[OT] Space Shuttle and ISS (was Re: Amiga 1000 helps win against patent troll...)

On 05/14/2010 06:30 PM, Geoff Oltmans wrote: Other way around. NASA wanted to retire the Space Shuttle to work on a new system, and decided to do it as soon as the ISS was complete. The issue was that Congress wouldn't give them enough budget to continue flying the Space Shuttle and in parallel develop its replacement. Each Space Shuttle mission costs around $750 million (private estimate, the published NASA estimate is $450 million but is not generally considered credible). It seems to me that they should have kept flying but scaled back to a schedule of four flights per year, while developing the replacement. A really big problem is that once they committed to shutting down the Space Shuttle program, it became all but impossible (prohibitively expensive even by Congressional standards) to extend the program beyond the scheduled shutdown. AFAICT, a Delta IV Heavy would be perfectly suitable for launching ISS modules. It's not suitable for launching astronauts. One of the possible alternatives to Ares I was upgrading the Delta IV Heavy to be man-rated. NASA decided against that for political reasons; my friends who are aerospace engineers tell me that from a technical point of view it would have been better in every way than Ares I. Eric