The space program must fly higher

Town Hall ^ | 2-4-03 | Charles Krauthammer

[biblewonk]

Who cares about the risk it's a total waste of money under the guise of research.

[Protagoras]

Space travel is very romantic, as is all exploration. Having said that, I advocate doing it on one's own dime.

Now all the "conservatives" can line up behind taking money from people at gunpoint and using it to explore.

[Alberta's Child]

If I am ignorant about anything related to the Columbia overhaul, it's because I was misled by what I heard from NASA people over the last few days.

My understanding was that the Columbia was actually the most "advanced" of all the shuttle orbiters as a stand-alone vehicle because it was designed at a time when humans were expected to be more involved in its operation. As a result of the overhaul, NASA ended up removed about 1,200 pounds of instrumentation, wiring, etc. that was no longer needed because more of these functions are now done either automatically or from the ground.

As I've said before, from a manned flight perspective the U.S. isn't "exploring" at all. Columbus was an explorer -- if one or more of his ships sank, he was sh!t out of luck. The lunar astronauts were explorers -- if the lunar module broke down, there was no contingency plan to get them back.

[Frank_Discussion]

I gotta run, so I'm going to be brief: Columbia had a lot of instrumentation included for system development that yes, were deemed redundant long ago, when the design was pronounced operational. The upgrade it recieved brought its capabilities up, and yes, it also entailed the dumping of the operationally useless equipment. Equipment that wasn't being used anyway, and had not been for a long, long time.

A particular detail: The point of loss for Columbia was during re-entry and has always been automated, so none of the upgrades changed that operational aspect.

As far as whether NASA is exploring or not, it depends on your perspective. Scientific exploration has been rather low for the past many missions, I'll admit. And I don't like it any more than you do. In terms of engineering exploration, that's a different story. The much-maligned ISS is quite a nice piece of work, and is showing how to build large durable structures in space. If somebody wants a far awy Lagrange point based staging base for other missions, we're better off checking it out locally. When we build a Mars ship, it will be in Earth orbit. A depot to do so will be desirable, and ISS is reconfigurable for such duty. For the available money and horrid beauracracy, we're learning a lot.