Boeing's space division is mostly what was acquired in 1996 from Rockwell International's Space Division which earlier was North American Aviation.

Here's a brief stroll through history:

[North American Aviation]
Designs and Builds:
* the X-15 Rocket plane
* the entire second stage of the Saturn V
* the Apollo Service Module and Apollo Command module (aka Apollo CSM)

[Rocketdyne] (Established 1955 as a division of North American Aviation)
Designs and Builds:
* the F1 engines of the first stage of the Saturn V
* the J2 engines used on the second stage of the Saturn V, and on the Saturn IB and IVb rockets

In 1967, NAA merges with Rockwell Standard to become North American Rockwell
Rocketdyne also comes along with NAA / Rockwell merger

North American Rockwell acquires avionics company Collins Radio in 1973 among others and becomes Rockwell International

[Rockwell International - Space Division]
* Prime Contractor for Space Transportation System (aka STS / Shuttle)
Designs and Builds:
* the STS Orbiters (i.e. Enterprise, Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis, Endeavour)

[Rockwell International - Avionics]
* Shuttle Orbiter avionics and communications

[Rocketdyne] (as part of Rockwell International - Space Division)
Designs and Builds:
* the RS-25 (aka Space Shuttle Main Engine / SSME)

1996 - Rockwell Space Division sold to Boeing

So, when they say "Boeing", it's the lineage of those teams that brought you such feature films as "Apollo - Man Walks on the Moon" and "The First Space Plane" :)

Logic and Mathematics here:

The ISS orbits between 180-250 miles above the earth. The shuttle can reach 350-380 miles above the earth, as it did when deploying the Hubble Space Telescope.

Both the Hubble and the Unity Module (1st Shuttle-launched ISS Module carried up by STS-88) are equivalent mass ~25,000 lbs.

So, the ISS is at least 100 miles lower than the what the shuttle has on several occasions achieved, carrying a similar payload mass.

Thus, the reason for the ISS being in a low orbit is not because the shuttle could go no higher (as it obviously did on several occasions).

Most of the orbital concerns with the ISS (inclination especially) are due to the Russians needing to be able to reach it from a launch site in their country.

Furthermore, given the limited budget for the current space station, how do you propose not killing the crew by placing them in an even higher orbit (where they have less protection from cosmic radiation) ?

More shielding = More weight = Costs more money!

And NASA getting more money is not going to happen unless we get another JFK-like "the USA will lead the way in space" president.

Alright, let's drink our brew and sing about ol' Jayne:

Jayne, the man they call Jayne....

{Chorus}
He... robbed from the rich and he...
Gave to the poor!
Stood... up to the man and he...
Gave him what for!

Our love for him now, ain't hard to explain!
the Hero of Canton, the man they call Jayne!

{Verse 1}
Now Jayne saw the mudders' back breakin'....
He saw the mudders' lament

He saw that magistrate takin'....
every dollar and leaving 5 cents

He said, "You can't do that to my people!
...You can't crush them under your heel!"

So Jayne...
Strapped on his hat and in 5 seconds flat...
Stole everything Boss Higgins had to steal!

[to Chorus]

{Verse 2}
So here is what separates Heros, from...
Common folk like... you and I

The man they call Jayne,
He turned around his plane and let...
That money hit sky!

He dropped it onto our houses...
He dropped it into our yards

And the man they call Jayne, He...
Turned 'round his plane and headed...
Out for the stars!

[to Chorus]

In addition, the 386-sx had only a 24-bit address bus, just like the IBM AT, limiting it to 16 MB of addressable memory (fetched 16-bits at a time).

The 386DX chip needed the companion 387 co-processor for floating point.

...to land on a passing asteroid. That is, if we still had a space program able to carry a person to it. Heck, I'd even settle for a quick-launch of an instrument/rover/lander to take some video and transmit it to Earth in near real-time.

You might even be able to use it as a one-way intra-solar-system ferry if the asteroid was going close to the same direction you wanted the probe to go.

You can go to NASA TV at http://www.nasa.gov/ntv

They typically will replay the launch highlights on the first evening when the crew goes to bed and repeat every hour until the start of the next flight day.

Tonight's flight day highlights will start at 8:00 PM Central Time. At 10PM tonight they will have a special video on the history of the program.

