Absolutely...I don't think it's at all far-fetched. They genuinely have a great museum, and I'm sure with the addition of the space exhibit hall (new since I've last been there) it's even better. Between that and their active leadership they'll likely end up on the short list of candidates. But my personal opinion is that NASA will ultimately choose museuems with a more direct tie-in to space exploration (Evergreen Aviation itself is just a small air freight company) and more conveniently located for a larger number of people.

Of course, since I live in Portland, I would be ecstatic if Evergreen were granted even Enterprise, much more so for one of the operational orbiters.

I can't find the original information, but I'm pretty sure the allocation of the shuttles won't be soley based on cash, but also on perceived value to the public for receiving one and consistency with the general mission of the museum. Keep in mind, the $42 million is supposedly for refurbishment for display, not to raise additional money. This first of all will mean cleaning up any potential hazards, like residues of hydrazine manuevering fuel. Of course, they get fairly weathered by each launch and re-entry, so there'll be some polishing to be done, and undoubtably ITAR-sensitive or high value equipment like the main engines will be removed and replaced with detailed replicas where applicable.

There's three orbiters surviving (Discovery, Atlantis, and Endeavor). I suspect Kennedy Space Center will keep one and house it near their Saturn V that's on display. This is consistent with another article that says two orbiters and six engine display kits will be made available according to the RFI. With public accessibility being a likely major consideration, the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum is almost guaranteed one of the actual orbiters, to replace the Enterprise aerodynamic test vehicle which is currently housed there.

That's going to make it a tough grab for the remaining orbiter. Because McMinneville is roughly an hour-long drive from the relatively small and aerospace-vacant city of Portland, I think their chances of getting an orbiter are relatively slim, even though they have a great facility and can probably afford it.

The Intrepid Museum in New York Harbor is certainly prominent enough, but they would need to make a rather substantial addition to protect the shuttle from the elements. It probably wouldn't be possible to deliver it to the waterfront an SCA flight to New York, but if they wanted to put it on a barge like the Concorde they have on site, they may be able to float it straight up from Florida that way. I think they're also at a disadvantage because there will already probably be two shuttles on the East Coast (Florida and DC).

I think Johnson Space Center in Houstan and Marshall Spaceflight Center in Huntsville are the two most likely locations not on one of the major coasts. Both of them already host two of the three remaining Saturn V's (the third is at Kennedy). On the west coast, I think the lead option is Boeing's museum of flight, partially because of their accessibility and ability to host a space shuttle, but also because of their involvement with the shuttle program (although that is due to their acquisition of Rockwell).

I would bet one of these three locations will get the third orbiter. That still leaves Enterprise after it leaves the Smithsonian, which only did glider and procedural tests, but would still be a major attraction. Maybe Evergreen has a chance at getting Enterprise, but I think more likely a second of the above three will get her. There is also a ground-test mockup called Pathfinder currently at MSFC in Huntsville that would likely get a new home if one of the orbiters went there, but it's only externally representative of the flight vehicles.

A commenter on another site had a fantastic idea, in my opinion: before sending the last of the orbiters to a musuem, use the SCA to take it on a tour of the US. This would be a great opportunity for millions to see it and the modified 747 together.

This whole fuss has grown out of a single post on the Orlando Sentinel blog. Granted it's a professionally written blog, but the post was based on third party reports about a conversation that those passing the rumors on about weren't involved in.

Griffin steadfastly denies obstructing anything, and has pointed out that every requested document has been provided on time. Garver refuses to comment on it.

I'd be willing to bet she went in with an attitude that Griffin was going to feed her everything that was wrong with Constellation, and she was going to take that back to Obama and get the program cancelled. Then we can return to using the shuttle and the Obama administration doesn't have to face the risk of overseeing a new and ambitious venture. Save the shuttle jobs (Florida voters), save a little bit of prestige of spaceflight, be the lady who stopped a broken program (Constellation is not broken, BTW. It can be fairly argued that it's not the best option, but it's well on its way to succcess), and as a result the US throws away 5 years of development work and sits on its butt for the next 4-8 years making freight runs to the ISS.

