The Space Shuttle Must Be Stopped

A spacecraft is a metaphor of national inspiration: majestic, technologically advanced, produced at dear cost and entrusted with precious cargo, rising above the constraints of the earth. The spacecraft carries our secret hope that there is something better out there—a world where we may someday go and leave the sorrows of the past behind. The spacecraft rises toward the heavens exactly as, in our finest moments as a nation, our hearts have risen toward justice and principle. And when, for no clear reason, the vessel crumbles, as it did in 1986 with Challenger and last week with Columbia, we falsely think the promise of America goes with it.

Unfortunately, the core problem that lay at the heart of the Challenger tragedy applies to the Columbia tragedy as well. That core problem is the space shuttle itself. For 20 years, the American space program has been wedded to a space-shuttle system that is too expensive, too risky, too big for most of the ways it is used, with budgets that suck up funds that could be invested in a modern system that would make space flight cheaper and safer. The space shuttle is impressive in technical terms, but in financial terms and safety terms no project has done more harm to space exploration. With hundreds of launches to date, the American and Russian manned space programs have suffered just three fatal losses in flight—and two were space-shuttle calamities. This simply must be the end of the program.

Will the much more expensive effort to build a manned International Space Station end too? In cost and justification, it's as dubious as the shuttle. The two programs are each other's mirror images. The space station was conceived mainly to give the shuttle a destination, and the shuttle has been kept flying mainly to keep the space station serviced. Three crew members—Expedition Six, in NASA argot—remain aloft on the space station. Probably a Russian rocket will need to go up to bring them home. The wisdom of replacing them seems dubious at best. This second shuttle loss means NASA must be completely restructured—if not abolished and replaced with a new agency with a new mission.

Why did NASA stick with the space shuttle so long? Though the space shuttle is viewed as futuristic, its design is three decades old. The shuttle's main engines, first tested in the late 1970s, use hundreds more moving parts than do new rocket-motor designs. The fragile heat-dissipating tiles were designed before breakthroughs in materials science. Until recently, the flight-deck computers on the space shuttle used old 8086 chips from the early 1980s, the sort of pre-Pentium electronics no self-respecting teenager would dream of using for a video game.

Most important, the space shuttle was designed under the highly unrealistic assumption that the fleet would fly to space once a week and that each shuttle would need to be big enough to carry 50,000 lbs. of payload. In actual use, the shuttle fleet has averaged five flights a year; this year flights were to be cut back to four. The maximum payload is almost never carried. Yet to accommodate the highly unrealistic initial goals, engineers made the shuttle huge and expensive. The Soviet space program also built a shuttle, called Buran, with almost exactly the same dimensions and capacities as its American counterpart. Buran flew to orbit once and was canceled, as it was ridiculously expensive and impractical.

Capitalism, of course, is supposed to weed out such inefficiencies. But in the American system, the shuttle's expense made the program politically attractive. Originally projected to cost $5 million per flight in today's dollars, each shuttle launch instead runs to around $500 million. Aerospace contractors love the fact that the shuttle launches cost so much.

In two decades of use, shuttles have experienced an array of problems—engine malfunctions, damage to the heat-shielding tiles—that have nearly produced other disasters. Seeing this, some analysts proposed that the shuttle be phased out, that cargo launches be carried aboard by far cheaper, unmanned, throwaway rockets and that NASA build a small "space plane" solely for people, to be used on those occasions when men and women are truly needed in space.

Throwaway rockets can fail too. Last month a French-built Ariane exploded on lift-off. No one cared, except the insurance companies that covered the payload, because there was no crew aboard. NASA's insistence on sending a crew on every shuttle flight means risking precious human life for mindless tasks that automated devices can easily carry out. Did Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon really have to be there to push a couple of buttons on the Mediterranean Israeli Dust Experiment, the payload package he died to accompany to space?

Switching to unmanned rockets for payload launching and a small space plane for those rare times humans are really needed would cut costs, which is why aerospace contractors have lobbied against such reform. Boeing and Lockheed Martin split roughly half the shuttle business through an Orwellian-named consortium called the United Space Alliance. It's a source of significant profit for both companies; United Space Alliance employs 6,400 contractor personnel for shuttle launches alone. Many other aerospace contractors also benefit from the space-shuttle program.

Any new space system that reduced costs would be, to the contractors, killing the goose that lays the golden egg. Just a few weeks ago, NASA canceled a program called the Space Launch Initiative, whose goal was to design a much cheaper and more reliable replacement for the shuttle. Along with the cancellation, NASA announced that the shuttle fleet would remain in operation until 2020, meaning that Columbia was supposed to continue flying into outer space even when its airframe was more than 40 years old! True, B-52s have flown as long. But they don't endure three times the force of gravity on takeoff and 2000*none on re-entry.

