Wednesday, June 8, 2011

Why not retire a Shuttle in orbit?

This photo of Endeavor, taken from a Soyuz capsule departing the ISS is all the evidence needed to make a case for something I thought made sense from the moment I heard they were retiring the Shuttles.

The International Space Station and the Docked Space Shuttle Endeavour | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

Retire a Shuttle in place. It costs astronomical amounts of money to lift anything into orbit. The bigger, the heavier, the more fuel/money. Take a look at that picture of Endeavor. It's huge. Further up the structure of the ISS there are two small Soyuz capsules docked.

  • The amount of crew space available on the ISS would more than double.
  • It has all of the life support equipment already tested and functioning.
  • It has three honking big engines that could be used (as they have in the past) to put the station on a higher orbit.
  • It can be sealed and separated to be used as a life boat in a catastrophic emergency

It just makes sense to leave it up there. Even if we had to pay for an additional Soyuz launch to return the crew to earth, this would be cheaper than the recovery and decommissioning of Shuttle Atlantis.


Monday, June 6, 2011

Emergency Management

I have been interested in emergency management for few years. Recently things have been happening in my world that make me want to do it even more. Coming from the background of an 8404, Field Med Corpsman, I know I have it in me. So I'm looking into training in incident response and emergency management.

A possibility for further education and training. Emergency Management Institute - FEMA Independent Study Program