NASA recently stated that their plan is to move forward, not backward. They plan to decommission the shuttle fleet by 2010 and move to a next-generation launch system. They also committed to some ambitious robotic missions. I think one of the most profound is the Terrestrial Planet Finder. This project would put a giant telescope {or several} up into a Lagrangian point and look for earth sized, surface liquid water planets. Big stuff. Potentially the biggest stuff of all.
But a few days ago NASA decided to funnel more money into the shuttle program, which again, will be retired by 2010. This means that the Terrestrial Planet Finder has been “delayed indefinitely”.
It appears that the US would rather waste their money on a crappy launch system that only gets people into LEO, than pursue groundbreaking scientific discovery. Why is the Shuttle so bad? This page has a very good overview of why, and it’s got nothing to do with technology. Excerpt:
“TWA gave us some cost figures on the Boeing 747. We took four 747s, with one in overhaul and three operational, and flew each three times per year – nine flights per year, just like the shuttle, each carrying 32,000 pounds of cargo. The price was the same as the shuttle: $55,000 per pound.
The concept we had for the MOL was flying 11 vehicles a total of 100 times a year. That’s what it took to keep that station going, with crew rotation, experiments, and getting the 988,000 lbs. of stuff up there for them to live on. The shuttle only flew (a maximum of) nine times per year, but if you were to fly the shuttle 100 times a year, the cost per pound would drop to about $800. It has nothing to do with technology. It has to do with the flight rate. If the flight rate is the same as the shuttle, even a 747 is expensive.”
It’s not only that the US is 35 years behind the Russians when it comes to rocket design. It’s that they have hundreds of years decades of red tape that’s keeping the shuttle expensive, dangerous, and a big waste of money.
