Monday, November 2

Save the Shuttle

Now one does have to wonder, "what if?" Seeing this article makes me think. I am a bit puzzled here. The idea is to scrub an entire fleet of operational Space Shuttles to replace them with one operational unit known as Ares. Now mind you the Ares will be returned to Earth with all life depending on an operational parachute. I am quite surprised it never happened on an Apollo mission, fortunate I would say. Parachutes being man made objects, you will have failures from time to time. Novel idea here, launch the space craft and upon return to earth, have a shuttle waiting astronauts board the shuttle and land on earth, leaving the old spacecraft, Ares, to orbit and be used on the next mission already in orbit. Use the shuttle again to have the ship serviced in orbit loaded and off she goes, why doesn't NASA think about these things? Seems it would save money too. 





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3 comments:

Douglas said...

It seems to me to be a step back into the early days of NASA. yet, I understand the need to replace the shuttle since it has an issue with those tiles and with the launch vehicle.

Neo said...

and it is really not a 'space ship' can only do low earth orbit.

Douglas said...

I suppose there are two reasons they use "space"... One is that it sounds sexier than "low earth orbit shuttle" and the other is that most people think of "space" as anything that is effectively a vacuum (no air) and where gravity is, for all intents and purposes, nil. PR, my friend, PR.