(Greg Kuperberg) wrote in
:

In article ,
Jorge R. Frank wrote:
(Greg Kuperberg) wrote in
:
[Changing the shuttle retirement date] would require the courage,
or maybe the cowardice, to contradict a direct and explicit promise
from the President of the United States to the American people.
That was not a promise by any reasonable definition.

I think that Bush may well have intended it as one.

I'll give that opinion all the weight it deserves. I think it's just
wishful thinking on your part. Consider the differences in wording between
Bush's speech and NASA's document describing the Vision:

http://www.nasa.gov/pdf/55583main_vision_space_exploration2.pdf

"Retire the Space Shuttle as soon as assembly of the International Space
Station is completed, *planned* for the end of this decade;" (emphasis
mine)

And it doesn't change the fact that the date was, in fact, arbitrary.

That's true! Except in that it comes after Bush leaves office.

That was driven by compliance with CAIB recommendation R9.2-1, which called
for the shuttle to be re-certified if NASA intended to fly it past 2010. So
Bush's selection of the date *wasn't* arbitrary. However, the *CAIB's*
recommendation of 2010 *was* arbitrary - they simply didn't want NASA
flying the shuttle all the way to 2020 without a re-cert, and picked 2010
as a nice round number in between. Presidential politics played no part in
their thinking.

--
JRF

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