A day in Space, Lets get a tank now

On Thursday, June 13, 2002, at 06:07 PM, gardener1_98 wrote:

> One thing that seems hightly possible in the near term is to
> make use of a spent shuttle propellant tank. If we could get enough
> business support to pay NASA (a big if),

I believe current policy is that NASA will give you external tanks for
free, provided you can control them and make sure they don't come down
in populated areas. The shuttle actually gains a little payload
capacity if it takes the tank into orbit (the separation maneuvers cost
energy).

The International Space Station (ISS) most important legacy may be
jump-starting space tourism. Consider: the first space tourist, Dennis
Tito, was supposed to go to the Soviet era Mir space station. Under
pressure from NASA, Russia de-orbited the Mir which resulted in Mr. Tito
going to the ISS instead. Now the Mir was old, smelly, crowded and
probably not all that nice. The ISS was brand new, shinny, much more
roomy, etc. Mr. Tito came back to Earth with glowing accounts of how
great space is. Would his experience have been as good on Mir?

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