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.
Yep!
Because robots can't do squat. Talk to some people who do robotics for a living. (There's a big group at CMU.) Just as an example, a robot designed to do simple retrieval can't tell the difference between a tuft of grass and a rock. I suppose we could build one to waive its arms and say "Danger Will Robinson" but that's about it.
"The evil corporations are keeping this project in place." Does Time have a macro for this stuff? Excuse me for questioning the gentleman's attitude but with rhetoric like:
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.I think I can be excused for thinking he's little more than a contrarion.
Oh, this is a classic:
no escape-capsule system was added to get astronauts out in a calamity, which might have helped Columbia.I suppose when there's a helicopter crash, he also criticizes the manufacturers for not including ejector seats.
And the political points are moronic:
Large manned-space-flight centers that depend on the shuttle are in Texas, Ohio, Florida and Alabama.With the exception of Ohio, the other states would still be locations for NASA's operations anyway for geographical reasons, regardless of whether NASA commissions a shuttle replacement or goes to unmanned flight.
He's just making the argument that NASA should be shut down for the purposes of more social spending. He may not realize it (I doubt it) but that's the thrust of his arguments. Other than pay-for-play unmanned flights, he suggests no alternative. Furthermore, the tagline tells us that he warned of unsafe rocket boosters. That's easy to do. I could tell you everything's unsafe. Has he ever said something on the shuttle was well-designed?
Since you are familiar with Dr. Easterbrook, do you know his area of expertise?
As a former EE, I love the KISS principle. I guess I'd like to read a reasonably technical (and unbiased) comparison between reusable "space planes" and expendable capsules. Do you know of anything out on the web? Something that would list the pros and cons in an unbiased way.
Would your Soyuz capsules be expendable or reusable? Is it worth it to design them to be to be refurbished after recovery? How does the cost work out? Also, when considering cost, how much do you add in for the recovery operation which would, I assume, involve military forces (either on the ground or at sea).
The "space plane" suffers because it needs control surfaces to glide home. This adds alot of weigh and complexity over a capsule. More weigh and complexity goes into making it reusable, too.
Of course, the worst of all worlds (which I heard a Congresscritter advocating on TV this morning) is the combination of two manned, reusable launch vehicles. This uses a manned space shuttle attached to a manned launch vehicle. With this you need two life support systems, flight systems, and control surfaces. Yikes!
Quite probably, but my point is that Easterbrook offers no alternatives here.
Its a total waste to send astronauts into space every other month to do the equivalent of high school science competition type experiements in order to have some rationalization for having bought the Shuttle capability in the first place.
I can't deny that at all, but then, what is the point of getting to Mars? It's all just pie-in-the-sky stuff anyway. The R&D to start a brand new program is also a very high cost.
The moon is the "satellite" we need, which will not be threatening to re-enter Earth's atmosphere every decade.
From the moon, we can launch and land with much less stress on the vehicles.
A space station in orbit around the moon, could much more easily be serviced from there, than from here.
The trouble is not really the cost, but is the "thing" about neutrality, about which everybody signed off on [using the moon] aways back.
But since those treaties, we seem to be getting along pretty well down in Antarctica; so why not on the moon?
It seems that two main camps have emerged: The critics of "spam in a can," led by Beelzebubba, Man of the Right, and Physicist, who hoe with the plow of libertarian orthodoxy. Let the market do it; if government must do it, make it as cost effective as possible. And that means going unmanned. Space colonization sounds nifty but, they say, is not especially attractive if done in the context of government operated settlements. The Moon is a harsh mistress and Big Gubbermint is an even harsher master.
And then there are the advocates of manned exploration, who offer a variety of reasons for their position. Some are rational and some are not. It is the latter that strike me: national pride, the romantic impulse of exploring the unknown.
It does seem that pretty much everyone is agreed on one thing: the STS is a bloated and increasingly obsolescent boondoggle. It is not cost effective. It is not safe. Its capabilities are limited. It is not what was promised. To say all of this is not to disrespect the sacrifice of the seven astronauts who lost their lives yesterday - though I think Easterbrook's timing was a little opportunistic.
