Space Shuttle Shenanigans

[Pangloss]

This has been making the rounds of various aircraft/spaceflight discussion forums lately, but I don't have a good news link for the story, I'm afraid. If I run across something direct I'll pass it along.

 

As I said back when Discovery flew in August, I believe we've already seen the last shuttle flight. A lot of observers have noted what appears to be further confirmation that NASA has no intention of flying another mission, in spite of this this week's announcement of a May launch window. Recent news that leans in the direction of "the fat lady's already back in the dressing room" include a plethora of candid-but-off-the-record comments to reporters, complaints about lack of money to pay for shuttle missions (which have mysteriously doubled in cost *aside* from the post-Columbia safety changes), stories about an apocalyptic "brain drain" allegedly underway within NASA, rumors of pending layoffs, and so forth.

 

One of the more blatant PR moves has been the way they're handling the end-of-flight schedule. You may have heard that the plan is for all shuttle flights will end in 2010. What you may not have heard was that that date was arrived at not by calculating the life expectency of the shuttles, or by analyzing safety factors, but by simply adding up the number of flights they needed to complete the International Space Station.

 

What's amusing (and sad) about that is that now they've begun to call that a hard deadline, regardless of the status of ISS. This began happening before the recent Discovery flight, so it's pretty obvious that once they had a deadline in place, and knew that nobody understood (or cared) how that deadline was arrived at, they could simply shift the way they talked about that deadline, and voila -- instant termination date.

 

It's worth noting that that deadline is not for December 31st, 2010. It's for September 30th, 2010. That, of course, the end of the fiscal year. As one aviation writer put it, "apparently keeping the paperwork neat is more important than anything else."