flinn@seismo.UUCP (E. A. Flinn) (03/19/84)
----- You could see ten years ago that the space station was going to be the next extravaganza after the shuttle. The shuttle was sold on the basis of economy - over the planned eleven-year lifetime a profile was presented that involved 729 launches, which works out to one a week. I.e., every Tuesday afternoon there would be a launch, for eleven years. I repeat my personal opinion that the main reason NASA exists is to pump money into the aerospace industry, because there are not that many people around (even those half a mile northeast of NASA Headquarters) who could possibly believe such a mission profile. It costs real money to build payloads - say $100M per full shuttle payload, which is a *very* low estimate. The shuttle office never planned to budget that money - this was left to the program offices. There was never the slightest possibility that anything like $5.2B worth of payloads would be in the NASA budget. So what is the only stuff cheap enough to put into payloads to launch week after week? That's right - bricks and two by fours and panelboard and other building materials. To build what? A S*P*A*C*E S*T*A*T*I*O*N,!! that's what. Never mind that impartial panels who studied what a space station would be good for found that the answer is not much. Never mind that well-placed people like Stockman and Keyworth pointed out that we don't need and can't use a space station at present. Never mind that the present plans for what to do with the station are pathetic. Never mind that the space station will be to science at NASA as an elephant in a lifeboat (as Von Braun said of the shuttle) in that every time the elephant hiccups everybody else gets wet. We will have the space station within a decade, as the O&W has declared, because having a space station is not only the next logical step, but the next inevitable step in space.
ks@astrovax.UUCP (Karl Stapelfeldt) (03/25/84)
I find it unbelievable (as you suggest) that Werner von Braun would compare the space shuttle's contribution to science to "an elephant in a lifeboat." How about citing some sources (and more detailed elaboration) for this alleged statement?