Shuttle fleet's flying fitness center of debate

The Antelope Valley Press ^ | March 4, 2003. | Robyn Suriano and Michael Cabbage The Orlando

[BenLurkin]

HOUSTON - Before Feb. 1, the future of the space shuttle was numbered in decades, as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration estimated the fleet that first lifted off in 1981 easily could keep flying through 2020.

With a string of 88 successful missions since the Challenger disaster of 1986, and plans for a replacement shelved indefinitely, the four-orbiter fleet was NASA's present and its future. Then Columbia broke up 200,000 feet above east Texas - and suddenly NASA was confronted with a question it hadn't expected to face:

Should the shuttle fly again?

With 2 million parts, it's the most complicated machine ever built; it costs a half-billion dollars per mission and requires 4,000 workers at Kennedy Space Center alone to maintain it.

What's more, those permission costs are certain to climb. The salaries of those 4,000 workers, as well as the cost of the launch pads and assembly buildings and administrative overhead that sustain it, had been spread across four orbiters. With the loss of Columbia, there are now only three.

Its aging technology promises to make upkeep even more expensive at a time when NASA is looking at years of essentially flat budgets.

That said, the reality is that NASA has no choice but to keep flying the shuttle. To finish building the $100-billion international space station and to care for its prized $3-billion Hubble space telescope, NASA must get the remaining fleet back into orbit.

[JoJo Gunn]

Get rid of it. We should have been working on it's replacement before starting that dang space station.

[Paleo Conservative]

Why do we need a space station?

[smokeyjon]

While the ISS is a technological marvel in it's own right, it was foolish to put one in earth orbit. Putting a station at the L1 point between the earth and the moon would have made much more sense from an exploration standpoint.

[JoJo Gunn]

Actually you ask a good question.... :)

[Charlotte Corday]

The new space telescope planned to be launched in a few years will be better than Hubble and cost less than $1 bil. Since it is to be located out at the L-2 point, (far beyond shuttle range) I trust they'll get the optics right the first time.....

The ISS basically exists to give the shuttle a reason to fly, and the shuttle exists to build the ISS (repeat sentence as many times as necessary).

Mind you I'm not against manned space exploration, as long as it's real exploration. Spending a billion per launch and risking 5-7 lives each time to do push button experiments in low earth orbit doesn't qualify as such.

[Paleo Conservative]

The new space telescope planned to be launched in a few years will be better than Hubble and cost less than $1 bil. Since it is to be located out at the L-2 point, (far beyond shuttle range) I trust they'll get the optics right the first time.....

So will it be designed to be disposable or will the space plane replacement for the shuttle be able to reach it for servicing missions?