Antiques in spaaaaace! Retired space shuttles cannibalised for parts NASA’s budget woes have forced it to consider sending museum pieces into space. With funding cuts looming, NASA engineers are saving cash by cannibalising parts from retired shuttles in museum displays to use on the International Space Station (ISS). The space shuttle programme was shut down in 2011, and the US’s four shuttle …
OK, so who's the lucky astronaut who's going to end up wearing Neil Armstrong's Apollo 11 suit?
Still I guess it could be worse, it could be the Apollo 13 ones (if they ever got the stains out after their fright...).
But then I suppose some styles never go out of fashion... ;-) A bit like my coat over there...
It's a shame they're slicing back the budget on these things and I think you can largely blame an unholy alliance in the Republican Party of economic liberals who think all funding for anything other than the military should be cut and anti-science people who probably feel it conflicts with their creationist and flat earth beliefs and blog about it furiously on their space age technology driven computer...
However, I don't see anything wrong with recycling and reusing what mostly amounts to very expensive, very high spec plumbing.
A tank, is a tank is a tank. They don't go obsolete very rapidly!
It's actually got some clever stuff like bellows inside to make sure you can get the water back out again and sensors to tell how full it is so not just a tank.
According to an ex-shuttle worker commenting on http://spaceflightnow.com/2015/08/19/photos-water-tanks-removed-from-shuttle-for-new-use/ the manufacturer for these tanks went out of business and this is a lot easier than trying to source suitable new tanks.
> blame an unholy alliance in the Republican Party of economic liberals
Hahaha. No, this has been happening for decades. It goes all the way back to Nixon, who hated the space program because it was Kennedy's pet project, and Kennedy made a fool of Nixon several times.
Nixon is the one responsible for 7 dead astronauts, because he canned the reusable flyback booster, forcing NASA to fall back to SRBs.
No, the deaths are due to bad design& planning...
the shuttle had no Abort method, so the first crew, while likely surviving the explosion, had no means of escape.
Second crew, again bad design & planning, they knew about foam hitting the wings, but since they had no space suits on board (I only just heard about that) to go examine the damage, there was nothing to be done...
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"As a space geek and a car nerd, that was the best Top Gear ever. I was gutted at the end result, but kudos for the attempt - so close ..."
It truly was one of the great moments in all of Television History. Especially the bit when they put the Top Gear space stickers on the wings upside down...
It happened.
Old castles, monasteries, priories, cathedrals, churches have all been robbed for their stone.
What is unforgivable, is hearing that they used to sell souvenir hammers at Stonehenge so the Victorian visitor could tap themselves a memento. At the same time as telling Greece they couldn't be trusted to look after the Elgin Marbles.
Those shuttle air frames were certified for 100 missions - we never got close before the Feds junked the program - I'm still shocked how FAST they were decommissioned, as if to make sure they could never fly again.
Bunch of soulless bastards... destroying what was another step to getting the hell out of here before stupid human tricks kill us all.
Yeah, I'm still unhappy about it.
The shuttles should still have never flown 100 missions.
The shuttles should have been something NASA learned from, and designed a second generation vehicle that was less expensive and even more reusable. But as usual, no funding.
It would be like everyone still driving Model As, and Ford never making a Model T.
Ok, I can see the problem with that right away.
NASA is a reality-based organization and U.S. politics right now... isn't.
Bernie Sanders, currently leaping up the polls, wants to do something breathtakingly sensible like taxing high-frequency transactions (not enough to make them loss-making, or even to significantly affect their profitability) to pay for free college and he's regarded by the mainstream as a loon.
On the Republican side, the Donald is seriously proposing the idea that the 14th Amendment (if you're born in the U.S., you're a citizen. No 'and's, 'if's or 'but's, this means you!) DOESN'T apply to people of the wrong colour - Sorry, didn't mean to type that, I meant, of course, if their parents had entered the country illegally - and, as far as I can tell, all but two of the other Republican candidates have said, "Great idea! Let's do that."
The crazy man in a sane world would entertain, and undoubtedly be entertained by, the sane people but the sane man in a crazy world would be in a nightmare and, what's worse, nobody would notice because they'd ALL be in the same boat.
A strangely enjoyable book which I've never heard anyone else mention. One of the first ebooks I ever read, free from Baen Books when they used to give entire back catalogues ou to purchasers of later books.
Reminded me to check out the Baen Library (http://www.baenebooks.com/c-1-free-library.aspx) - free ebooks for SciFi/Fantasy/Military SF readers.
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallen_Angels_(science_fiction_novel)
The fun part in that novel is how many friends of mine were "Tuckerized" in it (e.g. Orange==Yalow). The scene at the SF convention where they buried "Seth" in a box of packing peanuts actually *did* happen at a late '80's Lunacon (even down to the "kill Seth" chants).
Coming up next, they take from them the intel 8086 processors.
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/05/12/technology/ebusiness/12NASA.html
This could explain why the "User Manual" of the shuttle was so huge (about 10,000 pages?), because with such technology, you deal with rather low level instructions, and that means many many instructions (well at least that's one place without Java).
Sure, they could have upgraded those antiques, but it's like upgrading a 386 (good luck!!). The necessary funding to do that, and the stance of anti-science obscurantists (aka tea party republican death eaters) could only lead to the demise of the program. And add to this W. Bush and his priority of returning to the Moon and going to Mars (which is seemingly going nowhere), which cancelled a lot of things because funding got reallocated (funding moved to '/dev/null', I say).
They purposely used them as they were reliable, tried, and tested. Lets face it you don't want you flight control computer making a computational glitch when calculating your orbit, or the computer freezing when you are coming in for entry. Its not like they need to run a pretty GUI like desktop users do. Also remember the computer that got astronauts to the moon had less processing power then most wristwatches have today.
I remember reading like 11 years ago Nasa was paying $400 or was it 600 per processor for new 486 SX chips's this was well into the P3 era.
As I recall, the fuel tanks and engines of the retired Shuttles were removed and the engines replaced with replicas before they went on display, owing to concerns about toxic residue, and the weight of a full-up SSME, which runs to nearly 4 tons (3390 kg). In the retired Shuttles you see in the museums, all you see is the outwardly visible hardware in replica, not the actual engines.
Yes... however there is a retired SSME viewing stand near the KSC visitor center Saturn V building where you can see an actual engine. It looks complicated as hell compared to a SpaceX Merlin.
The other reason the engines were removed is they're using them on SLS. I hear there is still a fight to restart the production line.
The down side of this is that there's not many tanks left and the current method is for the space truck to deliver the water and the tank to the ISS. The empty is put back in the space truck and whole mess burns up in the atmosphere. The only ones that live to see another mission are ones returned by a Dragon.
Someone really needs to pull their head out of their ass and think of the long-term like what happens when there's no more tanks left to send up there.
You're lucky you've still got it after Sandy - it was hidden from public view when I visited a couple of years ago whilst they were sorting a new exhibition area for it. Hope it's back up.
Fortunately I've been to see Discovery a couple of times and they seem to have moved the barriers so you can get a bit closer to it now as well. Bit knackered looking, but there again if I'd been around the world that many times I'd be looking rough as well...
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