Atlantis continues its orbital journey toward the International Space Station, and is scheduled to dock there at 10:46 GMT Monday (05:46 CDT at the control center in Houston). Flight day two inspections have revealed no damage of concern to the orbiter’s heat shield.
According to shuttle program manager Wayne Hale:
“The bottom line is we are looking at nits, nothing of remote consequence.”
 Space shuttle Atlantis roared away from the launch pad today in an apparently flawless launch, having endured many days of technical and weather-related delays, and a three-year mission postponement brought about by the disastrous loss of her sister ship, Columbia.
Eight and a half minutes after liftoff, Atlantis and her crew of six astronauts safely reached orbit, beginning a two-day journey to rendezvous with the International Space Station. The shuttle is carrying a major new station component, the P3/P4 truss and solar array wing. Atlantis’ flight restarts the space station assembly sequence, which has been on hold since the loss on re-entry of Columbia in February 2003.
The new component, which will be installed with a series of three spacewalks over the next 10 days, will almost double the International Space Station’s power generation capability, and pave the way for further assembly flights, the next of which is scheduled for December.
If you want to be an astronaut, patience could be a useful trait.
Space Shuttle Atlantis is scheduled to lift off on the STS-115 construction mission to the International Space Station at 15:15 GMT (11:45am EDT), but today’s launch is far from the first attempt to get this mission off the ground.
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Congratulations to the STS-121 crew for a very successful mission
and a safe return.
In NASA’s launch schedule August 28th is the date set for the next shuttle launch.
Flying Space Shuttle Atlantis, STS-115 crew will deliver a truss and other key components during the Space Shuttle Program’s 19th mission to the International Space Station.
Taylor Dinerman has a piece in this week’s Space Review that is well worth a read. He compares the science-vs-human-exploration situation brewing now with what was going on in the early seventies.
History’s warning is simple: if we choose to underfund the Vision for Space Exploration the way we underfunded the Shuttle, we wont much like the results.
There is no ‘buy now, pay later’ option for space exploration.
The Fourth of July in the United States, is always a time for picnics, parades and fireworks. Now we can add shuttle launches to that mix. Sunday’s scheduled launch of STS-121 was scrubbed for the second time in as many days.
The next launch attempt for Discovery’s STS-121 mission to the International Space Station is scheduled for Tuesday at 2:38 p.m. EDT.
Even the layman that I am, I understand the need for these delays, but is there anyone that still thinks they can get 17 launches off in the next four years? Added to that, we have the news media gleefully announcing each “scrub” costs over a million dollars extra.
With “happy”, “good news” coverage like this, NASA probably looks back longingly to the days when shuttle launches received less news air time than the local “Petunia Festival.”
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UPDATE:
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Space.com, posts a troublesome article detailing the news of insulation problems with Discovery. During a post-scrub inspection, “NASA inspectors have found a small crack in the foam insulation of the space shuttle Discovery’s external fuel tank, prompting mission managers to discuss whether to press ahead with Tuesday’s third launch attempt or stand down for repairs.”
NASA’s shuttle-derived exploration systems architecture for returning to the Moon is rapidly loosing the shuttle-derived bit.
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The latest batch of articles is out at the Space Review, and once again Jeff Foust has assembled a fine collection of thoughtful commentary.
Before we get to that, I have to add my voice to the others who have marvelled recently at the one-man space publishing phenomenon that is Jeff Foust. Michael Belfiore started it here, and Dan Schrimpsher seconded (it’s buried in the middle of his own rather prodigious post), and I’d like to add my vote as well. Jeff not only publishes Space Today, the definitive space wire service, and The Space Review, he also finds the time to run a couple of really good blogs, Space Politics and Personal Spaceflight. Oh, and he holds down a full time day job at Futron as well.
My hat’s off to you Jeff, I have no idea how you do it, but I sure do appreciate it.
But back to this week’s articles:
That Kitty Hawk moment by Bob Clarebrough makes the point that, although the flight of SpaceShipOne was one of those moments that changes everything, it will be a while before the world at large comes to fully appreciate it.
In Small steps forward for NewSpace, Jeff Foust (if editing it weren’t enough, TSR always has an article or two written by Jeff as well!) takes stock of progress in the New Space industry, as reported at the recent Space Access Society conference.
Taylor Dinerman examines the recent announcement about US-China space cooperation in Cooperation with China: still dancing on eggs.
In Selling space exploration in uncertain times, Eric Hedman looks at space policy and the next election cycle.
