Her fate? Cannibalism. She'll be broken up and her parts used to maintain the other two. Despite being the "middle" sister of the shuttles, age-wise, she's first due for a major overhaul. So, instead of fixing her up for one or two flights, tops, they'd rather ground her and strip her for the vital stuff to keep the rest going. Someone had better notify the Discovery on subspace.
Mark
Posted by Dat (Member # 302) on :
You'd think they would put her in a museum instead.
Posted by Topher (Member # 71) on :
The shuttles are being mothballed in 2010 but their replacements won't be around until 2014? What's going to happen to the folk up on the ISS in the intervening 4 years? I can't believe that they'd leave the place unmanned...
Posted by Da_bang80 (Member # 528) on :
Maybe they have a cadre of trained monkeynauts to take over general maintenance on the station. Or they'd leave the Russians in charge, same difference...
Posted by AndrewR (Member # 44) on :
Better be careful Taikonauts will board the station and claim it as their own. WWIII will be fought in space!!
Posted by Omega (Member # 91) on :
quote:The shuttles are being mothballed in 2010 but their replacements won't be around until 2014? What's going to happen to the folk up on the ISS in the intervening 4 years? I can't believe that they'd leave the place unmanned...
Same thing they've been doing for the last two years with only one shuttle flight: use the Soyuz.
Posted by AndrewR (Member # 44) on :
Can't the US just build their own version of the Soyuz capsule? Surely it's not THAT complex?
Posted by Hobbes (Member # 138) on :
Where's the damn X-303 project? Screw the shuttles.
Posted by Mark Nguyen (Member # 469) on :
It's in a bunker somewhere in Nevada. Its everyday use is somewhat hampered due to certain reality-based issues.
NASA will essentialy be picking up where it left off thirty years ago when the shuttle is retired - they'll go back to the Apollo format. CSM-type capsules will be launched atop uprated versions of today's shuttle SRBs for orbital insertion and transfer to ISS orbit. For lunar or Mars missions, it would dock with a larger craft assembled remotely by one or more unmanned next-generation cargo rockets.
Remember, the shuttle was envisioned during a different era, when people thought a space station would have to be built BY PEOPLE in space, and that satellites would remain so expensive that it would make sense to repair them in orbit or bring them back down. This was before they figured out how to easily and automatically build space stations in orbit (the Russians perfected this ages ago with Salyut 6, 7 and of course Mir), and before small, cheap, and advanced satellites became the norm. The shuttle was meant to service spacecraft with human workers, and that really isn't necessary anymore.
And the shuttle itself is built on antiquated technology, when people figured that heat tiles are the ONLY way to build a shuttle that large, and that the necessary computer power to run the thing would be far too large to fit in the hull, instead of in the stock laptops they now use to augment what they ended up going with in the 70s. Go figure.
And look at the Russians... Money-willing, their next gen spacecraft essentially adds an aerodynamic, monocoque heat sheild to the existing Soyuz, giving is greater payload and re-usability. The Chinese capsules are in the broad strokes just bigger copies of Soyuz. Overall, space TRAVEL has already reached it's optimum configuration, until someone can figure out how to make SSTO travel a viable alternative.
Mark
Posted by Jason Abbadon (Member # 882) on :
Guys: a cool model of the proposed CEV capsule NASA will use.
Not my own though- I gotta go buy one!
Call me kooky, but I really like this design (for now). It gives NASA a chance to continue spaceflights (yes, even to the Moon or Mars, with a LEM type vehicle) while they come up with a replacment for the shuttle that actually works.
The only concern I'd have is that Congress uses this design's low cost as an excuse not to presue another shuttle-type design. Tha's last just untill China gets their propaganda base on the Moon and steals all our cool rovers we left up there! We really should have slapped a Club on those when we left...