[Young Werther]

The original plan was one launch a week with a month turnaround for the 4 shuttle fleet. Congress didn't fund the upgrades necessary to support this flight schedule. Each shuttle had a one hundred flight lifetime and then a new space craft would be designed, built and to replace the "old" shuttles.

Now NASA is going to replace the fleet with Apollo era capsules. If NASA has its way in the N Aeronautical S A replacement regime the BA-747 will be replaced by the

[MrB]

Heard the funniest thing today. The toilet is clogged on the shuttle (not funny), and the following exchange took place (paraphrased):

“We recommend cycling the WFC actuator”
“You mean jiggle the handle?”

[TalonDJ]

The original plan was one launch a week with a month turnaround for the 4 shuttle fleet. Congress didn't fund the upgrades necessary to support this flight schedule. Each shuttle had a one hundred flight lifetime and then a new space craft would be designed, built and to replace the "old" shuttles.

Now NASA is going to replace the fleet with Apollo era capsules. If NASA has its way in the N Aeronautical S A replacement regime the BA-747 will be replaced by the

Well they are no where near their '100 missions. Not only that but Apollo was always a safer design. The failures that killed Challenger and Columbia would have either not happened or been survivable using a 'top of booster' capsule type craft. Wings look cool but are just a huge load of useless weight you haul up to space every mission. The Shuttles design was dictated by a number of poor decisions and bad assumptions. Hopefully they can avoid some of those this time. The biggest bad decisions was 'payload return' and it dictated most of the design of the shuttle.