could a retired shuttle be reflown?

lets imagine some deerp pockets $$$$ deciding to make a shuttle space
worthy again;0

would it be possible? has nasa sent all the tooling to a scrap yard or
put it in storage?

i know its not going to happen but a discussion on this would be far
better than this board being dominated with spam.......

bob haller wrote:
lets imagine some deerp pockets $$$$ deciding to make a shuttle space
worthy again;0

would it be possible? has nasa sent all the tooling to a scrap yard or
put it in storage?

i know its not going to happen but a discussion on this would be far
better than this board being dominated with spam.......

Why in the world would you want them to fly again since you were such a
foreteller of doom and gloom when they did fly. I thought you'd be happy
now that they've quit.

OK humouring him..
Tanks, I don't know what happened to the tooling but the infrastructure for
the construction and shipping is gone as are the bits and pieces in the VAB
and the support for Shuttles on the pad I imagine by now.
So its not just the main vehicles its the rest of the system. I imagine
that will be the issue. Smaller components can be made I'm sure, but a lot
of the innards of Shuttles are being taken to bits to learn about wear and
tear, so I'd be very dubious unless you wanted to start afresh.

Brian

--
Brian Gaff....Note, this account does not accept Bcc: email.
graphics are great, but the blind can't hear them
Email:
__________________________________________________ __________________________________________________ __________


"Barbara Needham" wrote in message
...
bob haller wrote:
lets imagine some deerp pockets $$$$ deciding to make a shuttle space
worthy again;0

would it be possible? has nasa sent all the tooling to a scrap yard or
put it in storage?

i know its not going to happen but a discussion on this would be far
better than this board being dominated with spam.......

Why in the world would you want them to fly again since you were such a
foreteller of doom and gloom when they did fly. I thought you'd be happy
now that they've quit.

In article 30543542-0b9c-40d9-bc37-1bb9674abb71
@z8g2000yql.googlegroups.com, says...

lets imagine some deerp pockets $$$$ deciding to make a shuttle space
worthy again;0

would it be possible? has nasa sent all the tooling to a scrap yard or
put it in storage?

i know its not going to happen but a discussion on this would be far
better than this board being dominated with spam.......

The idea of continuing shuttle operations was examined in great detail.
Not possible, largely because there was no interest and because NASA has
been converting ground facilities for use with its new heavy lift
launcher.

Sorry Bob, but you can't unring this bell.

Jeff
--
"the perennial claim that hypersonic airbreathing propulsion would
magically make space launch cheaper is nonsense -- LOX is much cheaper
than advanced airbreathing engines, and so are the tanks to put it in
and the extra thrust to carry it." - Henry Spencer

On Wed, 3 Oct 2012 14:22:37 -0400, Jeff Findley
wrote:

The idea of continuing shuttle operations was examined in great detail.
Not possible, largely because there was no interest and because NASA has
been converting ground facilities for use with its new heavy lift
launcher.

Sorry Bob, but you can't unring this bell.

Well, not quite. Most of the infrastructure is still there and still
relatively easily brought back for Shuttle service, were some bizarre
chain of events initiated that the Shuttles were needed to be
reactivated. Only one of the two VAB High Bays (that were used by
Shuttle) is being overhauled for SLS, the other is sitting idle,
pending "21st Century Spaceport" decisions. There were three Shuttle
MLPs, and they're all still intact (SLS uses the new one built for
Ares I.) LC-39A is still intact with its RSS. The SRB plant is sitting
idle, awaiting Five Segment SRB production, and NASA would probably
simply use the FSB instead of the old one (that's what FSB was
originally designed for, after all.) The SSMEs are in storage pending
use by SLS. The ET plant is preparing to build SLS cores of the same
diameter, so it isn't irreverisbly changed.

It would be much more expensive and take more time than putting Orion
on Atlas 5, and funding CST-100, DragonRider and DreamChaser combined
through to flight, but there have been no irreverisble actions that
money couldn't put Atlantis or Discovery (most likely) back in orbit
in two or three years (Endeavour gave up her MPS to SLS-1.)

Brian

On Oct 3, 3:54*pm, JF Mezei wrote:

The only way the shuttle would be brought back to life is if there were
some planetary emergency and this was the only vehicle that could save
the planet at which point, you bet that NASA, ATK and others would get
the Shuttle in the air in record time.


Wrong.

No launch pads
The orbiters have be gutted
The OPF's will be gutted
The VAB platforms will be removed from both high bays
The expertise is gone

Also, the idea of mothballing is wrong

On Oct 3, 8:05*pm, Brian Thorn wrote:

Well, not quite. Most of the infrastructure is still there and still
relatively easily brought back for Shuttle service,


No, it isn't. It is being gutted.

In article om,
says...

Well, considering that the Earth will likely collide with a black hole
sometime in mid december (is the end of the world on the 12th or 21st
?), there would really be no time to rebuild the shuttles.

WTF?

From what I read, many systems were removed from the orbiters,
especially those that may have hydrazyne contaminents.

SSME's were removed and replaced with replicas. The aft compartment has
been gutted of plumbing and hardware related to the SSME's. Both were
done to harvest hardware for the NASA HLV.

There is no production capacity for the tanks. And I don't know about
SRBs for the Shuttle.

True about the ET, production was stopped long ago. SRB's are a bit
harder to tell since ATK is still developing hardware for the NASA HLV.

The only way the shuttle would be brought back to life is if there
were
some planetary emergency and this was the only vehicle that could save
the planet at which point, you bet that NASA, ATK and others would get
the Shuttle in the air in record time.

I doubt even that would be the case as even KSC is converting facilities
for use with NASA's HLV, commercial crew, and etc.

