[FPSPACE] Re: Msnbc.com (Oberg): Russia ready to take lead on space station

[DSFPortree at aol.com]

John:

> He is also said to be scrubbing the Shuttle manifest to eliminate lots of 
> currently planned Shuttle flights, on the basis that the system is not as safe 
> as its successor will be. 

But how do we *know* it's safer? It hasn't been built or tested. Does it make 
sense to scrap a vehicle that isn't *that* unsafe (if Gemini or Apollo had 
flown more than a hundred times, we'd have lost a couple of crews, I'm fairly 
sure) and replace it with an unknown quantity?

Are we seeing another instance of the new vehicle being sold as doing 
*everything* better than the old vehicle while its still merely a glint in an 
engineer's eye (shades of Shuttle in the 1970s)? Then the reality hits...

I'm a fan of neither Shuttle nor Station, but we have these things. Surely 
there are ways to put them to use to build a better future (define that as you 
will - for me it means going to other worlds). What's wrong with a 
Shuttle-based unmanned cargo launcher, for example? 

Of course, this assumes that a better future is the goal.

David

David S. F. Portree
Science writer & historian
dsfportree at aol.com
Flagstaff Arizona USA

Romance to Reality: moon & Mars plans
http://rtr.marsinstitute.info