Posted on 06/16/2005 6:28:37 AM PDT by Rodney King
Like the monster in some ghastly horror movie rising from the dead for the umpteenth time, the space shuttle is back on the launch pad. This grotesque, lethal white elephant — 14 deaths in 113 flights — is the grandest, grossest technological folly of our age. If the shuttle has any reason for existing, it is as an exceptionally clear symbol of our corrupt, sentimental, and dysfunctional political system. Its flights accomplish nothing and cost half a billion per. That, at least, is what a flight costs when the vehicle survives. If a shuttle blows up — which, depending on whether or not you think that 35 human lives (five original launchworthy Shuttles at seven astronauts each) would be too high a price to pay for ridding the nation of an embarrassing and expensive monstrosity, is either too often or not often enough** — then the cost, what with lost inventory, insurance payouts, and the endless subsequent investigations, is seven or eight times that.
There is no longer much pretense that shuttle flights in particular, or manned space flight in general, has any practical value. You will still occasionally hear people repeating the old NASA lines about the joys of microgravity manufacturing and insights into osteoporesis, but if you repeat these tales to a materials scientist or a physiologist, you will get peals of laughter in return. To seek a cure for osteoporesis by spending $500 million to put seven persons and 2,000 tons of equipment into earth orbit is a bit like… well, it is so extravagantly preposterous that any simile you can come up with falls flat. It is like nothing else in the annals of human folly.
Having no practical justification for squirting so much of the nation’s wealth up into the stratosphere, our politicians — those (let us charitably assume there are some) with no financial or electoral interest in the big contractor corporations who feed off the shuttle — fall back on romantic appeals to Mankind’s Destiny. Thus President Bush, addressing the nation after the Columbia tragedy two years ago:
These men and women assumed great risk in this service to all humanity. In an age when space flight has come to seem almost routine, it is easy to overlook the dangers of travel by rocket and the difficulties of navigating the fierce outer atmosphere of the earth.
These astronauts knew the dangers, and they faced them willingly, knowing they had a high and noble purpose in life. Because of their courage and daring and idealism, we will miss them all the more.
The cause in which they died will continue. Mankind is led into the darkness beyond our world by the inspiration of discovery and the longing to understand. Our journey into space will go on.
Anyone who finds it “easy to overlook the dangers of travel by rocket” just hasn’t been following the shuttle program very attentively. One astronaut death per eight flights!
The rest of the president’s address on that occasion was, to be blunt about it, insulting to the memories of the astronauts who died, and still more insulting to their grieving spouses, children, parents, and friends. If these astronauts believed that “they had a high and noble purpose in life,” they were mistaken, and someone should have set them straight on the point.
Please note that “if.” The motivation of shuttle astronauts would, I suspect, make a very interesting study for some skillful psychologist. Here is Ken Bowersox, one of the astronauts who was actually on board the International Space Station (steady now, Derb, husband your wrath) when Columbia blew up. He is writing in the June 2005 issue of Popular Mechanics, putting the “pro” case in a debate on the continuation of the Shuttle program, versus former NASA historian Alex Roland arguing the “con.” Bowersox:
I’ve wanted to be in space from the time I was listening to the radio and heard about John Glenn circling the earth. Columbia was the klind of blow that could have made me walk away from it. As astronauts, though, we wouldn’t have been on the space station if we didn’t believe in the program. Even after losing our friends and our ride home, we still believed that exploration was important.
Far be it from me to pull rank on Astronaut Bowersox, but I’ve wanted to be in space for somewhat longer than that — since seeing those wonderful pictures by Chesley Bonestell in The Conquest of Space, circa 1952, or possibly after being taken to the movie Destination Moon at around the same time. The imaginative appeal of space travel is irresistible. I don’t think I could resist it, anyway. Even with two young kids who need me, and a wife who (I feel fairly sure) would miss me, I would still, if given the opportunity to go into space tomorrow, be on the next flight to Cape Canaveral. As Prof. Roland says in that Popular Mechanics exchange: “The real reason behind sending astronauts to Mars is that it’s thrilling and exciting.” Absolutely correct. The danger? Heck, we all have to go sometime. As President Bush said, I am sure quite truly: “These astronauts knew the dangers, and they faced them willingly…” It’s the president’s next clause I have trouble with: “…knowing they had a high and noble purpose in life.”
Did they really know that? My experience of pointless make-work, which is much more extensive than I would have wished when starting out in life, is that people engaged in it know they are engaged in it. Whether they mind or not depends on the rewards. For a thousand bucks an hour, I’d do make-work all day long — aye, and all night too! Astronaut salaries don’t rise to anything like that level, of course; but there are rewards other than the merely financial. I hope no one will take it amiss — I am very sorry for the astronauts who have died in the shuttle program, and for their loved ones — if I quietly speculate on whether, being engaged in such a supremely thrilling and glamorous style of make-work, one might not easily be able to convince oneself to, as Astronaut Bowersox says, “believe in the program.”
