Posted 2/19/2006 05:13:00 PM by Douglas

Space Shuttle Program to pull resources from junk yard rather to continue to maintain three healthy vehicles, or: OV-104 to be 86'ed before next OMDP

With just 17 or so flights left on the shuttle manifest before the program is terminated in 2010, NASA's three remaining orbiters can only expect to fly about five missions each. As it turns out, NASA now plans to retire Atlantis in 2008, after five flights, rather than put it through a required overhaul and to "fly out" the remaining half-dozen missions on the manifest with Discovery and Endeavour.

"Atlantis will be coming due for an OMDP (orbiter maintenance down period) in the '08 time frame," Hale said. "And we looked the manifest and laid it out and we believe we can fly the '08, '09 and '10 time frame with Discovery and Endeavour.

"Discovery just came out of OMDP and Endeavour is just about to come out of OMDP. So it looks like the right thing to do is not to put Atlantis through another OMDP, which would get it ready to go fly maybe just at the very end, in 2010, but rather use it was a parts donor, if that's the word, for the other vehicles."

So that leaves 12 flights for OV-105 and 103? What impact does that have to ground processing with just having two, count 'em, two vehicles? Are we gonna fly this thing enough to complete the ISS or not?