NASA pulls final plug on space shuttle Discovery

In a final step of the phase-down of the space shuttle program, NASA has permanently unplugged space shuttle Discovery, the oldest in the space shuttle fleet, and the first to be retired earlier this year.

The final power-down occurred on Friday as the orbiter’s three electricity-generating fuel cells were drained of all their reactants, and their feed lines purged. Other than being a research curiosity, they will never work again. The shuttle’s glass cockpit, which used to be lit up by its multiple computer screens and backlit switches, will now forever be dark. The move marks Discovery’s final transformation from a space-worthy orbiter to a museum piece.

Discovery flew for the last time in March, and after it completed its 39th mission, it has been carefully taken apart to preserve some of its features while making it safe for public display. The engines have been taken out and replaced with replicas, and its thrusters cleaned of hazardous debris. Its flight deck has been reconfigured to appear ready for another mission – albeit an imaginary one. The Smithsonian, which will be the shuttle’s caretaker, asked NASA to keep Discovery as complete as possible so as to serve as a resource for future study.

Discovery will fly one more time, though not under its own power. It is scheduled to fly atop NASA's modified Boeing 747 carrier aircraft to Dulles International Airport in Virginia, where it will be unloaded by cranes and rolled into the Udvar-Hazy's James S. McDonnell Space Hangar as its centerpiece attraction. The display will replace the currently displayed prototype shuttle Enterprise, which has been on public view since 2003.

Although the ending of the space shuttle program has been met with almost unmitigated nostalgia in the press, it is doubtless being celebrated by space exploration realists, who have criticized the program’s costs and unreliability for years. They have claimed that the program has failed to achieve its promised cost and utility goals, as well as design, cost, management, and safety issues. Shuttle incremental per-pound launch costs ultimately turned out to be considerably higher than those of expendable launchers: by 2011, the incremental cost per flight of the space shuttle was estimated at $450 million to low earth orbit. When all design and maintenance costs are taken into account, the final cost of the space shuttle program, averaged over all missions and adjusted for inflation, was estimated to come out to $1.5 billion per launch.

Critics have also contended that the space shuttle program failed in the goal of achieving reliable access to space, partly due to multi-year interruptions in launches following Shuttle failures. NASA budget pressures caused by the chronically high NASA Space Shuttle program costs have eliminated NASA manned space flight beyond low earth orbit since Apollo, and severely curtailed more productive space science using unmanned probes.

Some researchers have criticized a pervasive shift in NASA culture away from safety in order to ensure that launches took place in a timely fashion, a criticism which was prophetic in two shuttle disasters: the crash of the Challenger in 1986 soon after takeoff and the break-up of Columbia in 2003 upon re-entry. In both cases, whereas engineers recognized the seriousness of the problem, NASA management dismissed both the evidence and the engineers' expertise and ultimately decided to continue with the mission, with catastrophic results.

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Image Source: Wikimedia Commons

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