Cancel the Space Shuttle, says one of its designers.

This is such a big pork barrel project, I can't see this happening. I don't think we should continue this either.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationw...6may16,1,4355573.story?coll=la-home-headlines

Scrap Shuttle, Its Pioneer Says
One of the nation's preeminent spacecraft designers says the current fleet is too old and should be replaced with a new design.


By Ralph Vartabedian and Peter Pae, Times Staff Writers


Max Faget, one of the United States' most important spacecraft designers, says the space shuttle, which he helped pioneer, should be retired and the human space program suspended until the nation can build a better vehicle for putting astronauts into orbit.

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

But such views have largely represented critics outside the circle of elite space engineers. Faget designed the Mercury space capsule and had a managing role in the design of every other U.S. human launch system, 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.


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The source said Boeing believes it can 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 envisions as the replacement for the shuttle. The new vehicle would also cost significantly less, according to Boeing's internal projections, at about $2 billion, compared to about $10 billion for the orbital space plane.

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

"As long as you are going to build a new one you ought to have better mold lines," Faget said. "There is nothing unstable about the shuttle and we could use the same mold lines. But I never did like the mold lines we had. It's an old prejudice."