When a political science appointee jumps on a rocket scientist on the topic of rocket science, what do you expect to happen? The rocket scientist is going to get pissed. Griffin probably isn't the easiest guy for a politician to work with. There's been a lot of criticism directed his way, especially from armchair engineers not on the program who think they know something he doesn't. If a politician came his way and spouted the same things, I could definitely see him getting riled up.

This is a mess, based on hearsay and little more. Unfortunately, the Sentinel has blown it into a national story without documented sources. I'm not even worried about Griffin. He's a skilled engineer, but a mediocre administrator. NASA will easily survive if Obama gets rid of him. But if he sinks Constellation, mark my words, you won't see NASA accomplish anything front page news worthy until at least 2030, unless there is another accident.

I was a little worried when I noted in the article that the author was a disguntled ex-NASA employee. Then I realized who the author was: former Science Mission Director administrator Alan Stern. He's the guy who earlier this year was lambasted by NASA higher-ups and Slashdotter's alike for pulling the plug on the ailing Spirit Mars Exploration Rover to save a few million dollars. His decision was forcibly reversed, and being out of favor he resigned. Given my enthusiasm for the rover program, I find my mildly surprised to be sympathetic to his bitterness. He had a limited budget that was too small to support his growing assignments. In a way his decision about Spirit might have been a good thing, because it drew a lot of fast attention to the issue...but he got torpedoed for it and then the attention died away again.

The problem of delays and ballooning expenses is not an easy one. The mission teams aren't spending their days seeing how far fire extinguishers can propel them down a hallway on an office chair and doing a little bit of development work when it suits them. They're very frequently working their tails off and on overtime, and Homer Simpson walking by wearing Tom Landry's hat isn't going to magically inspire them to greater efficiency.

The main problem as I see it is that engineers and scientists generally suck at estimating work, and accountants and managers generally suck at understanding technology development to do much better. Add in the fact that cost presented is a big factor in which missions get chosen over all the other candidates, and you've got recipe for severely lowballed estimates.

Stern is suggesting a really painful fix, and I'm not sure I like it. Cancelling missions that are overbudget or schedule is a hard thing to do. He's right that the "we've spent too much to stop" argument is incomplete, and he's right that supporting wayward projects further encourages poor management, but that's only part of the picture. MSL was originally considered to be worth the $1.4 billion it was approved for. The true sunk-cost argument isn't that we've spent too much to stop now, it's that a mission that was worth $1.4 billion is definitely worth $700 million. We've spent the $1.4 billion, and we can't get it back either way. However, looking at the issue anew, for $700 million we can get a $1.4 billion probe.

But that's only one mission, it still allows the problem to recur, and it stealthily and unequally replaces the question, "Is this mission worth $2.1 billion?" with two questions, "Is this mission worth $1.4 billion?" and, "Is this mission worth $700 million?"

I really wish I had a good counterplan to Stern's argument that we should cancel missions that go overbudget and schedule, but I don't. I like to think that an independent NASA auditing group of experienced engineers and bean counters who don't have direct stake in mission selection would result in better initial cost estimates, but I'm not confident of it. Figuring out how much work inventing something new will take is a lot harder than figuring out how much work making something that's been made before like a car will take, and NASA already attempts this to a degree.

By the same token, I'm not sure Stern's plan will work. It might fail to spur better estimations of scope. Its only accomplishment in that case would be the cancellation of a lot of good projects after a lot of investment with nothing to show for it. The two missions he calls out most deliberately, MSL and the James Webb Space Telescope, are two of the most anticipated, by scientists and civillians alike, science missions on the board for the next 10 years. It would be a shame to kill them and not only fail to get any science return, but fail to fix the problem.

I work for the TX facility.

If I may ask a tangential question, how do you like working for SpaceX out at the test facility? I've been considering applying for one of the test engineer positions out there. Really, the main thing keeping me from doing so is the fact that it's way out in Texas (not because of the usual Texas cliches, but just because I like the Pacific NW too much). Anyway, how are the hours? Any major gripes? What sort of work do you do and what kind of background did you come from?

Thanks and good luck with the testing!