And to top it all off, (the indefatigable) Jeff Foust reviews the novel Challenger Park.
Our friend David Livingston will be hosting a round-table discussion which will include the topics of rockets, engineering, and cost effective space access on his Radio/Podcast program, The Space Show.
The LIVE broadcast will take place Sunday, April 9. 2006, from noon-1:30PM PDT (yeah, that pesky daylight savings time has kicked in). The scheduled panelists for the program are Dr. John Jurist, Monte Davis, and Patrick Stiennon with David Hoerr, authors of “The Rocket Company,” and I’m sure the listeners will be calling in to add their two-cents worth as well.
It should make for interesting listening.
For more information on this or future programs and how you can tune in, check out David’s Website.
With the Crew Exploration Vehicle grabbing most of the attention lately, U.S. Space News has some graphical data on the CLV just posted March 28th that deserves a look-see.
Before the Columbia disaster, NASA was under intense schedule pressure to complete the International Space Station. Today they find themselves struggling to fly an aging and fragile space shuttle that has been placed squarely in the critical path for the new exploration vision. Two recent newspaper articles provide a sobering comparison of NASA’s actions then and now.
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NASA has delayed the next space shuttle launch from May until at least the first of July, in order to replace suspect engine cut-off (ECO) sensors in the external fuel tank. Discovery is slated to fly mission STS-121, the second of two engineering test flights in the return to flight sequence following the Columbia Disaster in 2003. Assuming the shuttle does fly in the July 1 to 19 window, almost a full year will have elapsed since the last flight.
NASA now finds itself at a critical juncture. For the agency’s plans to complete the ISS and develop the shuttle’s successor to have any credibility, this next flight will need to go off almost flawlessly. NASA needs to demonstrate over the next few flights that the foam problem is both understood and fully resolved, and it also needs to demonstrate that it can ramp back up to the flight rate required to fly the remaining missions before the 2010 retirement date.
Therein lies a major problem: The shuttle is a highly complex, high performance, and frail experimental vehicle. On top of that, the fleet is aging. It seems hard to conceive that the remaining sixteen or seventeen shuttle flights will all fly on schedule, and without new problems appearing. Yet NASA does not appear to have a plan B. There seems to be an expectation that, because they have to make it work, they will.
This is not the first time. In the early days of station construction New Scientist ran an article, ISS Titanic, pointing out that a simple statistical analysis comparing shuttle reliability with the number of assembly flights manifested showed that the chances of losing a flight over the period of station assembly were unacceptably high. NASA didn’t appear to have a plan for that, either. Ultimately, they gambled and lost.
Hopefully NASA’s renewed safety focus can prevent the loss of another shuttle, but the very vigilance that guards against that eventuality also works against efforts to fly regularly. Shuttle managers have promised to “listen to the hardware” – but given the shuttle’s age and complexity, it’s almost certain that the more they listen, the more they will hear, and the less they will fly. Throw in the pressure to get the station assembly completed before the shuttle is retired in 2010, and the whole proposition looks even dicier.
So why fly shuttle at all? Why not retire it now and move on? In a perfect world, that’s exactly what should happen, but don’t hold your breath. It sounds good on paper, but it’s hard to imagine it happening in the real world where the shuttle program means jobs in congressional districts. Then there’s the International Space Station, with which NASA has painted itself into a very shuttle-shaped corner: The only vehicle that can loft ISS elements is the shuttle. There’s no compelling technical reason that this should be so, the components were just designed that way to meet one of the station’s fundamental (political) requirements: providing a mission for shuttle. Scrapping shuttle and launching the ISS components some other way would see any money saved get spent modifying the station modules for a different launch vehicle, and would also introduce a delay of several years at a time when the ISS international partners are clamouring to have their modules launched earlier. It seems unlikely that NASA would be allowed to go this route, even if they wanted to.
So shuttle will fly, and likely run into further technical difficulties and delays, and cost overruns. Shuttle has become the project that wont die: NASA is stuck having to cannibalise other programs to feed it ever increasing sums of money, all so that it can be shut down to free up money for the Vision for Space Exploration.
The first step in NASA’s plan to return to the moon, the orderly retirement of the Space Shuttle, may yet also prove to be the most challenging.
Back in January I mentioned that the Dawn Mission which is part of NASA’s Discovery Program had been placed on hold. In a brief note on SpaceRef.com, Keith Cowing informs us that the project has now been officially canceled.
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