Much more likely that existing launchers (hardware already being built
and flown) would be pressed into service. It's easier to replace a
payload on a scheduled launch than it is to bring the shuttle system
back from the dead.

BUT...

Since the shuttle is really limited to LEO, if there were a planetary
emergency such as some meteorite on collision course etc, all the
shuttle could do is bring some missiles to LEO and launch them from
there after aiming them at the meteorite. That is a task that can be
done faster by existing rockets.

And just what "missiles" would even fit in the shuttle cargo bay? What
would their range be? This isn't Hollywood.

Diverting a "planet buster" would need to be done years before the
predicted impact.

(I know that there was a documentary with Bruce Willis where the 2
tankless shuttles were able to refuel at the Mir space station allowing
them to go all the way to the moon, sling shot around it and land on the
meteorite, but since Mir isn't there anymore, this scenario can't be
done anymore :-) :-)

If they had kept 1 shuttle in operational state (but mothballed), it may
have been of use to jumpstart the building of a mars expedition ship by
bringing up the first modules, arm etc to get vehicle to a state where
automated rockets could bring the remaining modules up.

This is dumb. The entire Russian segment of ISS was NOT delivered by
the shuttle. The shuttle was used for the US segments because it was an
existing asset. That asset is no more.

Whether a new shuttle model will ever be built remains to be seen. If
NASA develops proper automated rendez vous, it is quite possible that
modules perched atop conventional rockets may be "it" for the foreseable
future.

A "new shuttle model" is not likely to ever be built. It was a flawed
design from the start; a huge compromise made between NASA requirements
and military requirements. It should have been killed before it ever
flew since it was far too expensive, flew too few times a year, and was
far more fragile than needed.

Jeff
--
"the perennial claim that hypersonic airbreathing propulsion would
magically make space launch cheaper is nonsense -- LOX is much cheaper
than advanced airbreathing engines, and so are the tanks to put it in
and the extra thrust to carry it." - Henry Spencer

In article , bthorn64
@suddenlink.net says...

On Wed, 3 Oct 2012 14:22:37 -0400, Jeff Findley
wrote:

The idea of continuing shuttle operations was examined in great detail.
Not possible, largely because there was no interest and because NASA has
been converting ground facilities for use with its new heavy lift
launcher.

Sorry Bob, but you can't unring this bell.

Well, not quite. Most of the infrastructure is still there and still
relatively easily brought back for Shuttle service, were some bizarre
chain of events initiated that the Shuttles were needed to be
reactivated. Only one of the two VAB High Bays (that were used by
Shuttle) is being overhauled for SLS, the other is sitting idle,
pending "21st Century Spaceport" decisions. There were three Shuttle
MLPs, and they're all still intact (SLS uses the new one built for
Ares I.) LC-39A is still intact with its RSS. The SRB plant is sitting
idle, awaiting Five Segment SRB production, and NASA would probably
simply use the FSB instead of the old one (that's what FSB was
originally designed for, after all.) The SSMEs are in storage pending
use by SLS. The ET plant is preparing to build SLS cores of the same
diameter, so it isn't irreverisbly changed.

It would be much more expensive and take more time than putting Orion
on Atlas 5, and funding CST-100, DragonRider and DreamChaser combined
through to flight, but there have been no irreverisble actions that
money couldn't put Atlantis or Discovery (most likely) back in orbit
in two or three years (Endeavour gave up her MPS to SLS-1.)

In other words, commercial alternatives are currently being developed at
a fraction of the cost it would take to reverse course and bring back
shuttle flights. Don't forget to add to that the continuing Orion
program. I don't see how any sane person would ever want to bring the
shuttle program back from the dead, especially in this era of growing
debt and tight budgets.

We're in the same situation we were in after Saturn V production was
stopped and the last Saturn V put Skylab into orbit. Yes much of the
infrastructure was still in place for Saturn V. Yes it was still
theoretically possible to restart production. On top of that, surely
there were still some people within NASA that still held out hope that
this would happen since the shuttle would never be the HLV that Saturn V
was. But, the ugly reality of politics and economics dictated
otherwise.

On top of that, proposal after proposal was made for a cargo version of
the shuttle (e.g. Shuttle-C and the like). That never materialized in
parallel with the shuttle. The costs were deemed too high, even when
the designs shared much in common with the shuttle.

Now that NASA has been traveling down the road of a shuttle derived HLV
for some years now, it seems equally unlikely that the shuttle will ever
fly again. The facilities could theoretically handle both programs at
the same time, but NASA simply cannot afford the cost of two, huge,
parallel programs. They would have even less in common than Shuttle-C
and the shuttle, so they would cost far more than even that failed
combination.

Jeff
--
"the perennial claim that hypersonic airbreathing propulsion would
magically make space launch cheaper is nonsense -- LOX is much cheaper
than advanced airbreathing engines, and so are the tanks to put it in
and the extra thrust to carry it." - Henry Spencer

In article 41da502a-af03-428c-a8ee-
,
says...

On Oct 3, 8:05*pm, Brian Thorn wrote:

Well, not quite. Most of the infrastructure is still there and still
relatively easily brought back for Shuttle service,


No, it isn't. It is being gutted.

Brian has the details right, at the engineering level. But, the
political and economic gutting overshadows the idle infrastructure that
has not yet been gutted. It is vanishingly unlikely that the shuttle
will ever fly again.

Jeff
--
"the perennial claim that hypersonic airbreathing propulsion would
magically make space launch cheaper is nonsense -- LOX is much cheaper
than advanced airbreathing engines, and so are the tanks to put it in
and the extra thrust to carry it." - Henry Spencer