AES/newspost wrote:
Little to completely negligible meaningful science actually done with or
on the shuttle;

That's a matter of opinion. There's are dozens, if not hundreds of small
experiments that are carried out on every shuttle mission that the public
doesn't neccessarily know about. I'm sure those scientists feel that
their work is worthwhile, and I suspect that the scientific community in
general does too.

shuttle launches for repair missions of unamnned
orbitals cost more than rebuilding and relaunching a new copy of the
same item; plus limiting the unmanned orbital to an orbit reachable by
the shuttle generally significantly compromises its performance.

For a small satellite, that may be true, although the turn around time
may be important, depending on the mission. For a large, expensive
satellite like Hubble, I doubt that "relaunching a new copy" is a viable
short term fix to any problems it might encounter. The next generation
space telescope is still several years away.

NASA doesn't force a spacecraft team to use a shuttle accessable orbit.
Terra, Aqua and Aura can't be reached by the shuttle, and they're worth
billions of dollars each. I think, from a shuttle repair standpoint, if a
particular satellite can be reached by the shuttle, and if the economics
and mission timeline dictates that it's worth repairing, it becomes a
canditate for repair. If not, it doesn't get repaired. NASA isn't
stupid.

-- Jay

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