On subsequent days, they will replay 'Flight Day NN' highlights in the same manner (once per hour on either the hour or half-hour mark, after the crew goes to sleep).

Also, about 5-6 days into a mission, NASA will release a compilation video they put together that includes outstanding launch imagery and sounds, taken from ground-based cameras, the solid socket boosters (SRB), and from the External Tank (ET) looking at the underside of the shuttle orbiter towards the tail.

They even include pictures taken from the Shuttle Orbiter herself using a camera in the liquid oxygen umbilical well, taking pictures as the external tank falls away into the atmosphere, as well video taken by the crew at the ISS as the orbiter does the elegant Rendezvous-Pitch-Maneuver (aka the backflip) on approach to the international space station.

Google for "STS-nnn ASCENT IMAGERY HIGHLIGHTS" in a few days (where nnn is 135 for this mission, but those of 134 and 133 were also spectacular.)

Highly recommended!

The shuttle has an outstanding track record of success if measured as 'getting the job done'. And to those who want to call it a failure because of Challenger or Columbia, I have a few words to say:

FIFTY-THREE DEGREES (Farenheit).

Example 1: Challenger, 18 degrees Farenheit all night along and management is getting a lot of political heat to launch in the morning (which would barely be above 32 degrees F).

Solid rocket engineers: "Do not launch below 53 degrees!" You're asking a vehicle system with THIRTEEN TIMES the power output of Hoover Damn to function in an area it was not designed to! Yes the booster seals were later redesigned and augmented for safer operation, but failure became an option for Challenger because the managers jumped down a well with their fingers in their ears, "If I can't hear you, it must be safe!"

There are things the shuttle can do that the 'future' crafts (those currently in the works) will not have the ability to do. The shuttle orbiter can bring things back from space like the failed ammonia refrigerant pump on from the ISS (STS-135). The orbiter can repair things in space via use of the airlock and robotic arm (e.g. as done multiple times for Hubble -- one of the most useful scientific instruments of our time).

The US giving up the shuttle is like a construction contractor junking a working pickup truck because he might be buying a sports car and a shipping container.
++ Oh and the sports car may or may not work until we work out all the details
++ The shipping container can't bring anything back...one way only.
++ But that's okay because his buddy has a bicycle and has sorta agreed to letting him hop on every once in a while.

And while riding on the bike is only slightly cheaper (per man) than the truck, should the buddy decide not to let the construction contractor ride, there's no other way for him to perform his job.

Now, should we not also develop more modern vehicles at the same time? Of course we should! We should take the hundred billion from our useless foreign wars and put that into a new launch system, new shielding, new crew vehicles. But retiring the Shuttle ahead of having even a definitive timeline plus man-rated and proven equipment to replace it, means we are going backwards in our ability to work in and colonize space, not to mention the ability to research and improve our equipment that we've used in space by returning it and examining it back here on the ground.

No, its really not like the Itanium, which required totally new applications to take advantage of it. Future multi-role craft will still be hauling cargo and humans. Cargo will still have mass and humans still breathe air, require food and water. The software that would be using the Merced was totally incompatible with CISC. That's like suggesting the people taking future craft will be 2 feet tall and breathing argon,and that the cargo will have negative mass. Future multi-role craft will have the same design considerations and will take advantages of the knowledge gained through the Shuttle program.

"One of the original Shuttle designers" You say that as if there only 3 or 4. Do you even know how many people were responsible for designing the various parts of the shuttle? Propulsion engineers, Structural engineers, Avionics engineers, Thermal-Profile engineers, Electrical engineers. I'll require a citation of what parts didn't look good on paper. And furthermore, didn't look good as compared to what? Limitations are a part of any design.

A Soyuz is a late 1950's rocket design that was first flown in 1966 and was incrementally improved. The fact that you don't know how big an ammonia pump is, that you suggest it can be brought down in a crew capsule, and that you get modded +3 is quite funny.

A runway landing goes along with returning delicate cargo. A splashdown in the ocean or parachute to the ground has the potential to impart quite a bit of force on delicate equipment (aka satellites or something like hubble). A runway landing from a glider has barely any impact or potential for damage.

