Congressman: NASA should scrap shuttle

[Terminal23]

I agree whole heartedly with this. The shuttle is outdated way of space-travel.NASA has simply taken to long to find a replacement.Scrape the whole space station and spend the money on non-manned vehicles. Face it NASA we will never live in space,at least not in the next three lifetimes.

WASHINGTON, May 8 (UPI) -- NASA should scrap the space shuttle and spend its money on developing a new transit system, a 19-year veteran of Congress and former shuttle program advocate said Thursday.

"I am not going to vote for any funding for the existing orbiter to go back to space," Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas, said at a half-day hearing on the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's proposed Orbital Space Plane, a crew transport craft.

"It's my opinion that we can't make the existing orbiter as safe as it need to be," said Barton. "I'm not going to just sit by and put Americans at risk every time they go into space. If we had the same accident rate in our commercial aviation industry, thousands of people would be killed every day in this country, and we would not accept it."

Barton said he did not want to go through another investigation "if I'm in Congress six or seven or eight years from now when we have a third orbiter crash and kill another five or six or seven astronauts. I'm just not going to do that."

Fred Gregory, NASA's deputy director and a former astronaut, said the agency was looking at flying the shuttle with just a two-person crew -- a commander and co-pilot. The flight deck would be equipped with an ejection system that the astronauts could use to escape from the orbiter in case of an emergency, such as what occurred during the Feb. 1 breakup of shuttle Columbia while re-entering Earth's atmosphere over the southern United States. Seven astronauts died in NASA's worst accident since the 1986 Challenger tragedy, which also claimed seven lives.

Barton's comments followed an occasionally tense series of exchanges between members of the House subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics, and NASA managers who testified about their plans to develop a new vehicle to transport crews to and from the space station.

The so-called Orbital Space Plane is scheduled to become operational as the station's emergency lifeboat by 2010 and ready to ferry crews to the outpost via launch on an expendable rocket in 2012.

Members of the NASA oversight committee, however, were displeased with the lack of details on the project.

"The plan appears to be just another initiative that is long on promises and short on likely results," said subcommittee chairman Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif.

"It seems to me that NASA has given us a solution ... but it hasn't given us a credible story on what the problem is that we are trying to address," added Rep. Bart Gordon, D-Tenn.

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[osprey4]

Ok, I don't disagree, but what does the congressman suggest we use in the interim?

[Terminal23]

Thats the problem,he doesn't.I thought the space plane was a great idea,but NASA thought otherwise.

[originel]

while i agree that the shuttle is getting old and could use a replacement...i think a lot of the statements above are stretching the facts if not simply lying about them

If we had the same accident rate in our commercial aviation industry, thousands of people would be killed every day in this country, and we would not accept it."

i would like to hear his sources on this, because i seem to remember that there are actually more plane crashes than shuttle accidents (but i could be wrong...i just remember hearing that somewhere).

as for putting american's lives at risk...that's something they understood when they signed up. i see it as the same as signing up for the military...there's a change you can get killed, but i don't see any congressmen complaining about that. personally i think this is the same thing (note how most astronaughts are military personel).

really this is all just an overactive response to the columbia accident...in time we will start to see it in it's proper perspective

[Terminal23]

as for putting american's lives at risk...that's something they understood when they signed up.

Good point.

[cracked]

Originally posted by Terminal23
Face it NASA we will never live in space,at least not in the next three lifetimes.

uh...people have already lived in space for weeks at a time. personally, i think if we all stay on earth much longer (1000 or so years) unless something catastrophic happens, the earth will become so overpopulated we will kill ourselves from starvation, etc.

i also think their long term goal is not to live in space but to try other planets like mars. if you read up on it, the methods proposed to make mars inhabitable are very feasable given the proper resources.

i do happen to agree though that the space shuttle is outdated, but as for unmanned flights, what would be the fun of that?

drew

Take a minute to consider how many people died in plane crashes while we humans tried to figure out how to make a machine that could provide air transportation. Should we have given up on all air travel just because it was more dangerous than land transportation?

[uncle_jimbo]

Heres how I fell, we should buy 10 or so Soyuz ships from the R.F. That will allow us to continue space travel and it will help the R.F.s economy. While we use those ships we design a shuttle replacement, perhaps a new, more reliable shuttle that allows parts to be swapped easily (so we can replace old and fauly parts with new ones).



-- uncle_jimbo

[Buzioid]

Originally posted by cracked
i think if we all stay on earth much longer (1000 or so years) unless something catastrophic happens, the earth will become so overpopulated we will kill ourselves from starvation, etc.

1000 years?? Do you know the rate of popluation growth of humans today? I found that it is approximately 6%(I don't know if this is accurate)!! Plus we must consider that this is exponential growth, so it will increase with every generation. So therefore, 1000 years has to be way off IMO.

0 A.D. = 200 million
1850 = 1 billion
1930 = 2 billion
1975 = 4 billion
1990 = 5.3 billion
2000 = 6.5 billion

[JacobM5727]

Buzioid, people these days are getting more and more.. ..lets just say, randy.. so while it may have been 6% then, if it was, i dont think it will stay that low for very long

a main reason we are not overpopulated already is: there are already a lot of people starving to death. and if everyone on earth was healthy, there would be a huge health crisis.. not trying to be mean, but thats how it is unfortunately

edit - oh, shuttle, right.. it is very outdated, and it is very resource intensive.. i think they should rethink that space plane (x33) or whatever, because when i am rich, i want to be able to go to japan YESTERDAY