NASA admits shuttle, ISS were mistakes

[Thomas F Davis]

Here's foresight for you
I can recall an Aviation Week & Space Technology article from the last year of the Nixon Administration.  NASA presented a study to the then Office of Management and Budget which stated that they needed seven orbiters.  Why?  Because they estimated that they would lose two over the course of a 30 year program.
The OMB replied "No, you will get five, and you won't lose any".  
Five was later cut to four, but we ended up with the fifth (Atlantis) back in the budget after Challenger was lost.
I wish I had kept that article.
Tom

--- On Wed, 7/13/11, John Teller <jsteller at spottydog.us> wrote:

From: John Teller <jsteller at spottydog.us>
Subject: Re: NASA admits shuttle, ISS were mistakes
To: tacos at amrad.org
Date: Wednesday, July 13, 2011, 12:21 AM

That article is also 6 years old and was written under Griffin's 
tenure.  He was trying to move things away from big low-Earth projects 
into interplanetary missions (much as he did when he was running the 
Space Systems Group at Orbital).  Dissing ISS and the Shuttle were just 
part of the campaign.  Dawn was one of his pet projects, and made it 
through at least one outright cancellation.

---JST


On 07/12/2011 02:58 PM, Phil wrote:
> The media are so good at 20:20 hindsight. Why not celebrate its successes, than declare it a failure? I remember an article in 'New Scientist' damning the Apollo missions for the "lack of meaningful science". Of course, the assumption was that technology and engineering development have no intrinsic worth whatsoever.
>
> The Shuttle and ISS were not failures. Not having a replacement ready when the Shuttle was decommissioned was.
>
> Phil M1GWZ
>
>
>
>
> On 12 Jul 2011, at 04:35, Chip Fetrow wrote:
>
>> They missed the point that much of the Shuttle's design was done for the military, particularally the Air Force, who dropped out of the program once they were building the first Shuttles.  It would have been much smaller, and capible of going into higher orbits had the Air Force not been involved.
>>
>> http://m.techrepublic.com/blog/geekend/nasa-admits-shuttle-iss-were-mistakes/93
>>
>> --chip
>>  From the Kennedy Space Center Press Site
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