A rational person might have laughed out loud at the thought that although school buses are replaced every decade, a spaceship was expected to remain in service for 40 years. Yet the "primes," as NASA's big contractors are known, were overjoyed when the Space Launch Initiative was canceled because it promised them lavish shuttle payments indefinitely. Of course, the contractors also worked hard to make the shuttle safe. But keeping prices up was a higher priority than having a sensible launch system.

Will NASA whitewash problems as it did after Challenger? The haunting fact of Challenger was that engineers who knew about the booster-joint problem begged NASA not to launch that day and were ignored. Later the Rogers Commission, ordered to get to the bottom of things, essentially recommended that nothing change. No NASA manager was fired; no safety systems were added to the solid rocket boosters whose explosion destroyed Challenger; no escape-capsule system was added to get astronauts out in a calamity, which might have helped Columbia. In return for failure, the shuttle program got a big budget increase. Post-Challenger "reforms" were left up to the very old-boy network that had created the problem in the first place and that benefited from continuing high costs.

Concerned foremost with budget politics, Congress too did its best to whitewash. Large manned-space-flight centers that depend on the shuttle are in Texas, Ohio, Florida and Alabama. Congressional delegations from these states fought frantically against a shuttle replacement. The result was years of generous funding for constituents—and now another tragedy.

The tough questions that have gone unasked about the space shuttle have also gone unasked about the space station, which generates billions in budget allocations for California, Texas, Ohio, Florida and other states. Started in 1984 and originally slated to cost $14 billion in today's dollars, the space station has already cost at least $35 billion—not counting billions more for launch costs—and won't be finished until 2008. The bottled water alone that crews use aboard the space station costs taxpayers almost half a million dollars a day. (No, that is not a misprint.) There are no scientific experiments aboard the space station that could not be done far more cheaply on unmanned probes. The only space-station research that does require crew is "life science," or studying the human body's response to space. Space life science is useful but means astronauts are on the station mainly to take one another's pulse, a pretty marginal goal for such an astronomical price.

What is next for America in space? An outsider commission is needed to investigate the Columbia accident—and must report to the President, not Congress, since Congress has shown itself unable to think about anything but pork barrel when it comes to space programs.

For 20 years, the cart has been before the horse in U.S. space policy. NASA has been attempting complex missions involving many astronauts without first developing an affordable and dependable means to orbit. The emphasis now must be on designing an all-new system that is lower priced and reliable. And if human space flight stops for a decade while that happens, so be it. Once there is a cheaper and safer way to get people and cargo into orbit, talk of grand goals might become reality. New, less-expensive throwaway rockets would allow NASA to launch more space probes—the one part of the program that is constantly cost-effective. An affordable means to orbit might make possible a return to the moon for establishment of a research base and make possible the long-dreamed-of day when men and women set foot on Mars. But no grand goal is possible while NASA relies on the super-costly, dangerous shuttle.

In 1986 the last words transmitted from Challenger were in the valiant vow: "We are go at throttle up!" This meant the crew was about to apply maximum thrust, which turned out to be a fatal act. In the coming days, we will learn what the last words from Columbia were. Perhaps they too will reflect the valor and optimism shown by astronauts of all nations. It is time NASA and the congressional committees that supervise the agency demonstrated a tiny percentage of the bravery shown by the men and women who fly to space—by canceling the money-driven shuttle program and replacing it with something that makes sense.

Gregg Easterbrook is a senior editor of the New Republic and a visiting fellow of the Brookings Institution. Five years before Challenger, he wrote in the Washington Monthly that the shuttles' solid rocket boosters were not safe.

Robots can do limited science. Humans can do a lot more than robots. Again I think people who like robots who is in space is a bunch of cowards. Lack of Human spirit. Lack of Imagination. Humans should be the explorers not robots.

"When America stops getting back on the horse after being thrown, it stops being America."

The problem is that America has been thrown by an old horse twice, and is refusing to recognize that there is a more up-to-date approach to personal transportation: CARS.

Manned spaceflight is obsoleete, and is keeping us from developing the remote and robotic systems whose technology will have a meaningful economic impact that justifies the public investment.

"Spam in a can" is a pejorative coined by 1950s U.S. test pilots for astronauts. In a modern context, it is a pejorative for the lack of vision to recognize that you don't need human beings inside a craft outside the earth's atmosphere in order to have manned space flight, given modern technology.

