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Originally Posted by Fusilier
Afraid so.
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'Fraid not.
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Originally Posted by Fusilier
They're nearly falling apart. There's only so many times they can be refurbished and the parts replaced. The OVs are in bad shape, leading to disproportionate maintenance costs and safety issues.
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You live in Bangkok. I live 20 miles from the shuttle launch pads at Kennedy Space Center. My neighbors and I work at KSC. You seem to know things that those of us who actually work on them don't. The orbiters are no more "falling apart" than commercial airliners with similar flight hours and frame stresses are. And commercial airliners fly for decades, thanks to similar maintenance and periodic refurbishments as the shuttles go through. Actually, a better comparison would be military cargo transports.
BTW, look up when the last B-52 rolled off the assembly line.
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Originally Posted by Fusilier
It takes on average now no less than 3 months to get a shuttle capable of a subsequent launch.
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That's mostly due to red tape and massively redundant safety checks in the wake of two disasters. The actual work only takes a couple of weeks.
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Originally Posted by Fusilier
Even NASA stopped defending the STS and sees them as a money pit.
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They've always been a money pit. It was a bad design from the get-go.
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Originally Posted by Fusilier
It costs the space shuttle 5000$/per kilo of cargo... it costs their European competitors only about 2-3000$/ per kilo of cargo.
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You should compare apples to apples. Such as cost to LEO of the Delta or Atlas models comparable to the ESA launchers. The STS is not used to haul commercial sats into space, and the ESA has no booster that can lift the loads the shuttle's been lifting. Hell, there is no in-production booster that can. If there was the shuttle would have been retired years ago.
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Originally Posted by Fusilier
Old age and an expensive cost killed the STS.
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No. Bad design, a penny-pinching pound-foolish Congress, bad PR by NASA, and bad program management by NASA (leading to two major disasters) killed the STS.