Atlantis slated to be first shuttle retired (CNN/AP)

[eppur_se_muova]

CAPE CANAVERAL, Florida (AP) --
***Atlantis' parts will be used by the remaining shuttles, Discovery and Endeavour, until the aging spacecraft are mothballed in 2010, shuttle program manager Wayne Hale told workers at the Kennedy Space Center last week.
***
The $3 billion shuttle likely will have four or five more flights to the international space station before retirement.

"The reasoning is instead of taking it off-line for two years and spending a lot of money to return it to flight when it probably would fly only one time at the most, why spend that extra money, when you don't need to?" NASA spokesman Bruce Buckingham said Tuesday at the Kennedy Space Center.

NASA has planned 17 more shuttle flights before the program ends in 2010. The next-generation vehicles are expected to be ready no later than 2014.
***
more at: http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/space/02/21/shuttle.atlantis.ap/index.html

Sooooo...we're going to be totally dependent on the Russians again, for up to four years?

[Selatius]

1. The shuttle fleet needs to be retired anyway

It's an old design, and it's expensive as a result.

[Oreo]

2. Sad

There's no way they'll make 17 missions. They should retire it now and focus on using already known technology to get at least a rocket that can get back and forth to the space station.

If they go 17, the chances are pretty high that there will be another disaster.

[megatherium]

3. Should've been retired in 1986.

It was sold as an inexpensive way of getting to low-Earth orbit. It was too fragile and dangerous, which made it far more expensive (like by a factor of ten) than promised. One gets the impression that the Shuttle is nothing more than a boondoggle, making certain contractors a lot of money. It was sold as a way of opening up the commercialization of space. But if the Shuttle could carry its payload weight in straw into orbit (30 tons) and mysteriously in microgravity change it to that much gold, it would not pay for the mission.

The Russians couldn't figure out why we would build the Shuttle, they kept thinking there's got to be a good reason or else the Americans wouldn't have gone through the expense and trouble. They thought there was some military implication that they hadn't picked up on. So they built their own shuttle, which if memory serves was called the Buran ('Snowflake'). They flew it once and immediately mothballed it.

[Oreo]

4. Did the Buran ever fly?

I thought it blew up on the launchpad?

Here we go:
http://liftoff.msfc.nasa.gov/rsa/buran.html

Orbital Launch

The first and only orbital launch of the shuttle Buran was at 3:00 GMT on November 15, 1988. The flight was unmanned, as the life support system had not been checked out and the CRT displays had no software installed. The vehicle was launched on the powerful Energiya booster into an 247 by 256 km orbit at 51.6 degrees inclination. The Buran orbited the Earth twice before firing its thrusters for reentry. The flight ended at 6:25 GMT when the vehicle touched down at Tyuratum. The Buran 1 mission was limited to 2 orbits due to computer memory limitations.

Aftermath

Although the first orbital flight of Buran was unmanned, it demonstrated much promise. The autopilot that landed the shuttle was able to overcome a 34 mph crosswind to land within 5 feet of the runway center line. Also, of the 38,000 heat shield tiles that covered Buran, only 5 were missing.

Cancellation

After the first flight of Buran, funding for the project was cut. Although the project wasn't officially canceled until 1993, much of the work was halted long before that date. There were two other Buran shuttles under construction. The second orbiter, "Ptichka" ("Little Bird" in Russian) was originally scheduled for completion in 1990. The third Buran was due in 1992. Neither was finished. In November 1995, the partially completed shuttles were dismantled at their production site. The manufacturing plant is scheduled to be converted for production of buses, syringes, and diapers.

[eppur_se_muova]

6. Buran ("Snowstorm") is now a tourist attraction.

I remember seeing this in a book -- "This New Ocean"? and on some PBS show.

[northzax]

5. hey the Shuttle is the cream

of mid-70's technological design.

what? that was 30 years ago? oops. do they still use cathode ray tubes in their computers like the old Soviet Fighter planes?

[htuttle]

9. Actually, the Shuttle's computers are something of a marvel

At least the software on them is.

They are allegedly the most bug-free computer systems in the world. Not just cause they spent a LOT of time on Q&A, but they also came up with a unique "three-headed" design. There are three pretty much identical systems that have to 'vote' on each course of action or control issue. At least two of the computers have to come up with the same answer for the system to take that action. This helps to rule out the odd glitches due to component errors, stray cosmic rays hitting the chips while in space, etc...

[eppur_se_muova]

7. The original design called for the lower stage to be a reusable...

airplane-like vehicle. The development cost was too high for Congress to sign off on, so von Braun re-engineered it with the SRB's and external tank to bring the cost down to half the original estimate, *knowing* -- and stating -- that the cost per launch would then go up, which was a disappointment to him.

Of course, it ran into the inevitable cost overruns after that. But I don't think it was any factor of ten.

[megatherium]

10. I remember that. But, I think, a factor of ten is accurate.

Although I don't have the numbers at hand, so you might be right. But it was supposed to launch for tens of millions of dollars per launch. This was based on a weekly launch schedule. In the event, however, the cost is something like $400 to 700 million per launch. (Not the original development costs, the costs per launch.) That's because the program only succeeded in doing 4 to 6 missions per year, not 50. Remember that really cool mission where they repaired the Hubble? It would have been cheaper to just launch a new Hubble. To put into perspective what an enormous waste this is scientifically, consider that $500 million is a typical annual budget for a major research university.

For further derogatory information about the manned space program, see Robert Park, Voodoo Science.

[eppur_se_muova]

11. Oh, cost per launch or # in orbit, you're probably right.

They had to both increase the budget and drastically reduce the number of planned launches. I was talking development cost. Neither analysis looks good.

[greenisin]

8. Wow, you mean...

they're not just going to blow this one up like the other two?