There is no support for spam in a can at any cost. There's no benefit.

When you and TIME magazine are done urinating on the memory of yesterday's dead heroes, would you mind cleaning up? Thanks.

Oh, and by the way, not every benefit has a dollar value. Just thought you should know.

We need a new shuttle. The current ones were a kludge after Carter cut the budget and forced many design compromises. They are now totally obsolete.

They new shuttles need to be part of the Air Force Material Airlift Command, not NASA.

Because NASA managers are not generally pilots or former pilots, they are incapable of understanding the risks they impose on flight crews or even of really understanding what the risks are. Burocrats are a hazard to an astronaunts life.

Let NASA get on with unmanned planetary missions while the Air Force does the flying.

So9

If brave men are going to venture into space, and if they are going to be Americans, they deserve better than this.

Probably. And if we give them something better, then in thirty years we'll be having this discussion again.

Manned space flight will not be private in my lifetime. The lawyers will kill it. Sovereign immunity is required for ventures with this level of risk.

Is it for colonization, and the building a larger and more elaborate civilization? Bravo, I say, bring it on. It is a noble and desirable goal.

Exactly. All this talk about sending stupid cameras to Mars is silly. We already have pictures of it. Do we want to take the next step and live there or not? I certainly do. Isn't that what space is for?

But do the Shuttle and the ISS advance us sufficiently--or even minimally--in that direction? I say they do not.

And you're right.

... stay on the moon or in orbit for long periods we will have to overcome this issue.

Agreed; hence the pioneers to continue/expand on that science and develop the solutions for the following settlers. Everyone laughs at the old SciFi rotating-ring stations, but absent a viable gravity-field generation device it's the one thing we know would work today.

"A very good editorial cartoonist at the time published a cartoon which depicted several horse-drawn Conestoga wagons with nobody in them. People were instead standing behind the wagons, which were ostensibly pointed westward, and the cartoon was captioned, "Fearful of the unknown, the early pioneers launched unmanned wagon trains to explore the American West.""

The better analogy is of "horseless wagons", (trains) which indeed opened up the west. Men are as necessary for spaceflight as horses are for exploration.

And the other problem with the analogy is that people were meant to live and work self sufficiently at their own expense in the undeveloped west, while the spending of billions of taxpayer money on the dream of sending a few governemnt elites to live off planet earth is pretty offensive to freedom.

Those weren't governemnt-funded wagons. Those pioneers spent their own money and took their own risks.

You and NASA can do whatever you want after NASA is privatized or turned into a charity for people looking for inspirational feats.

One good quote deserves another.

I had the ambition to not only go farther than man had gone before, but to go as far as it was possible to go.
Captain James Cook

My column for UPI next week is already written, will be posted early, and is an answer to this misbegotten editorial in Time magazine. Its title is, "Those in Peril on the Sea."
The main problem is that Time does not begin to understand the character of Americans. Herman Melville, more than a century ago in the opening paragraphs of Moby Dick, understood our driving need to go out in peril and promise, better than the cubicle-dwellers at this sad magazine could ever imagine.
We will continue to go into space as long as it is there and we have breath. It's as simple as that.

Congressman Billybob

Click for latest column for UPI, "Historians against History (HAH!)" (Now up on UPI wire, and FR.)

As the politician formerly known as Al Gore has said, Buy my book, "to Restore Trust in America"

Launching satellites robotically is a mature technology, even with the '60s and '70s hardware and software they use.

Yes, and when you have a mature technology you had best be experimenting with new technology before it becomes obsolete technology.

All the more reason to go forward with a new shuttle system and manned planetary missions.

So9

"We need to continue with exploration of space -- but we also need to get the pioneers, then the settlers, out into a true space station and Moon colony."

Why?

If you think government intrusion into our lives is bad now, imagine this "lifestyle alternative" on what would essentially be a civilian military base for government-selected elites.

If you want space to be a place where people can live in freedom, then the only way to get there is by private efforts, supported only by a government consent to homesteading-type property rights guarantees.

"Spam in a can" is a pejorative

Pejorative (n.) - Disparaging; belittling

How nice of you to belittle and disparage the 7 who died yesterday. You're truly a prince among men.

The average Joe who doesn't follow the program doesn't understand the direct benefits to mankind

Name three specific benefits that have come from the space program during the last ten years, other than entertaining kids in grade school science classes or providing employment to otherwise unemployable geeks? Technology used by NASA is developed by Defense Department and others and eventually transferred to NASA, not the other way around. If you cant point to any specific benefits, how about a success at NASA during the last ten years?

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