Now, however, nine thousand experienced engineers, scientists, and skilled production workers, are being laid off indefinitely. There was a sizeable gap between the last Apollo mission to the Moon and the launching of the first space shuttle flight, but the transition had been prepared and the skilled engineers, scientists and pilots were redeployed from one program to the other without a significant loss of momentum. The suspension of US manned space flights is unprecedented since the first Mercury astronauts were sent into space in the early 1960s.
The Russian space agency will charge NASA $63 million per astronaut-a relative bargain compared to the $1.5 billion cost of each shuttle mission.
The Russian vehicle will be the only means of bringing up new astronauts and cosmonauts to the international space station, built in the course of dozens of shuttle flights over 30 years. The three remaining shuttles will become, literally, museum pieces, with Discovery at the Smithsonian’s Udvar-Hazy Center near Dulles Airport outside Washington, Endeavour at the California Science Center in Los Angeles and Atlantis at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.įor at least five or six years, and likely much longer, the only proven capability for putting astronauts in Earth orbit will be the Soyuz, based on technology even older than the space shuttle, which was designed and developed in the 1970s. Any rescue would have been conducted with a Russian Soyuz, able to ferry only one astronaut at a time, in addition to its own two-person crew. The crew was limited to four astronauts-the fewest aboard a shuttle flight since 1983-because there was no backup shuttle available in the event the Atlantis suffered sufficient damage during liftoff to make reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere too dangerous. The Atlantis mission was overshadowed by this impending shutdown. The American manned space program is shutting down indefinitely, an event that has considerable historical significance. The successful completion of the 33 rd flight of the space shuttle Atlantis, which landed at Cape Canaveral July 20, marked the end of the US space shuttle program and the beginning of a lengthy hiatus in manned space efforts. The Aplaunch of the first manned space shuttle, Columbia
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