SSME Engine Maintenance

On Friday, May 31, 2002, at 09:36 AM, Ed Schonert wrote:

> Wow, $10,000,000 between launches! (re Al Globus' 5-29 comments)
>
> How did Heppenheimer miss that little tidbit in his article on SSME's
> in 11-98 issue of Air & Space? Is that a per engine price or total for
> the 3 shuttle engines?

I believe, although I'm not totally sure, that this is per engine.

>
> Perhaps we can operate the shuttle under a foreign flag (Liberian or ?)
> to get lower labor rates for the shuttle engine & tile maintenance.
> Ed
> S.

Engine and tile maintenance require a *lot* of expertise, and one very
small mistake can destroy the orbiter. For example, an Arianne 4 was
once lost when a technician accidentally left a cleaning rag in a fluid
pipe and the shuttle fleet was grounded for months to check the wiring
that was, in part, damaged when technicians had to walk on the wire
bundles to do other maintenance tasks. The only place you can get low
cost labor that is qualified to do this kind of work is Russia -- and
the shuttle infrastucture cannot be moved to Russia at a reasonable
price.

The materials in one asteroid (the largest ) are sufficient to make
orbital space colonies with ~500 times the surface area of the Earth in
usable real estate. See http://lifesci3.arc.nasa.gov/SpaceSettlement/
for details.

Al Globus
CSC at NASA Ames Research Center
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/~globus/home.html