What next for NASA

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The shuttle Discovery is to fly again in May, the first shuttle launch since the ill-fated Columbia flight exactly two years ago.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/4231121.stm

Conceived in the 1970s as a low(er) cost reusable spacecraft, each shuttle was designed for 100 spaceflights.  However, it's proved to be much more expensive than originally anticipated and the three remaining vehicles are all ageing rapidly.  Columbia itself flew for the very first time on 12 April 1981 and the remaining fleet of Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour are having to compensate for Columbia's loss.  The shuttle is also the only vehicle able to carry the components for the ISS into orbit.

Where will NASA go next for a reusable launch platform?  

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whabang wrote:

I think that if the U.S. truly are going to aim for mars, then there have to be made investments in some alternative for the shuttles; a craft capable of going to Mars would have to be built in orbit either around Earth, or around the moon.

That's the point, we need a cheap and reusable system for getting components from Earth to orbit in order to construct a craft to get to the moon.  The moon is but another stepping stone (the energy needed to lift raw materials from the moon to lunar orbit is much lower than that required to lift off Earth), but whatever system is adpoted will have to fight for funding and development time with NASA's other grand projects - remember that funding isn't going to be significantly increased.

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I'm with La Blob & La Cecilia on this one.  It's built into us to know, and the more we learn, the more cool stuff we realise is out there worth learning about.  To me sending a rocket to the moon is far more of a noble achievement than building a missle who's only purpose is to take life on a massive scale.

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That's an amazing story x-ray.

Thing is that the space programme is primarily about exploration and discovery, in an age where bigger and better exploding things get all the funding, it's good to see that there's still a place for our more noble instincts.

And it pays dividends in all sorts of ways too.  If it saves one life, then it's got to be worth the investment.

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What amazes me is that it's now nearly forty years since we walked on the moon.  In that time we've seen the appearence of the digital watch, the mobile telephone (with more processing power than those old Apollo computers), carbon fibre, the desktop PC, the Hubble telescope, Huygens and are even about to soft land a probe on a comet.

Yet we've never sent a human beyond Earth orbit, or indeed returned to the moon.

Where is our spirit of adventure?  Is designing ever more inefficient ways of mass extermination more of a noble passtime?  It speaks volumes about humanity that we'd rather spend out taxpayers money on an aircraft carrier instead.

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I sincerely hope not...  We've people like Steve Fossett, Ellen McArthur, Richard Branson and Sir Rannulph Fiennes all proving that mankind hasn't quite lost it's sense of adventure, so hopefully the 20th century obsession with making bigger and more spectacular bangs will prove to be the abherration rather than the rule.

For me it's the Saturn 5 rocket and not the ICBM that remains the 20th Century's most impressive piece of engineering.