Posted on 02/02/2003 6:15:31 AM PST by RKV
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.
I fear that you are right. And that reflects a sad loss of American, and human will to explore and to colonize space. It's a sad loss of confidence, vision, and will.
I thought they were: Several times I've lit on the NASA channel to see animation depicting compartments stacked in the payload being removed and inserted/added on to the ISS like tinkertoys.
This is bogus. If a cpu is powerful enough to do the job, then its fine to use it. A comment like this would be valid if it was found that the cpu was incapable of doing the job. The anti-lock brake "computer" in my car is a simple analog model. I see no need to replace it with a 3.0GHz Pentium4 with 256MB of RAM.
However, having written all this, I have for years wanted us to move to large unmanned expendable launch vehicles for payloads and more numerous smaller people movers. I'm not an aeronautical engineer so I don't know how practical these "space planes" are. Unfortunately, I would expect them to be far more expensive and difficult to use routinely than we think right now.
Agreed. The Shuttle didn't crash because it was insufficiently complicated.
I'm not an aeronautical engineer so I don't know how practical these "space planes" are.
Who needs a space plane? Soyuz capsules can do the job. They aren't slick, but they're comparatively cheap and reliable.
Long live the KISS principle.
The first trips of Columbus were economic failures with lives lost. The first North American colonies were economic failures for a long while (until they discovered that tobacco, a New World plant, was a good cash crop), and the early colonies had high loss of life. The early colonists paid the price, and their descendents reaped the rewards.
The Earth is too small a basket to put all our eggs into. We have limited resources, and finite living space. We also have occasional world-wide catastrophies that really mess things up. The long-term survival of the human race requires us to have access to space resources (energy, mineral, etc), and some money spent in that direction seems like a better investment than in propping up our failed public schools and social-welfare policies (which is where the Democrats would like to put the money)
The technological sophistication that the space programs sponsored in the 60's, led to the technological dominence of the US through the 70's and 80's (until Clinton and company started giving away the store in the 90's).
What we need is for private business to have incentives to create cheaper and safer avenues into space, and for the government to get the regulators (EEOC, OSHA, etc) and the trail lawyers off their backs
I thought that Columbus got a grant from Queen Isabella?
I guess we'll need something other than chemical rockets at some point, to really explore space.
Interesting concept, but this has little to do with the Space Shuttle Program, which at the present time seems to be an anachronism looking for a purpose.
We have proven men can go into space and survive for some period of time. We did that long ago. We have proven men could get to the moon and back. We did that long ago.
What we have not proven is either the utility or desireabilty of colonization. Perhaps there is a good and economic rationale for it, but if there is, I haven't seen it and nobody seems to be mentioning it, even for a huge government money-pot. If it were a feasible and practical program with some genuine commercial or military application, the moon would be presently covered with people.
Space is an extremely unforgiving and hostile place for human life, as is any known planet you can mention. Who will fund it, and why? Good Ole Money Bags Uncle Sam, who already has us so deeply in debt we are unlikely to ever get out?
Human colonization is a hugely costly project. But, until good reasons are given to do it, it is unlikely to happen except as a publicity stunt or some moss-gathering scientific works/welfare program. Why have we never colonized the ocean floor, which is a whole lot closer, accessible and holds a lot more promise of material return than the moon?
As exciting a prospect as colonization may seem, it belies reality but not because it ultimately can't be done. Given enough time and resources it can. But there is really no good commercial or military purpose to do it at this time or in the forseeable future or we would be headed in that direction already. We have plenty of resources and room here on Earth (despite the desperate cries of the environmentalists) and we are unlikely to ever send our "excess" population to Mars or need its iron or gold, if it even has any. We can get all we need of that from the remaining 70% of the Earth we have barely explored, much less developed.
Robotics presently seems the way to go into space, because the technology is there and it is cheaper and less cumbersome than manned exploration. Generally, man is just an expensive hinderance for most purposes.
Humans in space should be there where there is a defined purpose and a good reason to spend the money. Otherwise, it is just another giant public-works project using emotion as a rationale to continue. As somebody aptly pointed out previously, we are now using our precious resources in this program for such publicity stunts as catapulting teachers and aged Senators into space for no seemingly good reason except to feel warm and politically-correct cuddly.
This entire Shuttle Program needs to justify it's current and future status and goals before it should be allowed to continue spending more of our borrowed billions which if piled up could reach to the moon and colonize it!
The fact a 35 year old program currently exists in a particular form is not a good enough reason. We could say the same thing about all of our money sucking "social welfare" programs too - and in fact do, to our economic and social sorow!
Perhaps the current manned program is just a monstrous aerospace industry and geek boondoggle trying to hold our increasingly scarce national technological resources together? Fine. Then let's admit it and use it to our best advantage. But let's not blindly follow along the same ruts Westward just because the last wagon train went that way. Those ruts could dead-end somewhere in the Donner Pass if we don't really have a clue where we're headed!
Yep!
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