No. I'm not begging the question or in other words, assuming what I'm trying to prove. I'm showing that the shuttle is useful for the very nature of what it can do and for what no other vehicle can currently do. SHOULD THERE HAVE BEEN ANOTHER CRAFT DESIGNED AND BUILT that was able to do it better and for the same or equal cost then bravo to that other design/build. However, you are suggesting that because there "might have been" something better, that what we have in the Shuttle isn't useful. In a world where $5 flying carpets exist, I guess my $500 bicycle would be pretty damn limited and expensive. However, since flying carpets don't exist, I find my bicycle useful for getting around sometimes.

Let me make the comparison more explicit:

Parent is an obvious troll but I'll respond anyways.

The Space Shuttle didn't work? You have to be kidding!

Someone who claims the space shuttle "didn't work" probably was saying in 2003, "I'm glad those 486's were retired. They weren't even multi-pipelined. Good thing we have these Pentium III / Athlon processors now to take us to new levels of productivity."

Do you think any system is going to hit all of its goals the first time around?

No, it comes from PRACTICAL experience from operating in an environment, and in this case operating in an intensely difficult environment... space.

Furthermore, their design goal was not to be $50M per launch. Their design goal was to send people and cargo to low-earth-orbit to increase our engineering and science knowledge in space and to return people and cargo safely to a runway touchdown. With two exceptions, both being OPERATIONAL / MANAGEMENT rolls-of-the-dice (when safety should have been paramount), it has accomplished these goals. A hope that they would achieve spaceflight at $50M per launch was merely a political fantasy, which is irrelevant.

From a long-term perspective, it doesn't matter if the shuttle cost 10x its initial estimate to operate. It gave us experience and knowledge from refining processes / technology / materials of the initial system. It has taught us what works, what is difficult to make work and what the practical tradeoffs are for a given spacecraft design. These are the benefits from simply being in the environment.

To quote Han Solo, "flyin' through [hyper]space ain't like dustin' crops, boy!"

Tell me: How you are going to do an analysis of a failed ammonia pump on the space station without the shuttle? You cannot open up a pump containing (or, even if vented, that previously contained) poisonous fluid on the space station. Thus, you need to bring it back to Earth. What is the only vehicle can do this? hmm? ... crickets... Yes, the space shuttle.

For those that want a car analogy, the ISS operating without the space shuttle would be like throwing out the entire contents of your car's engine bay in your car when something goes wrong, and ordering a new one for replacement (that may or may not develop the same exact problems since you have no means to investigate what went wrong with a given design.)

The technology improvements and quality of life improvements the Shuttle program has brought all of humanity: wild-fire detection, artificial hearts, artificial limbs and joints, food-safety, the hubble space telescope, highway safety during rainstorms, just to name a few, is ground-shaking.

It's been a Good Thing we have such a vehicle that can perform science / engineering / building / repair in any number of configurations. At least until the close of STS-135.

When you say that NASA and STS is hindered by cost-contraints I fully agree. However:

Seven astronauts died on Challenger because MANAGEMENT refused to listen to the ENGINEERS who designed it. It was not designed to be launched in such low temperatures. Operations decided to roll the dice with the Challenger and we see what happened.

Who with a rational mind complains that a high-performance sports car is junk because its Z-rated tires fail when you drive it through a lava field?

Seven astronauts died on Columbia because MANAGEMENT refused to listen to multiple ENGINEERS who requested orbital photography analysis of the foam-impact site. A rescue mission using Atlantis was possible.

Let's not forget the three Astronauts who died on Apollo 1. NASA management and bean-counters went against ENGINEERING best practices. North American (the contractor who designed the command and service modules for Apollo) engineers wanted the door to open outwards and a non-pure-O2 environment (requiring higher internal pressurization) even though that setup is harder to seal against vacuum. Government bean-counters mandated a command module door that swung inward for cost reasons. After the accident and loss of life, NASA conceded that North American's original best practice design for an outward-opening door and non-pure-O2 environment was worth the cost and the design was reverted.

Do we see a trend here? Flying a space vehicle outside of its design envelope or refusing to follow up on a request for analysis by engineers concerned for its safety are decisions that reflect poorly of the operations management or economic short-sightedness, NOT of the design of the vehicle.