In the account ledgers the arguments of the first camp are - right now - essentially unanswerable. This is not to say (and I doubt that even they would say) that the manned program has been total waste even weighed just on strict tangible benefits: some genuine, hard-to-duplicate scientific research has been accomplished through it, some technology spinoffs have occurred (though fewer and fewer as of late), and some military missions have been accomplished. Is it worth continuing? On tangibles it becomes harder to make that argument as unmanned technology improves. If we continue down the murky bloated path offered by the ISS and the STS - even harder.
Such advocates seem unswayed by the intangibles offered: national pride, manifest destiny, the romance of the American frontier dream. Well: it may not sway them but that does not mean that these phenomena are not without validity or transformative power. While they entail the danger of abuse by unscrupulous bureaucrats it's also true that they have a value that cannot be easily denied. The value of those six flags we left on the moon lies in more than just the rock samples or measurements taken as weighed against the very big bill footed to leave them there. Cold, clear eyed libertarians may be immune to their power but most of our fellow citizens are not. I certainly am not.
Even if this aspect of manned space exploration and settlement does not sway the skeptics, however, there is one that does and which has not been addressed save tangentially: the first objective of any society is that of survival - if not of the individual then at least that of the group. This demans continuing research into the universe around us far beyond the dictatesof knowledge for knowledge's sake, research unlikely to be accomplished through the private sector. And in recent decades we have detected several uncomfortably close near misses by large bodies that would have entailed catastrophic losses had they struck true.
All of which certainly demands (at the least) an aggressive program to catalog all such threatening objects and to develop the means to destroy or divert them - assuredly, a justifiable expense and function for government if there ever was one. It is quite possible that this much can be achieved through unmanned means. Certainly (I would like to think) that even you and MOTR and Physicist would think this a far better use of taxpayer dollars than the untold trillions plowed into wasteful and often destructive so-called social programs, the real culprit behind the growth of Leviathan. We can rightly kvetch about the $15 billion plowed annually into NASA and its boondoggles, but it's chump change next to the waste of the hundreds of billions dumped into domestic entitlement and discretionary programs, to say nothing of the billions we've poured down ratholes in the Third World in the name of "foreign aid."
Nonetheless, I think the only ultimate insurance against the fickle hand of fate for the survivial of our society, our civilization and our race will be to take real and bold steps to plant our seeds in new settings - earth orbit, the Moon, Mars, the moons of Jupiter and beyond - so that the whole may survive the destruction of any one. Ultimately I would prefer that as much of this as possible be done privately. Given the scales of economy and resources needed, at least in the initial stages, some government involvement is inevitable. Them's just the facts.
STS and ISS won't get us there. If they accomplish anything at all it's the acquiring of more knowledge (which does have some value) about human survival in space, albeit in a very expensive and unsafe fashion. But there are some good ideas percolating out there (such as Robert Zubrin's Mars Direct proposals) which could do so for reasonable cost. They are worth exploring.
In the meantime I think we can all agree this tragedy represents an opportunity to reevaluate (in long overdue fashion) our space program and better evaluate what could be better done by the private sector or the military - and that if we are to continue "spam in a can" that we have a clear and compelling reason for continuing it, and a better, safer and more cost effective means of achieving it.
It is part of the nature of man to start with romance and build to a reality.
- Ray Bradbury
Several satellites have been launched from the shuttle, however. Further, if low-orbit satellites become profitable in the future, then a manned spacecraft would be able to retrieve them from space for repair on earth. But you are right, it is not necessary at this time.
Hindsight is always 20-20 and I'm no exception. But I have to believe that if those on the ground had gone the extra mile and ASSUMED tile damage and that the lives of the Columbia 7 were in peril if re-entry were attempted, they could have docked the orbiter at the ISS and had Discovery or some other orbiter up there pretty fast (3 weeks? RKV, any guesses on turnaround time?) to retrieve the astronauts and THEN send up a mission to inspect and repair. A complete scrapping of the mission to get the crew home safe. Would anyone have bitched at NASA for trying? Wouldn't it have been better to be safe than sorry?
If they can put together a crew to repair the Hubble the way they did, it has to be within the realm of possibility to do a tile repair job in orbit.
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