Google apps
Main menu

Post a Comment On: Doug Ross @ Journal

"For wont of $3 billion: the President's Priorities"

3 Comments -

1 – 3 of 3
Blogger Mike aka Proof said...

Allowing the shuttle program to go into mothballs without having a viable replacement in place, not even keeping a single shuttle in reserve in case of a dire emergency, will be a large part of the legacy of the anti-JFK.

12:50 PM

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Great post, keep the barrage coming. Lars

2:10 PM

Blogger Georg Felis said...

The Shuttle has always been a money-hog, a mutant cross between a semi-truck and a school bus run by a government agency who's true goal was to farm out contracts to every single congressional district in the country.

Now despite its expensive warts, the Shuttle has had an *amazing* career, showing that it can do just about anything in low-earth orbit imaginable. But it is *old*, stressed, and has killed two crews, expensive as hell, and the only real capacity we’re losing in the short-term is repair missions like Hubble (which are cheaper to just launch a new and better replacement) and large-item return (which the Shuttle has done *twice*). The remaining Shuttles are being sent to museums, and not mothballed (which would be a similarly horribly expensive process with low expectations of success). Shutting down the system is a tough sell, but could be considered a "good" decision provided the money freed up can be used to promote a commercial launch business instead of being siphoned off to other pet projects.

Which brings us to Congress, who in their infinite wisdom decided that the replacement for the Shuttle would be the SLS, promptly dubbed the Senate Launch System, which would use Shuttle parts and infrastructure to create a replacement for the Shuttle, thereby reinventing the R101 . (SLS has been spiked, rebuilt, reintroduced, modified, and such multiple times since its introduction. If anything it is a proposal that is bigger, more expensive, more complicated and more fragile than the system it is supposed to replace. A mouse, built to government standards.)

At the current rate, Commercial space development will completely overshadow the same Government agency who so long ago was considered the absolute bleeding edge of technology. Good. Maybe I can buy a ticket to the TWA space station before I get too old.

3:31 PM

You can use some HTML tags, such as <b>, <i>, <a>

Comment moderation has been enabled. All comments must be approved by the blog author.

You will be asked to sign in after submitting your comment.
Please prove you're not a robot