It's fun to pick on Texans for things like cowboy hats, unnecessarily large barbeque pits, and their slow drawl, and it's easy to pick on people who didn't know what was going on when you're reading a news article after the fact that starts out by telling you exactly what went on, but "fearful idiots" is a remarkably stupid generalization.

How do you think residents would respond in your area? "The house is rattling, there's a tremendous roaring sound, I can feel reverberations through my body, and there's a bright glow on the horizon...meh, my WoW character is about to level up. I'll worry about it later." Somehow I'm guessing not.

Supposing they tested this near New York, or better yet Boston (The Mooninites are coming! The Mooninites are coming!)? There'd be hysteria in the streets. Heck, in some places you'd probably even get looting and throngs fleeing the city. The same goes for pretty much any place in the entire US, with the likely exception of Cape Canaveral, where rocket launches happen relatively frequently.

Things like this are genuinely bewildering when you don't know what's going on. About 10 years ago I saw a natural gas pipeline fire...from 50 miles away. The whole family was out on the back porch staring at the eerily pulsating glow of the reflection off the clouds trying to figure out what was going on. Until the local news reported on what was actually happening, our best guess was a forest fire, but a nuclear bombing of Portland was another speculation (we figured it unlikely, however, partially because there was no similar glow to the north, in the direction of Seattle). Coincidentally, they said the flames from that fire were as much as 200 feet high, so it was probably similar in brightness to the SpaceX test, but not nearly as loud.

A final more general comment: SpaceX has been conducting engine tests out there for several years now. In fact, their first Falcon 9 firing (1 engine at that time) on that test stand was almost a year ago, and their first nine-engine, short duration fire was three months ago. In view of this, SpaceX's statement that the sound carried much further than in the past due to the weather is probably quite accurate. It also probably didn't help that they did the test at 10:30 PM. Perhaps in the future they'll work safe stopping points into their procedure so they can delay to the next day if the test preparations take too long.

They probably also should consider putting up simple walls to reflect some of the sound upward and reduce the complaints long term. At the very least, have a facility-wide arbor day celebration and go plant lines of trees along the edge of the test site. I know our local racetrack was able to reduce neighborhood complaints (and make the treehuggers a little happier) by doing this.

It's fall in the northern hemisphere of Mars where Phoenix is located, so it dying was entirely expected, and although it lasted longer than its mission, they were hoping to get a few more weeks out of it. Landing was just a month before the summer solstice, so it had 30 days of conditions that started good and improved, then 130 days of declining conditions. Since it's in the arctic circle, it had complete daylight until a month or two ago, when the sun started setting again.

Spirit and Opportunity, however, are in the southern hemisphere, and it's early spring. Between the dust on Spirit's solar panels and being about 12 degrees further from the equator than Opportunity, things got a little worrisome for Spirit over the winter, but her minimum power levels at that time were over twice the 89 Watt-hours quoted in the article.

Low power is slightly less of a concern now than it was then, because the surface temperature should be higher and so electronics should need less heating, but that huge drop in power is probably more than enough to make up the difference. The other potential positive factor is Spirit's batteries had a decent level of charge when the storm started, so if the storm dissipates quickly they'll probably be in the clear. Trying to maintain 89 W-hr for several months, however, could very easily be fatal, so they're trying to use an absolute minimum of power to keep her out of fault mode.

Spirit actually hadn't moved an inch for several months to save power until a week or two ago. Her team had parked her on a sloped rock face at about a 30 degree angle to square her solar panels to the noon sun over the winter, and because of relatively clear skies, she was even able to take a high resolution panorama (link is to an index, not directly to the giant 42 MB image) and do some stationary science. As the sun angle increased, they had just started inching back towards a 20 degree tilt to follow it when the dust storm hit. There's a rather dramatic picture of what that 30 degree tilt looks like on the program site.

As of the last report I've seen, the atmosphere is 69% opaque due to suspended dust (although I believe more than 31% of the sunlight diffuses through indirectly), and the dust coating on Spirit's solar panels is only letting through 32% of of the sunlight that actually reaches them. In the past they'd had good luck with winds cleaning the panels off, but that hasn't happened in a while. The team is hoping that the same seasonal weather that brings on these dust storms will generate a few lucky dust devils.

