What do you think of NASA final shuttle mission in 2010?

Question

why would nasa stop their flights?

Answer 1

They've been planning on stopping them in 2010 ever since the Columbia investigation. Sooner or later they need to start spending the shuttle money on the replacement. To keep them going any longer they'd have to put them through major renovations and recertification that would delay the Ares system.

Congress will probably try to get them to add one more to launch the AMS anti-matter experiment.

Answer 2

the shuttles are old, falling apart, unreliable, and expensive to run. they are also limited to low-earth orbit only. it's time for something new.

a new re-usable spacecraft would have been really cool, but there is no money to develop one.

Answer 3

The shuttle is old, and the parts are no longer being manufactured.

I think it's  a shame, and I wish we'd had a little more foresight and had gone on to build more of them, (a fleet of 10 or 12 would have been good) but we didn't.

It's one of those cases where you choose the leser of two bad choices - keep it flying and risk another loss, or stop flying and wait years for a replacement, while we rely on the goodwill and the pockebooks of the Russians to keep our people in space.

And it gets worse.  One of our presidential candidates (Obama) has promised to postpone Ares and Orion for an extra five years, to fund some new education program.

(Why do this, when he could get the same effect by doubling the space program budget and spending it on things that will inspire kids to learn, so that they might have a shot at being an astronaut, is beyond me.)

So we may have to wait until 2019 or later to send people up again.

Answer 4

They stop it, because otherwise, they couldn't afford landing on the moon again. The Shuttle is pretty cool and fascinating, but also expensive, as it is actually more a fleet of flying prototypes  than production ready machines.  They require a large force of workers and engineers for operations, have very expensive maintenance and are still very limited in space, as the Shuttle is only a compromise between being a spacecraft and being a glider - bad both in space and in the air, but still capable of doing both.

Developing a second generation Shuttle would have been cooler, but NASA was not really motivated doing it before loosing the second orbiter - most successor projects failed because of too ambitious concepts or got canceled.

But well, never say never. Maybe somebody else than NASA will one day create the second generation shuttle, maybe on the many cool things, NASA invented in the last 30 years as basic research.

Answer 5

it sure would be nice if all those Chinese or Indian dudes would develop a reusable space deployment system... instead of doing the same thing the US did in the 60s and expecting kudos for it.

anyway... shuttles end in 2010 and the new capsule starts in 2014... ow.