The space shuttle is a flying swiss-army knife. What other vehicle has done construction in space? It is also the only vehicle capable of returning payloads FROM Space. I would like to see how STS nay-sayers would propose doing R&D on the failure-mode of the ammonia pump that recently failed on the space station, without the STS to bring it back to Earth for analysis.

I suppose the people pushing for single-purpose launch vehicles were the same people complaining that an original IBM PC was in the $2500 range, when a type-writer and calculator could be had for under $150.

Actually, the Gravis Ultrasound *did* support DMA to its on-board memory (up to 1 MB in 1992) and no other SB card had onboard memory or processing at the time.

I know this because I wrote a MOD player in assembly for a college course (independent study) could use either programmed i/o or DMA to load the sample-memory banks.

The GUS was WAY ahead of the SoundBlaster at the time. 14 channels mixed *in hardware* at 44100 Hz. 28 voices at 22050 Hz and max 32 channels at 19200 Hz. The on-board memory was great for music sample loading and sound effects loading. You had a hardware interrupt that would flag you as the processor was reaching the end of the sample buffer, at which point you would load in the next segment of sound. So streaming audio was actually quite easy for the GUS.

I also wouldn't say that the emulation under DOS was terrible. When running the Sound Blaster emulation software ('SBOS Installed!'), most games' music sounded cleaner because you were getting an actual piano / drums / whatever in place of the synthetic sounds coming from a SoundBlaster. And games that were written to take advantage of Ultrasound were amazing ( Star Control II for example ).

Gravis didn't release a driver for Windows NT 4.0 which was a shame. If I had more free time at the time and had I known they would never get to it, I would've written one for them.

Thanks! :)

I'm not a structural engineer or mechanical engineer by profession, but my father was an aeronautical engineer at North American Rockwell for about 33 years, working mostly out of the Downey facility. He was responsible for structural designs of the Orbiter crew section (flight deck / mid-deck -- structures forward of the cargo bay for those not familiar) and also the structural designs of the Apollo command / service modules going back to the 1960s. My older brother also worked at Rocketdyne for a while on the SSMEs, so I grew up with the Space Shuttle and Apollo being talked about quite often at the dinner table :)

I was thinking the same thing about using an existing heavy lift vehicle to get a tank to LEO. I agree a different breed of tank-design would be needed to keep the LOX and LH2 feeding properly in the microgravity. Maybe a sort of variable-volume fuel tank could be utilized.

I guess the next question is how to get these ideas in front of congress or those with some research dollars to fund a prototype before our grand vehicles are only museum pieces.

Speaking of Rockwell, why not retrofit our favorite Space Shuttle Orbiter?

Well then I have a plan!

Prerequisites:

1) Figure out a way to get a 2ndary external tank (ET) still full of LOX + LH2 into Low Earth Orbit (LEO). Keep it In the shade of something so the fuel components stay cryogenic.
2) Figure out a process to re-attach the shuttle to the 2ndary ET in orbit via spacewalk
3) Figure out a process and system enhancements to restart the Space Shuttle Main Engines (SSMEs) in vacuum
4) Seal the shuttle orbiter crew module better to support a long-duration trip (less Atmosphere loss)
5) Put additional H2 + O2 fuel cells in the cargo bay and plumb them into the existing fuel cells
6) Put small lander or environmental module in the other half of the cargo bay. This will provide shielding and habitat for Long Duration Trips
-- 2 & 3 are problems that would require some significant investigation but are not impossible
-- Shuttle can haul 56,000 lbs to LEO, so 5&6 shouldn't be an issue. Fuel cells can provide water, power and O2

Action Plan:
1) Get Shuttle to Low Earth Orbit (LEO) via normal launch
2) Attach 2ndary ET to Shuttle via a docking process.
3) Re-Fire the SSME's using the fuel in the newly attached 2ndary ET
4) Go study nearby celestial body of interest (moon, mars, asteroid)
5) Return to Earth and land like a champion space plane.

What do you get from all this:
1) A proven vehicle for launch, orbital maneuvering, and landing
2) Known system for life support for at least 30 days + extended duration from additional fuel cells.
3) Existing ground preparation facilities and processes to make this happen within 2-3 years after the prequesites are solved.

Otherwise we're probably looking at 15-20 years before a manned vehicle orbits Mars, given testing, rampup and other time constraints for an entirely new system.

...know when to pack it up and go home.