Posted on 02/01/2003 8:35:38 AM PST by fporretto
February 1, 2003
Lord, guard and guide the men who fly
Though the great spaces in the sky.
Be with them always in the air,
In darkening storms or sunlight fair;
Oh, hear us when we lift our prayer,
For those in peril in the air!(Mary C. D. Hamilton)
By now, you're aware that Space Shuttle Columbia, scheduled to return to Earth this morning, has exploded on re-entry.
We have lost seven more of the bravest and best members of our race. The thought is near to unendurable. The tragedy is not at all assuaged by the routine observation that space is the human frontier, and frontiers are not for the faint of heart.
Other commentators will wax poetic about the terrible loss in human terms, the probable setback to the American space program and the impact on the progress of the space station. I haven't the heart for it, anyway. No, I didn't know any of the astronauts, but I've known their kind -- the courageous, confident, irrepressibly cheerful men and women for whom mortal risk in the cause of freedom, or justice, or human advancement is all in a day's work.
I'm going to talk about the great, festering wound in all aerospace programs of any kind: the tendency to prolong the usage life of a system well beyond the point of lunacy.
Did you know that the U.S. Air Force flies planes that are older than Columbia was? Would you have guessed that most of its planes, and most of the planes flown by the Navy as well, are more than twenty-five years old?
Most of those, of course, are combat platforms. That makes it worse, not better.
Aerospace systems are unbelievably complex and expensive. We're a long way from the days when a factory would turn out a thousand Grumman P-51s in a month. These days, we might get a dozen planes in a year -- and that's after the plane has gone into full scale production. So the need to extend the lives of older systems already in service is obvious and inexorable.
The B-52 fleet, the backbone of American air power, is replete with planes more than forty years old. This isn't a knock against the B-52. It's one of the finest combat aircraft ever built, unmatched by any other bomber in its reliability and elegance, but if it were a commercial airplane, no airline would dare to keep it in service. No air traveler would be willing to fly on it.
Yet we put the cream of American youth into it, the brightest, strongest, clearest-eyed of our airmen, to execute missions more hazardous than anything else a man might be asked to do. We have no choice.
It gets worse. In recent discussions of fleet upgrade plans, Air Force procurement planners have frankly admitted that they expect B-52s flying today still to be in service in 2050. The youngest B-52s were built in the Seventies. You can do the arithmetic for yourself.
But with new combat aircraft costing hundreds of millions of dollars per copy, there's no way around it. And the B-52 is just the most egregious element of our geriatric aerospace fleet.
The Space Shuttles are the most complex machines ever devised, bar none. Nothing, not even a B-2 stealth bomber, comes close to a Shuttle for complexity or sophistication in any dimension. But the design is twenty-five years old and has already killed fourteen astronauts.
A spacefaring nation cannot afford to stake its future on a twenty-five-year-old design that's got so many provable weak points. But to replace the Shuttles will take at minimum a decade and $50 billion. It would be more prudent to assume fifteen to twenty years and $100 billion.
The higher we reach, the higher the costs, the more extensive the planning, the more protracted the development, the more elaborate the testing -- and the greater the risks.
Yet space is inarguably where we must go. Even discounting its military importance, we are obliged to push into the Great Up-And-Out. No expanding technological species can confine itself to the surface and biosphere of a single planet, if it wants to have a future.
So we must press on. We have to spend the money, devote the brainpower, and risk the lives of our best and brightest. In any choice between confronting the challenges of the future and swaddling ourselves in the glories of the past, America must choose the future.
Please remember that, and remind your elected representatives of it, as the "what are we doing in space anyway?" cries mass around the edges of our public discourse... as they did after the explosion of Challenger, and after the Apollo XIII debacle, and after the Apollo I disaster, and any time our risk-taking draws the bad end of the odds.
And pray for the seven heroes whose lives ended high over Texas this morning, and for the families they left behind.
Wrong the last B-52 was built in 1962.
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