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Originally Posted by basa
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Originally Posted by Paul
Considerable, a return to flight like this will be covered globally and will get extreme coverage in America. There is a lot of pride inbedded into the Space program by the thousands of people working within the space industry.
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Pity the US Govt and NASA aren't as interested in Hubble.  |
Actually they have agreed further funding recently to keep Hubble serviced for at least another 2-3 years. Hubble is a long way past it's mission time now and if NASA and the US government wasn't interested then it would have been left to die.
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Originally Posted by Nugget
I was reading about this in the paper at the weekend. According to the article, NASA are using part of the operation to see if the shuttles could be repaired (if necessary) in space.
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I think that part of the mission was always going to happen, NASA needs to know whether repairing damage to the shuttle tiles in space is possible. They already have a special boom mounted camera for inspecting the shuttle for damage.
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As to using the Soyuz craft, it is known that the Soyuz craft are reliable and safe (to a point) but the Shuttle is a lot more than just a delivery lorry in space and I would be suprised if the Soyuz craft could carry out all the types of missions that the Shuttle can. Also I doubt that the US military would enjoy asking the Russians if they could borrow a Soyuz to launch their latest satellite packages LoL.
NASA is already testing the next generation of launch vehicles (along with other groups) and hopefully sometime soon there will be a safe, reliable, re-usable and cheap launch option available for use.