Blue Jeanz
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Registered: 04-2006
Location: Pennsylvania, USA
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Do we really need to keep sending up the Space Shuttle?
(Information found at space.com and time.com)
The average cost to send the space shuttle up each time is $1.3 Billion Dollars. Yes, I said Billion. It was originally projected to cost $5 million per flight. Aerospace contractors love the fact that the shuttle launches cost so much!
[Note: How much is a Billion dollars? Picture this: A tightly-packed stack of new $1,000 bills totaling $1 billion would be 63 miles high! And about a Billion months ago Dinosaurs walked the Earth. One Billion = One thousand Million!]
Just what are we doing up there? We're building a Space Station! Wow! The Space Station was conceived mainly to give the Space Shuttle a destination, and the shuttle has been kept flying mainly to keep the space station serviced!
Some analysts propose that the shuttle be phased out, that cargo launches be carried aboard by far cheaper, unmanned, throwaway rockets and that NASA build a small "space plane" solely for people, to be used on those occasions when men and women are truly needed in space. NASA's insistence on sending a crew on every shuttle flight means risking precious human life for mindless tasks that automated devices can easily carry out.
Switching to unmanned rockets for payload launching and a small space plane for those rare times humans are really needed would cut costs, which is why aerospace contractors have lobbied against such reform. Boeing and Lockheed Martin split roughly half the shuttle business through a consortium called the United Space Alliance. It's a source of significant profit for both companies; United Space Alliance employs 6,400 contractor personnel for shuttle launches alone. Many other aerospace contractors also benefit from the space-shuttle program.
The tough questions that have gone unasked about the space shuttle have also gone unasked about the space station, which generates billions in budget allocations for California, Texas, Ohio, Florida and other states. Started in 1984 and originally slated to cost $14 billion in today's dollars, the space station has already cost at least $60 billion—not counting billions more for launch costs—and won't be finished until 2008. The bottled water alone that crews use aboard the space station costs taxpayers almost half a million dollars a day.
There are no scientific experiments aboard the space station that could not be done far more cheaply on unmanned probes. The only space-station research that does require crew is "life science," or studying the human body's response to space. Space life science is useful but means astronauts are on the station mainly to take one another's pulse, a pretty marginal goal for such an astronomical price.
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10/29/2007, 2:55 pm
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avonandie
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Registered: 08-2007
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I agree with you but I also feel that they need to go up for certain things. Like to repair the space station, etc. They shouldn't have to spend billions for stupid readons.
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10/29/2007, 4:19 pm
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iowakansas2006
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Registered: 02-2007
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They're building a space station so I see the need for this and more.
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12/5/2007, 9:38 pm
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Blue Jeanz
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Well, they built the Space Station so the Shuttle would have a place to go. I see it's supposed to go up again Tomorrow?
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12/5/2007, 10:57 pm
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Blue Jeanz
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Location: Pennsylvania, USA
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I believe she lives in Canada Char.
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1/6/2008, 11:06 pm
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God Bless All Who Post Here!
