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.

Even I would agree that the satellite launching capabilities of the STS can be duplicated (and bettered) by unmanned booster vehicles.

Repairs are another story. But then the question becomes whether it's cheaper to just launch a replacement satellite or to go up and repair it, as some have pointed out in regards to Hubble.

I think that unmanned vehicles have their limitations and are likely to be so for many years to come. Taking care of satellite or even weapons system launches into LEO or GEO are not one of them - for the foreseeable future.

with Columbia, you are talking about a split-second decision to try a pre-orbital abort, which is very risky in itself.

Wrong. Mr. Dittemore (sp?) yesterday said that he himself was among the group that reviewed the videos of the launch to assess the possibility of damage to the tiles. They had 2 weeks to abort the re-entry. I just have the feeling that someone had to have recommended modifying the mission to address any possible damage and put the safety of the crew first instead of completing the mission at hand.

Just a feeling...an opinion.

I told you his area of expertise.

Actually, you didn't, but that's OK. What I'm really interested in is in what field he holds his Ph. D.

He writes about science as it interconnects with economics, politics, and the law and public policy.

I write poems, it doesn't make me a poetry expert.

Here is a sampling for you of Easterbrook the Luddite.

Your link was enlightening and an unexpected article for TNR. As you are more familiar with his broader oeuvre, I'll concede that his work does not belie a technophobic view and provides an interesting juxtaposition between technical topics and a significantly-more-than-casual writing style. Nonetheless, this Time article is more than a little disappointing on that score.

Humans belong on the earth, or using a more liberal interpretation, within the earth's biosphere, so as not to exclude travel within the lower reaches of the atmosphere or the oceans.

Regarding the ISS, the three astronauts should be evacuated at the earliest possible time and the project abandoned. A possible followup project would be use of the ISS as a laser weapon target, thereby providing a means whereby earth-based mass spectrometers can be precisely calibrated as aluminum, titanium and other alloys are vaporized in the vacuum of space.

I agree with Easterbrook. What we are essentially doing now is providing enormous tax monies to a few companies and giving a select few Americans an very costly joy ride. The science can be done equally well without bioforms in space doing it.

Gore's space station is not needed, and neither is the shuttle. Time to shut them both down and save the American taxpayer BILLIONS AND BILLIONS of dollars.

"NASA was faced with taking extreme measures (rush a rescue or park them at the space station are two possibilities) or guess it was okay to land. "

I think Nasa's choices were limited to attempt reentry and pray, or let them asphyxiate in space. It would have been impossible to have another shuttle launched before their air ran out, and they were way below the orbit of the ISS, and would not have been able to get there. I personally wonder if NASA was in fact aware that this was a really bad situation they could do nothing about, and if they discussed it with the shuttle crew.

Nasa changed the foam type on the booster rockets to a freon-free type several years ago, which is when this breaking-off foam problem began. I would like to know why this decision wasn't reversed once it became evident that this was an ongoing problem.

Could they have been brought back without burning up, or were they dead man walking after the launch?

I have to believe that if NASA flight directors had decided to mofify the mission, they could have docked at the ISS and waited for another orbiter to come and get them, leaving Columbia behind...waiting for a repair crew to do assessment and repair to the tiles. I think the lives of the Columbia 7 and a billion dollar orbiter would have been worth the effort.

They had 2 weeks to abort the re-entry. I just have the feeling that someone had to have recommended modifying the mission to address any possible damage and put the safety of the crew first instead of completing the mission at hand.

But you are presuming they'd be capable of repairing the problem when it seems they didn't successfully diagnose it. Once you're up there, you're up there.

I do think there are probably contingency plans in place for any mission where the spacecraft had sustained significant damage. I suspect they didn't consider this significant. And as to the left wing indicator, it had been reported that it had gone out on SIX previous Columbia flights during re-entry. And it made it down safely each previous time. The insulation hitting the wing *may* have been totally irrelevant to why the craft burned up.

I frankly don't have much confidence in NASA being able to tell us what exactly went wrong with 100% certainty. What's left of the craft is so burned and broken and scattered that a meaningful piecing together of the parts might be impossible.

That may well be the case, but it is a bit off my main point. This was a two-fold, decision making failure, period. The first was undoubtedly done by some bean counter who proposed an additional low gravity fungus growth study, in lieu of a tether/propulsion or camera on a stick that would have allowed the crew and by extension, those on the ground to better understand if there was a problem.

Failing that provision, the guys on the ground were put in the position of having to decide whether or not to abort, via some other means, or continue, in the hope (vain it would seem) continuing this mission wouldn't be hazardous.

As to whether or not the launch-strike caused this or not, while it is true that investigators need to remain objective to properly conduct their job, the evidence at hand is pretty strong. A strike occurred, no inspection was done, sensors in that area failed, the shuttle broke up. Now, off the top of my head, I would propose the likelihood that something totally unrelated caused it at about 30%, terrorism about 5%, and the lauch-strike as about 64% (I'll leave 1% in for ghosts or aliens.)

Unfortunately, the likely investigation will come back as "indefintie cause" due to destruction of evidence. This will neatly sidestep the bean counters referred to above and the subsequent, far harder decision faced the day of the launch. That is when a determination to mount some form of rescue should have been made. There will have to be clear and convincing evidence before I am convinced of anything else (and the odds are it does not exist either, unless manufactured).

"Let's dedicate the unmanned exploration of the universe to their memories, and make them the last people to die in space."

The timid....and the cowards WILL stay home and let everyone else...(or their current 'wet dreams' of robotic exploration)...but some humans WILL explore space.

It's in our genes.....to go looking.

Stay home...you probably couldn't hack it anyway.

redrock

"I have to believe that if NASA flight directors had decided to mofify the mission, they could have docked at the ISS and waited for another orbiter to come and get them.."

Wrong - the orbiter could NOT HAVE made it to the ISS...this mission had an orbit that was too far from the orbit of the ISS, and a different altitude. They did not have the fuel to make it.

IF the tiles were damaged at launch, these fine people were dead men walking. And IF that were the case, would you bring them home sooner to die? Would you tell them? Would you tell the world?

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