You expected otherwise? It’s John Glenn.

“‘The shuttles may be old, but they’re still the most complex vehicles ever put together by people,'”

Complexity is not a figure of merit, especially for human-rated flight systems.

“‘and they’re still working very well,’”

I guess if 1-in-60 LOC/LOV/LOM figures, flaky ET ECO sensors in the critical path for certain launch failure modes, and more and bigger pieces of foam falling off the ET than ever all count as “working very well”, then yes, the Shuttles are still “working very well”.

“‘[I]t’s also going to be expensive to contract with the Russians to put our people up in space in Russian vehicles to our space station and bring us back.'”

It’s going to be more expensive, by an order of magnitude or more, to recertify the Space Shuttle and fly it until Ares I/Orion or some alternative is operational.

“you could always bid on a tour of the National Air and Space Museum with Glenn. Minimum next bid, as of this writing, was $15,500.”

If only a Glenn tour went for $30-40 billion, then maybe there would be enough money to back up the retired Senator’s claims and wishes regarding Shuttle operations extension.

FWIW…

CSR is not Cost plus, so does that mean that big aero isn’t going for it?

As for Spacehab, they had Boeing as their prime contractor for most of their existence and are/were using LM for ARCTUS. They are big aero with a facade

Everyone knows that I am a supporter of keeping our Shuttle flying (since it is all we have) and “reader” said:

Keep it flying to do what, precisely ? Complexity is not a virtue on its own. Pay 5 billion a year to avoid paying a fraction of that to Russians ? Yes that all makes perfect sense.

It might come in handy to resupply the Station – say with Control Moment Gyros.

And what would be the cost of flying on the Soyuz to Station, once the Shuttle is retired? On other threads here we read about Russia cutting off gas supplies to neighbors when they would not agree to increased prices. That could NEVER happen with Soyuz flights, right???

I only hope that the Russians would agree to fly astronauts – at any cost. They can sell the seats to Europeans and Japanese, and that puts them in charge. They might not be willing to sell astronauts a seat regardless of what we offered them.

Why just Falcon? Why just nuspace? Who say Spacex is going to win CSR (COTS II) and not other contractors like OSC, Boeing, Spacehab?