I wish I could get a sweet gig like this. I could have given NASA much better advice than this study, for a lot less than three hundred thousand:

The study by George Washington University researchers urged the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to cut down on shuttle flights by limiting construction on the space station and to reinvest extra funds in developing a new manned vehicle. NASA could use shuttles as remote-controlled cargo ships to finish the station, the report said.

No matter how many times people make that recommendation, it remains fundamentally wrong, and displays an ignorance of economics, and the purpose of the Shuttle. There's no point in flying it at all if you're going to fly it without crew, and no way to justify the expense of maintaining the infrastructure for it. The astronauts, who are paid and willing to risk their lives, are the least valuable element of the system, and NASA has an oversupply of them. NASA only has three orbiters left, and if it loses one more, it will almost be out of the Shuttle business anyway, regardless of whether or not more astronauts are lost.

But I can't get my head around this bizarre notion that some seem to have that sending people into space is supposed to be risk free. What is it about that environment, unlike the sea, coal mines, construction, or any other activity in which people die all the time, that make some people check their brains at the door?

NASA at least had an appropriately diplomatic response:

Erica Hupp, a spokeswoman for NASA, said the organization "appreciates all the work that George Washington University put into its study. We are working toward the same goal to make human space flight more reliable and less hazardous.''

Translation: thanks for the clueless advice, but no thanks. What a waste of money.

[Update on Saturday morning]

Keith Cowing isn't very impressed, either.

Rand

The space shuttle has killed 14 people over twenty plus years. Just the other day, a Texas refinery killed that many or more. And don't forget that over a hundred times as many brave folks have been killed in Iraq. Strange how people look at the same thing.

People cloud the difference between "risky" and "unsafe", often deliberately if they're pushing their own agenda.

More to the point, billions were spent to make the Shuttle man-capable, man-rated. That money, and weight, becomes a major loss if millions more is spent to make the Shuttle a unmanned vehicle. Better not to fly the Shuttle at all than to waste money making it unmanned. It would probably make more money with museum tickets.

The only good reason for using the unmanned orbiter as a supply ship is because it's the only ship that can bring down large amounts of cargo from ISS. If NASA had funded Alternative Access to Station all those years back, we wouldn't be having this problem. Now we face the choice of either limiting cargo to what can be returned by Soyuz / CEV, flying the orbiter unmanned, or pushing all of our cargo out the airlock into an ATV for destruction once its no longer useful.

Shuttle: the "circus" part of bread and circuses.
The rest follows.

I would like to see someone come up with a realistic estimate for how much it would cost to convert the shuttle to an autonomous vehicle. There are an awful lot of switches and buttons that would have to be replaced to even think about making it work.

So the notion of an autonomous shuttle is just a fanciful excuse to skirt around the real issue. If you want to do exploration, you have to be willing to take risks.

The time and resources wasted on trying to automate the Shuttle would only make the matter worse.

Astronauts are grown up people who volunteered for this job. Inform them of the risks, they can make a decision. They are working on a harsh environment using low margin technology.

The Shuttle is already fully automated, and has been since day one. All that is involved in flying it uncrewed is to add actuators to drop the gear, and to control the brake and steering pedals. The astronaut office has always fought this "last mile," (or in doing an autopilot landing) because it removes the last reason (in the minds of some) to have pilots.

Modifying the Shuttle is quite beside the point. The point is that one of its primary purposes is to deliver crew to orbit. If it doesn't do that, there's little reason to continue to pay the cost of its infrastructure.

This idea is the worst of both worlds.

Launching a 100 ton uncrewed space station with your cargo.

The cost isn't in making in autonomous. The cost would be removing the systems necessary to sustain crew. If its going to be made in to an unmanned system, then it should be completely be turned into an unmanned system to save on launch weight. Maybe leave a few items in place to allow ISS crew to enter and retrieve supplies.

More rational plans (only slightly so) are to simply remove the Orbiter from the STS stack and replace it with some other vehicle that is unmanned and automated. Cost savings would be kept by using a known launch system, and it would still allow for manned shuttle launches by just making a different stack.

Still, parking the shuttle, once a new vehicle is ready for production, is the best idea IMO.

It doesn't make sense to remove the crew systems, because not that much weight is saved, and most of the systems needed to keep crew alive are also needed to keep avionics alive, with its current design.

There is not much to salvage. The main engines are expensive and high maintenance. The current main tank design only makes sense with a vehicle that is piggybacked on it, like Shuttle. The solids had an insignificant design cost. Curiously I think the engine designs developed for the Saturn V are more interesting to reuse for a new rocket, even for what we require today. There is no large LOX/hydrocarbon engine available today with the characteristics of the F-1A engine. The closest is probably the former Soviet RD-170. What a waste.

Personally I think a new design inspired by Shuttle with technologies available today could have been cost competitive with expendables, even if I wouldn't bet money that it would reduce costs over them. The problem is doing one would drain up all of NASA's budget leaving zero for the Moon project. A vehicle like Shuttle also makes little sense for anything but servicing LEO stations.

LEO stations made sense in Von Braun's grand design. In the stations men could do Earth monitoring or conduct other military missions. Satellites under computer control have taken care of all these tasks. They afford a longer loiter time. Computers can sustain themselves off the fat of the land via solar power. Humans cannot. Yet.

There may be some other use for LEO space stations, to conduct experiments in micro-gravity or a space shelter, but I doubt they will be of the size or scope of ISS. Something like Bigelow's design which involves no human intervention to deploy and has few modules seems more sensible.

A research station (or more) conducting ISRU research and surveying either our Moon or the Martian moons seems more interesting than dumping it all in a new Shuttle. ELVs can put satellites in the sky just fine. If the commercial sector manages to make reusables good for that, more power to them.

The question is which vehicles are more interesting for exploring the Moon. I say vehicles because I suspect you will need more than one just like Apollo did.

Actually aside from human crew, what cargo is there to remove from the ISS? We have no need to deorbit safely tens of tons of stuff. The ISS doesn't really make anything material (except various forms of waste).

Forgot about the environmental sensitivity of the avionics. Good point.

I think it's nice that people at GWU take an interest in space politics. Anyway, isn't politics the art of stating the obvious? (cut down on shuttle flights, station)

Makes you wonder what the AF might have accomplished if they'd kept pushing the X15 further, higher, faster.