7 thoughts on “The White Elephant In NASA’s Living Room”

  1. Relating to the previous white elephant (which wasn’t as big), you now have a chance to buy the Shuttle’s mobile launch platforms. UK Guardian link.

    Some of the comments are pretty funny.

    Could you drive one all the way to Pasadena?

      1. I’ve always thought that if Congress wanted to have a real jobs program, and get ordinary people involved in space, they should order NASA to take the engines out of the crawlers, and have masses pull them with ropes, a la pyramid building.

        1. You’re thinking in the right direction, just too small. They should outlaw not only office automation (remember Obama’s talk about ATMs replacing bank tellers?) but power equipment. After all, one skilled operator with a backhoe can do the same amount of work as scores of manual ditch diggers. Outlaw backhoes from construction sites and they’ll have to hire those ditch diggers (union employees, no less). Outlaw cranes and make hundreds or thousands of people pull ropes. It worked for the pyramids so it’ll work again.

  2. There actually is a mission for SLS, and for the very first one at that. Dennis Tito plans to use it to launch the Inspiration Mars habitat and trans-Mars injection propulsion system. The crew would be launched on a commercial crew vehicle. That means the first flight can be a little later than NASA originally planned. But it also means that it has to go off on time. and work the very first time. That’s a nerve-wracking a set of requirements, in my opinion…

  3. The only potential buyer I can think of is the companies that use some of the world’s largest drag line excavators to mine Florida phosphates. A crawler weights a bit more than twice as much as Big Muskie, and its flat top would make the required additions fairly simple.

  4. The ISS is a classic example of what the military calls a self-licking ice cream cone* in that its existence is used as justification for its existence. For the vast amount of money spent on the ISS, there is very little science being accomplished. Most of the astronauts’ working hours are spent maintaining the station rather than doing anything productive.

    The SLS will be more of the same. We decried the “Bridge to Nowhere” as a boondoggle (and it was) but this one is many times as costly. It’s so expensive that there’s no funding left to actually develop any payloads other than an also absurdly expensive capsule.

    Seriously, if the ISS and SLS are the best that NASA can do with manned spaceflight, they should cancel the whole thing.

    *Interestingly enough, WikiPedia credits the first known use of that phrase to the linked paper describing the NASA bureaucracy. Nothing has changed, at least not for the better.

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