New Space Shuttle ?

Last November, NASA took decisive action on its two-and-a-half-year-old plan to replace the aging space shuttle.

It cut the heart out of the project.

Abruptly and quietly, NASA scrapped the shuttle-replacement portion of its so-called Space Launch Initiative (SLI)—the latest in a string of development programs conceived in the wake of the 1986 Challenger disaster—and shifted most of the nearly $5 billion the agency had already earmarked for the program to pay for current shuttle improvements. Among them: safety upgrades that it hoped would let the shuttle fly accident-free until 2020 or beyond. And with plans for a new shuttle on hold, NASA announced that SLI would focus mostly on building an Orbital Space Plane, a modest, relatively inexpensive reusable vehicle that could hold a small crew (and little else) and would be launched by an expendable rocket. NASA hopes that when OSP is ready in 2010, it will serve as an interim, alternative transport, a "space taxi" until the agency can produce a next-generation shuttle.

NASA's decision was a last resort. The agency's latest estimates for designing and building a new shuttle had mushroomed from $6 billion to $35 billion. And even that was only a best guess, says Garry Lyles, NASA's Next Generation Launch Technology program manager. The gap between the figures, Lyles says, reflects NASA's difficulty with budget forecasts: "We need to develop a technology program that provides accurate data for our cost models." While so much uncertainty surrounded SLI's price tag, the shuttle's cost—$500 million per launch—was at least a known quantity. Consequently, NASA officials believed they had no choice but to place yet another bet on the 30-year-old system.




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For now use the shuttle-with its 70s technology-(my laptop has 100x the computing capacity than the nav computers on the shuttle).

Look to upgrade to a reusable system, this system has served us well and probably for the next 5 years into the future. But with proper planning we can replace with a system as robust and long lasting as this shuttle system.

Hey guys...

no offence here but that thing looks like something out of SF????

The shuttle looks like the Farscape 1 module, out of the show, and the fuel rocket looks like the NX test module out of the Enterprise series??????

Good read though....may just be my warped sense of mind at the moment?

Groan..warped sense of mind....

I don't believe it. They probably changed these old computers by some new ones.

Actually they still use cpu's like a 386 and stuff.Nasa is still looking for them.This is because they aren't so advance as in number of transisitors on the chip.They are less influenced by cosmic radiation. Newer chips, like athlon xp's and pentium 4 processors would break to fast.That's something you don't want to happen when you reënter earth's atmosphere.

Due to the current budget crunch, it could well be that the Powers That Be could have finally come to the conclusion that there is no money to continue on with a further public disinformation campaign while the true weight of space access is borne by operational X Craft.

IT NEEDS TO BE 100% MODULAR!!!!

The F-14 tomcat has more computer power then the space shuttle u can operate the nav computer on board the shuttle with a calculator. I forgot which one.

the problem is that people are losing interest in the space program maybe these two rovers on route to mars will change things, so the gov sees no need for spending more money in something that not the majority care about

Maybe we should see what the Air Force secretly has flying in space right now?

That would be extremely interesting, but I seriously doubt that we will, not at least for the next 20+ years.

There have been some upgrades on a few computers on some of the shuttles. And you are correct that basically most of the flight control and navigation computers are the equivalent of 386's. But my question is, so???

There has never been any incident of the limited computing power having an adverse affect on any portion of any shuttle mission. So, I'm unsure what you're trying to get at.

Yes, I'm sure everyone would prefer to have the most computing power they could get in, but when you have a fleet of vehicles whose performance is more dependent on other systems; whose missions are more vulnerable to mechanical/aero-mechanical failure; and whose performance has never been adversely affected by the main control system...why would you put money there instead of the other places?

I knew it's computers were not that new, but this just makes me sad.
I double checked your claims, because I just wouldn't and couldn't believe it. But damn: www.philly.com...

Well, if this article is of substance then this would be a good answer to my "so???"