Opportunity, on the other side of the planet meanwhile, has been getting 500-600 Watt-hours and averaging about 50 meters per day of progress towards the huge crater Endeavor, which is 12 km away.

And what nutjob modded the parent as a troll? Sheesh! And to think we probably let that person vote, too.

They were indeed designed to work for almost the worst conditions expected for 90 days, based on what prior landers saw. If you read Dr. Steven Squyre's book Roving Mars (which I highly recommend for any space nerd, even though he wrote it several years too early), he describes at several points how worried they were that dust accumulation was going to kill these things before 90 days were up.

After talking about wipers, blowers, vibrators, etc. they concluded the best course of action was to just size the panels to produce the minimum required amount of electricity for operations after 90 days of worst-case dust accumulation. An added bonus of this approach was plenty of power to play around with early in the mission (and part of why they've done so well now). Accomplishing this ended up being a huge problem, however, and I think the power team spent weeks trying to figure out a geometery that would provide the needed amount of surface area, but not get in the way of all the other parts while folding down small enough to fit inside the tetrahedral lander platform. They finally got a break when they figured out a set of winglet-like tabs that unfolded from the back of an already folded section of panel.

The result didn't just solve the problem, it looked freaking awesome. Earlier renders of the rovers had them being nearly square or hexagon shaped, as opposed to the swept-back fighter wing look they have as built. Heck, Steve Jobs is probably even jealous of how sexy the MER's look, and they aren't even trying.

As the NASA article mentions, you can find more info from the Phoenix team's official website: http://phoenix.lpl.arizona.edu/

Also, the Planetary Society has done a great job following the mission, and there's an extremely detailed update one of their members wrote based on a phone interview with the Phoenix project manager shortly after the last contact with Phoenix was made last week.

Here's a quick summary: Phoenix has been reducing operational tempo for several weeks. In anticipation of having too little power to run the robotic arm and inability to communicate in late November for a few weeks as Mars passes behind the sun, they hurried sample delivery to a few more TEGA ovens for analysis, but they still had one oven-load left to analyze when the dust storm hit that dropped power levels below a sustainable point. However, despite that, they had already met all of their operational objectives. The extra data would have been a bonus.

When they saw the dust storm coming, they tried to power down almost all non-essential systems, but weren't quite in time. As a result, the batteries drained completely and it "browned out." The next day, the batteries charged enough to wake up in what they call "Lazarus mode" and try communicating, but it likely missed the relay window with the orbiters. Over a couple days, they got some intermittent communications, and were hoping to be able to send instructions to properly time the wake-up for best chance at communications and best utilization of what little solar power its getting each day, but apparently that hasn't yet succeeded. They were hoping to get temperature and soil conductivity measurements periodically, and maybe even a few pictures of CO2 ice starting to cake up in the area.

It may still be in Lazarus mode, or something may have failed due to the thermal contraction of the electronics (ex: solder and circuit board material expand at different rates...too extreme of a temperature shift and things start popping apart) ending it for good. There is still some hope that Phoenix will survive the frigid temperatures and even the weight of a meter-thick layer of CO2 ice to awaken in the spring. That's what Lazarus mode was created for, but the hope of that has always been very small.

There's a really interesting tidbit about a microphone that's part of the descent camera. On a whim they tried to use it a couple weeks ago to record wind sounds, but it didn't start up. Then one of the team members had a conversation with blind man who pointed out that he'll never see a picture of Mars, so he had really been hoping the microphone would work so he could experience it through sound. That really motivated the team to try the microphone again, but unfortunately, it sounds like they didn't have a chance with that either.

I've been following this mission on a nearly daily basis since landing. It's been neat to see Phoenix in action, and no doubt a busy few months for the team. I'm sure they'll feel somewhat relieved to return to living by a 24 hour clock and have the leisure to analyze all the data and the 25,000+ pictures it returned. I'll never forget the shot Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter got of it drifting down to the surface with Heimdall Crater in the background. In my opinion, it's one of the top 10 space images ever. The MRO team even claims that if you look really close at the full size version, you can see a black-spec a few hundred pixels beneath the lander that is the just-released heat shield falling away.

Well done Phoenix.