Shuttle could fly to 2050

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Shuttle could fly till 2050 says Boeing official—IT IS IN A MUSEUM
Posted on March 10, 2012 by Bob
Boeing Co. officials are even more confident, saying their shuttle vehicles could fly for 30 more years or longer.

When NASA introduced the space shuttle in 1981, the agency envisioned the fleet of four orbiters lasting perhaps a decade before being replaced. But with the 100th shuttle mission blasting off tonight at the Kennedy Space Center, it now looks like the venerable launch system could be operating until 2020.

NASA is preparing for the possibility of flying the shuttles 300 more times, solidifying the outlook for thousands of shuttle workers in Southern California and elsewhere who provide engineering and maintenance for the fleet. But the plan also raises concerns again about the durability of a craft built with 1970s technology.

The space agency has little choice. A replacement for the aging shuttle, the X-33, is several years behind schedule and may not fly at all, while work on the International Space Station has been accelerating.

“For at least 10 to 15 years, NASA won’t have anything else,” said Marshall Kaplan, a Potomac, Md.-based aerospace consultant. The shuttle “is the only vehicle we have to service the space station.”

Although it has been flying for nearly two decades, the shuttle still has more than three-quarters of its design life left, said the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, saying that the vehicles are more than capable of handling increased flights to service the space station.

“There is a tremendous amount of life left in the vehicles, probably 20 years’ worth,” said William Readdy, NASA’s deputy associate administrator overseeing the shuttle program. “The fleet we have continue to get better and better as we mature our process and upgrade the subsystems. I’m totally confident that the space shuttle is up to the task.”

Boeing Co. officials are even more confident, saying their shuttle vehicles could fly for 30 more years or longer.

“They are in terrific shape,” said Stan Albrecht, Boeing’s vice president and program manager for the space shuttle, noting that each of the four shuttles in service were designed to fly 100 missions. Discovery has flown the most missions at 27, followed by Columbia with 26, Atlantis with 22 and Endeavor with 14. The Challenger had flown 10 missions before it exploded shortly after launch in 1986.

“The missions flown so far [have] been relatively few,” he said. NASA had initially envisioned 50 missions a year, far more than the five it has actually averaged.

The outlook for the shuttle’s life is good news for Southern California, where the vehicles were developed and built. The region continues to have a major role in the shuttle program.

As major aerospace projects moved elsewhere and thousands of jobs were lost, shuttle work remained stable and is likely to continue so for the foreseeable future.