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In article <69647@cup.portal.com> BrianT@cup.portal.com (Brian Stuart Thorn) writes:

>P.S., I consider myself more than mildly supportive of the Space Shuttle,
>but when NASA starts flying half-empty Space Shuttles and saying "the mission
>was full", I get worried.

I was just trying to explain, not defend, NASA's position as I see it.  Both
ground control and the astronauts claimed that they were very busy and work-
ing 12 - 16 hour days.  They may not have had the crew time to support an
additional payload, I don't know.  I do know that payload volume is not the
only constraint.

I can think of several ways to work around the problem:

1) Launch the LAGEOS on a Delta.  This could have been done rather easily,
   in my opinion.

2) Launch IRIS on another or the same Delta.  This would have required a
   significant development that NASA may have had to pay for.  IRIS was
   developed as an upper stage for Shuttle commercial payloads.  After
   commercial satellites were removed from the manifest, NASA agreed to
   launch LAGEOS as its first and only IRIS payload.  This was probably
   important for international relations as I suspect, but don't know,
   that Italy wanted data on what is for it a substantial rocket develop-
   ment program.  Thus IRIS, not just LAGEOS, needed to be flown.

3) Add another astronaut to the crew.  If crew time was indeed the constraint
   as I suspect, that fact should have been obvious early enough to add a-
   nother astronaut to run the additional payload in the payload bay.

4) Make it an EDO flight.  Again, if crew time were the constraint, adding
   the EDO pallet would add another two man-weeks to the flight.

For reasons not obvious to me, NASA is only flying one EDO flight per year.
The incremental cost of making a regular Columbia flight an EDO flight is
rather low.  If it were up to me, Columbia would be flying EDO every flight,
even if half of it were nothing but astronauts floating around in LBNPs.

Mike

-- 
Michael Kent                                   kentm@rpi.edu
McDonnell Douglas                              Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute

Tute Screwed Aero Class of '92                              Apple II Forever !!