None of which is any reason why the rest of us should believe in it, let alone pay for it. There is nothing — nothing, no thing, not one darned cotton-picking thing you can name — of either military, or commercial, or scientific, or national importance to be done in space, that could not be done twenty times better and at one thousandth the cost, by machines rather than human beings. Mining the asteroids? Isaac Asimov famously claimed that the isotope Astatine-215 (I think it was) is so rare that if you were to sift through the entire crust of the earth, you would only find a trillion atoms of it. We could extract every one of that trillion, and make a brooch out of them, for one-tenth the cost of mining an asteroid.
The gross glutted wealth of the federal government; the venality and stupidity of our representatives; the lobbying power of big rent-seeking corporations; the romantic enthusiasms of millions of citizens; these are the things that 14 astronauts died for. To abandon all euphemism and pretense, they died for pork, for votes, for share prices, and for thrills (immediate in their own case, vicarious in ours). I mean no insult to their memories, and I doubt they would take offense. I am certain that I myself would not — certain, in fact, that, given the opportunity, I would gleefully do what they did, with all the dangers, and count the death, if it came, as anyway no worse than moldering away in some hospital bed at age ninety, watching a TV game show, with a tube in my arm and a diaper round my rear end. I should be embarrassed to ask the rest of you to pay for the adventure, though.
** There are actually reasons to think we may have been lucky so far. News item: “Steve Poulos, manager of the Orbiter Projects Office at Johnson Space Center in Houston, acknowledges there is ‘a debate’ inside the agency about the threat posed by space debris. One school of thought is that a fatal debris strike is ‘probable,’ Poulos said. But he said others think such an event is likely to be ‘infrequent’." Uh-huh.
It was designed by committee on a shoestring. And it served as the excuse Carter needed to end the Apollo missions.
I think we should use the shuttle to put a satellite with nuclear weapons aimed at the middle East in orbit and tell them about it. Any attack on America by Muslims or their agents and ka-boom, they're gone.
The "bottom line" was a constant focus and concern of the great age of exploration that people constantly refer to; Columbus, Hudson, etc.; exploration for exploration's sake is a very recent phenomenon of the 19th and 20th centuries (Perry going to the Pole, etc.)
Columbus did not find the riches, spices, nor the faster route to the Far East upon which the Spanish rulers had banked. He found hot chili peppers.
Speaking as a rank amateur and ignoramus, I have always viewed the shuttle as a grotesque half-way measure, a hydrid technology that was both ugly and dangerous. The alternative? Well, I've already admitted to being an ignoramus.
I agree with your sentiments to a point. To me it's that machines can do more for a lot less money than manned flight. I'm not against manned flight, but rather I'm for the best science return for dollars spent. We could do a lot, lot more without the shuttles devouring NASA's budget.
This argument is often a massive overstretch. You can't make a case that none of the above wouldn't have existed without the space program, and also it would have been more efficient to spend the same amount of money on simply developing medical technology without the roundabout method of having a space program and hoping for spinoffs.
I think we should claim the moon as rightfully ours, and put ICBM silos on it.
This is excellent!
Surely there is better technology available. Cant we do better than 1970's technology.
True, but he was pursuing wealth, and the land that he claimed for Spain and the path that he paved led to that wealth. Are we in space in search of wealth? No. Did we claim the moon? No. The Columbus analogy is simply false.
OH MAN I LOVE THIS GUY!
Does he have anything to say about privately funded space flight, like Spaceship One?
the problem is that TOO MUCH MONEY was available -- rather than use cleverness to solve problems, more money was thrown at it.
a perfect example is the japanese space program - there are actually TWO of them, one that is government run, the other that is run on a shoestring by a group of universities. the LATTER group is so successful that the government actually has restraints in place (no launch vehicle wider than 1m for example) so they won't continue to embarrass the bloated and ineffectual government agency.
so, with the 1m restraint in place, the shoestring group put a satellite around the moon (!!!!!!)
...and anti-technology leftist crank.
The real problem with the Shuttle is not that it is statistically any more dangerous than any other craft designed to explore a new frontier, but that the government runs it. This means that the people who are willing to take the risks needed to do meaningful eploration are being prevented from doing so because NASA cannot, for political reasons, afford to take the risks needed for interesting missions.
Time to turn over the risky stuff to Burt Rutan. His crews will be the first to explore Europa.
Even with two young kids who need me, and a wife who (I feel fairly sure) would miss me, ... I'd understand if she didn't... I would still, if given the opportunity to go into space tomorrow, be on the next flight to Cape Canaveral.
That's the draw, bucky. The problem is the shuttle program and its bureaucracy, NOT manned space flight.
Looking at photos from remote control cameras may be safer but without a living, breating presence, without the goal of footprints ... it won't get the job done. Manned is not as efficient ... but it's the only way to scratch the itch.
"I agree the shuttle is the proverbial horse designed by a committee, but as a whole the US manned space program has reaped many benefits that we take for granted. Technologies developed for the space program gave us home computers, cell phones, CT scans, improved cardiac monitoring in hospitals, more fuel efficient and lower maintenance cars etc."
Tang. You forgot Tang.
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