Interesting Article From New Scientist.....

NASA should retire the shuttles as soon as possible and consider converting them into uncrewed vehicles in order to finish the International Space Station, says an independent safety report.

"That's the primary option we hope could be looked at seriously," says Joseph Pelton, who led the project at the Space and Advanced Communications Research Institute at George Washington University, US.

The institute released the report on Wednesday, a day after NASA gave an update on its progress towards returning the shuttles to flight.

Agency officials were not available to provide comments on the safety report.

"We do not consider these conclusions to be either 'pro' or 'con' NASA's current programs," the report states. "Rather, we see our findings as a means to identify ways in which NASA programs could be made safer and more effective."

The group recommended that NASA follow all of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board's recommendations on making the shuttles safer, but said the space agency should go further still.

The reports says the most pressing issues include the lack of an emergency escape system from the shuttle, the potential for space junk to hit a spacewalking astronaut or the shuttle, and the use of safety waivers to permit shuttles to launch. It also says that NASA should have a full accounting of all safety concerns. The report listed more than 40 specific technical and management issues.


But the complexity of a shuttle - each has more than 30,000 parts - means it cannot be made significantly safer, says the report, even though NASA is trying to achieve this.

"We think that the shuttle and the space station have been asked to do too much and are in some danger of technological obsolescence," Pelton says.

Converting one or more of the shuttles into uncrewed vehicles may be a way to finish the International Space Station while also reducing the risk to astronauts, the report said. The shuttle is the only vehicle that can carry the large items needed for ISS construction.

The report also recommended bringing back the X-38 programme, a prototype for the Crew Return Vehicle for the ISS. NASA axed that program after going over budget on the station.

The CRV was supposed to be a six-person emergency escape vehicle for the station. Now running with a two-person crew, the ISS is currently in "crisis management mode", the report says.

Pelton says that turning Europe's planned ISS cargo ship, the Automated Transfer Vehicle, into a crewed vehicle may be another option. Without the shuttle, crews depend on Russian Soyuz rockets for travels to and from the ISS but only enough Soyuz rockets to last until April 2006 have been funded.

The report was commissioned by the Space Shuttle Children's Trust Fund - established after the shuttle Challenger blew apart in 1986 - for the families of lost astronauts.