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After this mission, it’s ['Atlantis' is] scheduled to fly on STS-132 in May 2010, and it’ll be readied as STS-335, the rescue flight for the final shuttle mission next September.

I’m torn over the end of the program. It will be sad to see these vehicles stop flying. I can think of few things more thrilling to watch than the moment the three mains start up at T-6 seconds before launch, and I get a lump in my throat thinking that after next year I’ll never see that again. But I also know that each launch is a lot of accidents waiting to happen.

Thanks for that info. Much appreciated.

I certainly see where you’re coming from there.

I guess I just hate the idea of having such a long gap and such uncertainty in us not having a US (western really) human- capable payload and flight system like Shuttle or Saturn-Apollo so I’d rather we flew the shuttle as late as possible to keep our space presence going.

(Plus because just WOW! Shuttle launches & technology – love ‘em! )

Spaceflight will always have an element of risk – I don’t think it can be otherwise but, yes, it makes sense to minimise that as far as reasonably possible – if no further! Some risks deserve to be taken! I’d like to see a bolder approach & yes, I’d be happy to risk my own life & if I died well better to die doing something I love than of Alzheimers in bed unfulfilled. That’s my perspective on things anyhow.

Per Wikipedia the first stage engine had been test fired; but the Saturn V was only a gleam in the designers eyes in 1961, yet it flew in 1967. Six years from nothing on paper to a flight. One more year to a manned flight. Further, in 1961 they hadn’t even decided on the mission configuration which determined the necessary characteristics of the booster.

When Ares 1-X was being launched, for example, part of the concern of getting off the ground before the end of the week was so mutual personnel could move on to other scheduled launches.

CCAFS is a facility that is operated by the 45th Space Wing headquartered in Patrick Air Force Base, which is just to the south of CCAFS.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CCAFS

Ahhhh, home sweet home, where the sun is shiny, where rockets and missiles roam.

Well, not exactly. I mean, the Germans were perfecting the V-2 in the 1930s, and Robert Goddard obtained the patents for multi-stage rockets and the liquid-fuel engine in 1914. So if you put your starting point there, it was actually 55 years.

And if you move your starting point back to the 17th Century, when the Indians were using iron-cased solid rockets or the 13th Century, when the Chinese were first using rockets in battle, you can see “one small step” as the climax of a 737-year project. So in that sense, 18 years fiddling with new technology — coincidentally, the same 18 years that saw the spread of the Internet, wireless telephony, GPS navigation, laptop computers, and other technologies that the modern-day Shuttle relies on — is really a tiny blip in the grand scheme of things.

We’ve been fiddle….. around with design studies on what to replace the shuttle with for eighteen years.

Under current rates of decisionmaking Columbus’ great great grandchildren would have sailed in about 1692. Oh well, perhaps our great great granchildren will see a Mars landing, or arguably more practical, an asteroid landing.

For human transportation to undergo a similar leap, we just need to shrink people.

People (Americans especially) are going in the wrong direction. Which is why planes are still shaped like tubes and travel at subsonic speeds, and space travel continues to cost a whole bunch.

Plus space is really high, and you have to go really fast to get into orbit. (Even Cubesats have launch costs around $30k. The perfusion of small commercial launchers will certainly bring this price down for small satellites).

This is really up in the air. I think it’s not quite at the stage yet where it could be tested at the station. Once its ready for prime time, then it’d be a matter of what would be available to launch it.

@Sully #1

Your just talking about the nature of space tech. Pretty much anything you build for launch into space is obsolete tech compared to what we have on Earth by the time it gets up there. It’s in the nature of the beast.

I think what the shuttle helped to do, though, more than anything else, is make LEO flights attainable by any corporation by making us all think they are routine. If we’re going to truly be space explorers, you need other non-government people in on the action. So NASA did exactly what I think it should do: pave the way in areas business is too risk-averse to tackle until it is ready to do so.

By the way, if anyone has a chance to see a launch, it’s absolutely amazing. I saw the launch for the Hubble repair mission and it still fills me with awe when I think about it. A video broadcast does not do it justice.