Re: One-year delay for RTF-3?

On Thu, 28 Jul 2005 14:17:35 -0400, John Doe <jdoe@xxxxxxx> wrote:

>genedigennaro@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
>>
>> Good question Jim. I'm not so sure there will be an RTF-3.
>
>I see many possibilities here:
>
>The stand down is temporary. There have been many "shuttle grounded" times in
>the past, such as when they discovered bad wiring and grounded the fleet until
>all orbiters could have their wiring checked.
>
>Shuttle never returned to flight. The way the NASA spokesperson said it, the
>problem wasn't really fixed. In essence, RTF2 was never achieved since fixing
>foam problems was a hard requirement before going back to normal flight operations.
>
>A true blue RTF3 with some report written otlining requirements NASA much
>achieve before launching again. And one would have to wait for Discovery to
>come back in order to see the evaluations of tile damage, how all the
>improvements to the RCC etc worked.
>
>(As an aside, crewmembers were surprised the batteries for RCC sensors were
>still good as of this morning, they hadn't expected them to work for such a
>long period -- why aren't those sensors working off Shuttle's power ?).
>

I've been wondering the same thing. My guess is it's because the
electrical connectors on the wing root bulkheads had enough spare pins for
power or data, but not both, and adding or changing connectors would have
structural implications that there was no money to address.

>My guess is that it will be more of a temporary stand down rather than a
>formal RTF thing. The difficulty here will be in determining if the foam
>concept can be salvaged, or if NASA will need to beg Congress for special
>money to redevelop the ET, at which point, it is either a one year delay
>minimum to build the new ET, or Congress saying "why bother, this vehicle is
>already slated for retirement", in which case, Shuttle is to be moved to museums.

.

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