Spacecraft designer calls for retirement of shuttle..started in 1962 to present !!!

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Spacecraft designer calls for retirement of shuttle
By RALPH VARTABEDIAN and PETER PAE
Los Angeles Times

A highly-regarded spacecraft designer says the space shuttle should be retired and the human space program suspended until a better vehicle can be built.

Similar calls for grounding the shuttles and other harsh assessments of its safety have been growing in the past week from members of Congress and space policy experts. They say the fleet is too unreliable, too old and too costly to continue operating.

Such views, however, have largely represented critics outside the circle of elite space engineers.

This newest critic is Max Faget, 81, who designed the Mercury space capsule and had a managing role in the design of other U.S. human launch systems, including the space shuttle, Apollo and Gemini. He has received almost every commendation that exists for engineers and was inducted into the Ohio-based National Inventor's Hall of Fame earlier this year.

"The bottom line is that the shuttle is too old," Faget said this week. "It would be very difficult to make sure it is in good shape. We ought to just stop going into space until we get a good vehicle. If we aren't willing to spend the money to do that, then we should be ashamed of ourselves."

The aerospace industry is positioning itself for such an effort, industry sources say. Boeing Co. is studying two options for building a derivative of the shuttle that could be rushed into service within three years. Until then or until the shuttle flies, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is relying on the Russian Soyuz capsule to get back and forth to the International Space Station.

Faget (pronounced fah-ZHAY), director of engineering for human spacecraft design at NASA for 20 years, was blunt in his criticism of the growing U.S. reliance on the Soyuz. The craft ran into problems this month when a three-man crew returning from the space station landed hundreds of miles off course.

"It is like going down the highway and thumbing a ride," he said. "You can do it, but it isn't the best way to get around. It is really admitting defeat."

NASA officials did not respond directly to Faget's comments, though they said the "shuttle he designed 30 years ago is not the shuttle of today," noting it had been upgraded and modernized.

NASA engineers at the working level said privately that they regarded Faget as "a giant in the space community whose opinions are worth more than anybody else's."

The shuttle was harshly criticized last week at a Congressional hearing, when Rep. Joe Barton, a Texas Republican, called for its permanent grounding. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, a California Republican and chairman of the subcommittee on space and aeronautics, said the vehicle was now so old that the country should no longer invest money into improving it.

Whether the technology of the existing fleet should be updated or a new fleet of spacecraft built is the subject of an intensifying national debate about the future of the U.S. human space program. At issue is how many billions of additional dollars the nation can afford for the program.

In Faget's view, the choices are obvious.

"We ought to get a decent vehicle," he said. "It could carry fewer people, but it ought to be a new vehicle."

Pending the findings of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board review, "NASA feels that the shuttle is still the most advanced, high-tech heavy lift vehicle in the world," said Robert Mirelson, a NASA spokesman. "Right now the administration has set the priority of returning the shuttle to flight pending the findings. The shuttle is grounded and will stay grounded until we are absolutely certain it can return to flight safely."

Efforts by the agency to replace the shuttle have failed for technical, political or monetary reasons. Boeing has begun new efforts on its own to examine how quickly it could turn out a replacement spacecraft.

Mike Lounge, a former astronaut who is manager for Boeing's NASA Systems in Houston, told attendees at the 40th Space Congress in Cape Canaveral last week that Boeing engineers were doing an "internal exercise" to determine the best way to construct a replacement shuttle if one were needed.

Two options are under study, according to a source familiar with the studies. One would use old blueprints but adopt modern manufacturing techniques. The other would build a modernized shuttle using the same "mold line" or shape of the current fleet but with the latest lightweight composite materials and advanced electronic equipment.

The source said Boeing thought it could build such a shuttle in three years, far less than the decade or so it would take to develop and build the orbital space plane that NASA envisioned as the replacement for the shuttle. The new vehicle also would cost significantly less, according to Boeing's internal projections, at about $2 billion, compared with about $10 billion for the orbital space plane.

Faget said such a program might make sense, but he questioned why anybody would use the same shuttle architecture that he pioneered almost 30 years ago.