Avation/Spaceflight fans! Are you in a betting mood?

Oh, gooness. The grumbling's already started..

http://www.space.com/11383-nasa-space-shuttle-retirement-museums-backlash.html

In reply to friedgreencorrado:

They're gonna keep it in the Hudson like they the other big planes.

Chicago gets the sim, not an Orbiter. Damn.

Appleseed wrote: Chicago gets the sim, not an Orbiter. Damn.

Que? Seattle got the sim. Or were there more than one available?

Appleseed wrote: Chicago gets the sim, not an Orbiter. Damn.

Oh, I just assumed Chicago was going to get the Challenger as a symbolic tribute to Obama’s old stomping ground.

In reply to Wally: (Re: airplanes in the Hudson) Yeah, I keep forgetting you Yankees know how to "get BMW E36 done". Every one of y'all down here keeps tellin' me that..

Holy zombie canoe, Batman! 12 and a half years!

And I still remember the Shuttle piggybacking on the 747 and cruising around SoCal  before landing at LAX.

californiamilleghia said:

And I still remember the Shuttle piggybacking on the 747 and cruising around SoCal  before landing at LAX.

They did a flyby at Moffett in the bay area before they headed to SoCal, I went and shot some photos:

In reply to friedgreencorrado :

I apologize for them. The people here that get things done and the people that move down there and talk about it are generally two different groups of people. We don't normally send our best and brightest.  

and then we had the Toyota truck pulling the shuttle across the 405 freeway overpass because the Moving truck was too heavy for the overpass with attached trailer/shuttle , 

It was hooked back up after it got over the Freeway and hauled another 15 miles or so to the museum

Mrs. preach got mad at me because I volunteered for the one way trip to Mars. I'd go in a second.

I don't want to be a hero, at all, but I'd fix the pumps and hatches and E36 M3 that would make them that do one.

EDIT: I would not take a canoe.

Does anyone know why they didn't upgrade the Shuttle? I mean technology has advanced a mass amount. They could have just redesigned the flaws and made it awesome. Lighter,Stronger,Faster..

In reply to MyMiatas :

The design was pretty impractical to begin with.  Its primary feature / advantage is the ability to return large objects from orbit, which was rarely used and I am sure got no where near paying back it's cost.  It was never as reusable as anticipated (far more expensive to refurb than expected).

Being able to put fairly large research item in orbit is likely pretty useful, but with the space station, likely also not really practical any more.

The true successor to the shuttle is likely the X37, which is crew less and small enough to fit in a fairing on top of a standard style rocket making far more practical.

It was fantastically expensive, costing $1.6 billion (with a b) per launch.  Compare that to a Falcon 9, which is $67M.  Granted it carries more stuff, but only about twice as much.  Price per pound to low earth orbit is the usual means of comparing launch costs, this chart has most of the major systems on it and the Shuttle one of the most expensive systems ever built:

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/cost-space-launches-low-earth-orbit

In contrast, Falcon 9 is the second cheapest ever built, second only to Falcon heavy.  Starship will be another huge improvement, assuming it eventually works.

It was also fantastically unsafe, having killed 14 people due to inherent flaws in the design (flaws not shared by any capsule-on-top-of-rocket design).  Aside from STS-51L (Challenger) and STS-107 (Columbia) there were one or two other missions that came pretty close to being spectacular failures as well.

Spacecraft design is all about compromise, they are heavily limited by weight and any capability that you design into it uses some of the available weight, thus eating into performance and limiting other capabilities.  To get the Shuttle funded back in the 1970s NASA had to get the military and intelligence organizations to sign on to using it, and that drove some capabilities that were unnecessary for the purely civilian role it wound up taking.  The wings are much larger than it would have otherwise needed due to military "cross-range" requirements, for example.