Scuttle the Shuttle! Foundation Urges

Space Frontier Foundation Press Release via SpaceRef ^ | Monday, July 14, 2003 | Rick Tumlinson

[anymouse]

The Space Shuttle system should be retired, and all further investments in the Shuttle ended, argued the non-profit Space Frontier Foundation today.

A growing consensus in Congress and the space community affirms that the Shuttle system is hopelessly inadequate to our needs and cannot be made safe or affordable, stated the group s founder, Rick Tumlinson. It's time for the venerable Space Shuttles to make way for the improvement in safety, innovation, and competitive pricing that would occur if the private sector were to be given the chance to do for space travel what commercial aviation has done for air travel.

The Foundation points out that while NASA spends billions maintaining and flying the Space Shuttles, a new generation of privately funded commercial spaceship firms has sprung up to fly people on sub-orbital flights, conceivably for mere hundreds of thousands of dollars per ticket. Rather than continuing to waste taxpayer funds, the group believes an era of commercial orbital space flight could be in the making, if the government would nurture it using the money currently spent on government-only space systems.

NASA should not be in charge of designing, building and operating what is essentially a glorified space truck/bus, added Tumlinson. Imagine if the government had done the same thing with an airline. With no competition it would never get cheaper, better or more efficient - and no one would be able to afford to fly on it. That's the socialist monopoly we have in space flight. It has not improved safety or access and wasted billions of tax dollars.

To begin the hand off to the private sector, NASA should be banned from developing any replacements, and should be made to examine every alternative to safely end the Space Shuttle era, including ending Shuttle flights upon completing the international core of the International Space Station (ISS); flying the Shuttle using its remote control systems in the meantime; and/or mothballing the ISS until commercial LEO transportation becomes available.

None of the Shuttle's capabilities are indispensable, argued Tumlinson, and the ISS should not be used as an excuse to keep flying it at the risk of more astronauts lives. If needed, the Russians can keep it going, or it can be mothballed until it can be taken over by a private Space Port Authority, and then operated, serviced and expanded by private spaceships and cargo vehicles. Now is exactly the right time for a change that can eventually open space to the people who have paid for it all.

[Fabozz]

"[D]on't you think NASA was pretty good in the early days? I wonder what's changed, they seemed inspired and excited back then. Perhaps it is as you say, the perceived competition (against the Russians) is gone."

My grandfather was one of the NACA engineers who became the founders of NASA. Those engineers had all just spent the duration of World War II developing warplanes. (Admittedly, some of those engineers designed planes for the Luftwaffe, but the principle is the same.) During wartime, getting results quickly, and getting them right the first time, meant the difference between life and death, victory and defeat. They ran NASA the same way they had run their wartime projects: lean, quick, free of bureaucracy and committed to doing whatever it took to hit the target.

Competition from the Soviets was a factor, but it was their wartime experience that taught them how to compete. By the end of Apollo, though, that spirit was gone. The war-hardened engineers were too old to keep running projects with that same intensity; they either became upper managers or moved to other opportunities. The ones who followed them learned their skills not in the airplane factories of a nation at war but in the postgraduate classrooms of universities rocked by 60s radicalism.

If you want to find engineers with that early-NASA spirit today, you can't look anywhere in the aerospace industry. You have to look at growth industries like computers, software and biotechnology, where the high-stakes, cutting-edge atmosphere of start-ups and IPOs inculcates that same "victory or death" ethic. In other words, the best way to duplicate NASA's early success is to kill NASA and offer its budget as prizes to private-sector firms.

[Sam Cree]

Thanks, that's very interesting and believable. It explains alot.

[anymouse]

I completely concur. Check my profile page for links to some space forums of interest.

[bvw]

There are fields were performance remains high, over generations. Every one I'm thinking of has the professional delivering directly to the person who uses or benefits from what is deleivered For example: surgeons, fire men, tailors, carpenters, masons, plumbers, electricians, theater.

[Iris7]

One can find good men in these fields, and also in the large bureaucratic organizations. I am involved in the latter sort of operation, and find the good men in it in a never ending struggle, making a great personal effort, sacrificing, to keep the organization running at all. This is probably how things work everywhere and everywhen (at least from my point of view).

[this_ol_patriot]

Do this right and we have the next economic boom.

[barkeep]

Just to be accurate, no one can say with absolute certainty what the threshhold level of healthy gee force would be, naturally there has been no way to empirically test it,but the best speculations I have read by people in the field is that half gee would be more than sufficient.