Space Forum / Shuttle / June 2007

A better question is there ANY WAY TO SAFELY FINISH THE STATION BY
2010?

With shuttle delays I seriously doubt it. Schedule pressure to meet
that deadline may well cause the next accident

Careful there. CAIB R9.2-1 didn't recommend *retirement* by 2010, it
recommended *recertification*. The VSE plan to retire the orbiters was
based on the assumption (probably true) that recertification as
envisioned by the CAIB would be too expensive.

It's important to understand the reasoning of the CAIB. They didn't want
NASA to operate the orbiters through 2020 and beyond (the then-current
plan) without a recertification. They were fully aware that a
recertification would be very expensive and a recommendation of same
would probably result in a debate over recertification vs
retirement/replacement of the orbiters. This debate was something the
CAIB welcomed, but they didn't want immediate retirement of the orbiters
or to prevent ISS completion, so they didn't recommend recertification
as a constraint to return-to-flight. Instead they recommended
recertification at 2010. The date was pretty arbitrary; it was a nice
round number between then and 2020, and gave plenty of time to complete
ISS assembly (at the time the CAIB report was published,
return-to-flight was in March 2004).

The CAIB had no intention of forcing "schedule pressure" to complete ISS
by 2010, nor was their intention to force orbiter retirement prior to
ISS completion. Now that orbiter retirement is virtually a foregone
conclusion, due to the termination of subcontracts after the delivery of
hardware needed to fly out the current manifest, it makes sense to relax
the 2010 deadline in order to fly out the current manifest, as long as
no new flights are added. Some CAIB members (I think Steven Wallace was
the most recent) have expressed this opinion publicly.

Well, its getting older  and older and I'd imagine there will come a point
where  its going to cost a real large amount to keep them flying. There have
been a lot of comments recently about things used only having been qualified
for 10 years, and then requalified etc, and things do age.

The cost  is another thing, is it actually wise to keep throwing money at it
and not at the new craft. However, I do have my doubts about the sense of
the new craft myself anyhow. The crux will come when there is a new person
in the whitehouse.

Brian

It would probably be fairly easy to take a different look at the CAIB
report and conclude that the CAIB had authorised X number of flights for
each orbiter before requiring major overhaul/recertification and that
the then current schedule would bring the last flight in 2010.

Since NASA has not added flights and since return to flight has happened
later than the CAIB had expected, it would probably be easy to move the
2010 *reasonably* and stay with the same number of flights and just
account for the longer stand-down period as well as the periodic delays
of a couple of months such as the one just experienced due to the hail
storm.

It could also be argued that by adding such flexibility to the deadline
without changing its original goal, the remaining shuttle flights would
be safer since NASA would not be under a tight schedule pressure.

There would have to be some formula that would take into account every
day an orbiter spends on the pad since it is exposed to the
elements/salt/rain and those degrade the orbiter quicker than when it is
indoors in the maintenance bays with climate control.

When you consider Discovery (or was it Endeavour) which was in a major
maintenance cycle at the time of columbia's accident, and this was
suspended for a couple of years while they were working the problems of
the other orbiters and ET foam. Its first flight will be in 2007 so that
is at least 2 or 3 years after the CAIB had anticipated a return to
flight. Shouldn't they allow that vehicle to fly 2 or 3 years beyond its
original retirement date ?

Where there is a will, there is a way.  But since the anti-shuttle folks
are still quite powerful within NASA, I doubt there is a will, even if
the retirement of the shuttle will mean an end of human spaceflight at
NASA for a very long time, putting these people out of work.