A very devastating mistake to not only America's space capabilities but to the economy, manufacturing, design ,and test infrastructure in discarding the Space Shuttle.
An excellent summary from former PM Bob Thompson follows:
An often ignored but critically important issue is the supporting infrastructure for spaceflight. Thompson made the analogy that when people see a Shuttle Orbiter, they really are seeing just the "tip of an iceberg." The Shuttle is more than an orbiter vehicle; it is also the servicing facilities at the Cape that process and prepare the orbiter for launch. It is the ET fabrication facilities at Michoud and the SRB plant at Promontory as well as the Space Shuttle Main Engine (SSME) that has performed flawlessly over the 133 flights to date. It is the mobile crawler and the launch towers at Pad 39-A. And it is the trained cadre of people that put all the pieces together and make them work in concert to deliver and return people and equipment from space. Thompson rhetorically encompassed his argument thusly: The Shuttle is a "dumb vehicle that cost too much" but is a "fully functional part of a space transportation system – an 18-wheel, extended cab work vehicle." He told the audience that Orion, Soyuz and Progress were more like "taxis" and "pickup trucks." He said that the Constellation vehicles (chosen to implement the 2004 Vision) were bad decisions, followed on now by an even worse decision.
Thompson used a familiar graphic, the chart showing NASA's fraction of the annual federal budget over decades (see above). The large spike centered around 1966 represents peak spending for the Apollo program. Thompson made two specific observations about this graph. First, Richard Nixon (who took office in 1969) is often damned as the President who "killed Apollo." But the graph shows that the ramp-down in spending for Apollo began two years earlier in 1967, in Lyndon Johnson's administration. The Vietnam War required some of NASA's money, so Apollo-Saturn production managers were told to build the equipment needed to fulfill Kennedy's decadal goal and shut down thereafter.
Additionally, Thompson made the very significant point (one usually ignored by many engaged in space policy debates) that the "Apollo spike" paid for the infrastructure – the buildings, laboratories, test and training facilities, and launch systems – that Apollo usedand that the Shuttle uses to this day. By terminating the Shuttle with no follow-on, the fate of most of this infrastructure is the scrap heap. Note that the "Apollo spike" in funding happened forty years ago. To design and build the supporting infrastructure for human spaceflight in the mid-1960s, we annually spent ten times the fraction of the budget that we do now. Given the reality of the nation's finances, NASA will be lucky if they can continue to get one-half of one percent of federal spending per year. This does not seem to be a good time to throw away three functioning Shuttle orbiters, thereby discarding a working national space faring capability, one carefully built and paid for over the last 50 years.
This unbelievable mistake will eventually have to be rectified , may occur on a crash basis or the security of the USA maybe in jeopardy !
Thompson used a familiar graphic, the chart showing NASA's fraction of the annual federal budget over decades (see above). The large spike centered around 1966 represents peak spending for the Apollo program. Thompson made two specific observations about this graph. First, Richard Nixon (who took office in 1969) is often damned as the President who "killed Apollo." But the graph shows that the ramp-down in spending for Apollo began two years earlier in 1967, in Lyndon Johnson's administration. The Vietnam War required some of NASA's money, so Apollo-Saturn production managers were told to build the equipment needed to fulfill Kennedy's decadal goal and shut down thereafter.
Additionally, Thompson made the very significant point (one usually ignored by many engaged in space policy debates) that the "Apollo spike" paid for the infrastructure – the buildings, laboratories, test and training facilities, and launch systems – that Apollo usedand that the Shuttle uses to this day. By terminating the Shuttle with no follow-on, the fate of most of this infrastructure is the scrap heap. Note that the "Apollo spike" in funding happened forty years ago. To design and build the supporting infrastructure for human spaceflight in the mid-1960s, we annually spent ten times the fraction of the budget that we do now. Given the reality of the nation's finances, NASA will be lucky if they can continue to get one-half of one percent of federal spending per year. This does not seem to be a good time to throw away three functioning Shuttle orbiters, thereby discarding a working national space faring capability, one carefully built and paid for over the last 50 years.
This unbelievable mistake will eventually have to be rectified , may occur on a crash basis or the security of the USA maybe in jeopardy !
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