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.
Uh, ... well, ... we usually give credit. ... Maybe this explains it better: (wav or mp3)
"NASA is killing more Americans than Al Qaeda.
What??? I'm not sure how to respond to that statement. Do the numbers 911 not mean anything to you..Surely you aren't trying to make a joke? Gad man...in my eyes you aren't "Right" about this...you are very, very wrong.
The best we can hope for, is that after all five crash, the program will end. Essentially, that's what happened to hydrogen dirigibles after the Hindenburg. "
What the heck!?!?!?! "The best we can hope for...is for them to all crash"????? That's the BEST...that you can hope for????? Forgive me friend...but that's just plain sick.
Without risk there is no reward.
There may be some valid reasons for ending the Space Shuttle program, but mere danger should not be one of them.
You lost all credibility with me. Why don't you go back to John Birch Be Me or some other looney tunes group.
(1) NASA has been taken over by the bureaucrats. There are now more dead weight paper shufflers looking to advance their careers on the government dollar than there are scientists, engineers, and technicians.
(2) The workforce is aging. Not enough young people with vision work there. (Related to point one in my opinion. People who want to see real space research, as well as see a human presence in space, are deterred by the ugly, do nothing NASA bureaucrat culture.)
(3) The long term goals are missing. We were supposed to be on Mars a long time ago. Politics intervened and spent the money elsewhere. Greedy contractors looking to feather their own beds helped to kill the dream.
(4) The shuttles are archaic, old technology. There was a fundamental error made in "freezing" our technical platform so early on in the technology development process.
(5) There are dozens of alternate launch technologies that could/should be studied. But pure capitalism won't do it. Someone who has to invest billions with a possibility of no return will put the money elsewhere, thank you. Those who want private enterprise involved must still understand that govenment money will have to fund it. Realizing that, we need to break that money free of NASA.
These are only a small number of the problems. As for solutions?
(a) I would re-engineer the old Saturn boosters but with modern material science and engine technology as one answer.
(b) Re-fund the "space plane" but assign the contracts to private contractors. (This would also provide a short term boost to the economy as it hired engineers that have recently been being laid off.)
(3) Fund research into some more "far out" scenarios. For example - can ground based high intensity pulsed lasers (powered by a nuclear power plant) propel an unmanned launcher by aiming at water ejected from rocket nozzles? Can an underground tunnel, proceeding up through a mountain, use electromagnetic capability (think magnalev, using continuous acceleration in a tunnel evacuated of air) to accelerate and launch unmanned vehicles? Can the "hobbyist" lifter technology be scaled? I sure don't know, but I do know that if you beat your forehead against a wall and tell a doctor it hurts, he will tell you to stop doing what you're doing. We need to try something else, preferably several other "somethings".
In any case, these guys are on their way. I guess we can futz around, piss the money away, and then hitch rides with them. Time will tell whether we need have our kids learn Chinese if they are going to the moon.
?? Would that be "Air Force Material Command" (AFMC) (the old Systems and Logistics commands commbined) or "Air Mobility Command" (What was once called "Military Airlift Command" (MAC) and before that Military Air Transport Service (MATS, I think I've got the words correct). Another choice would be "Air Force Space Command".
We cannot abandon the space program. We can and must make it as safe for manned activities as possible. This means constant oversight, inquiry and, when avoidable disaster occurs, accountability.
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.
You are wrong because you are talking about something totally different. A pre-orbital abort would have been on take off prior to reaching orbital altitude. You are talking about re-entry after two weeks in space. Two very different things.
Explore space? Doing experiments on fungus growth in zero gravity? Sounds like a high school science competition, not exploration. If they are doing the explorer bit they would be at least flying to Mars if not landing there rather than doing experiments of such dubious value.
It was in the sensibile atmosphere at the time. I'd say that put it in US airspace. Unless you dont' think Texas is part of the Homeland. (and if you don't, them's fighting words :) ). Besides there were only 6 Americans on board, which much as I hate to defend MoR, that's what the original post said,"More Americans", of course he had to qaulify that to 2003 after the fact. Take the last 20 years and Al Qaida comes out way on top.
Do know how stupid that sounds? If not, you really are as ignorant as you seem. It would take days for a launch from the moon to arrive at the Earth. Within an hour, China would cease to exist and a few days later so would the moon base.
What Isabella expected to gain from Columbus's voyage is no different than the expectations from the exploration of space. The possibilty of vast, untapped mineral deposits is as real for Mars, Venus, and even the Moon, as it was for the New World. BTW, are you suggesting that European monarchs did not tax their subjects?
"And the new world would not have long remained undiscovered in the free market of exploration."
LOL!
I claim this New World for José!?
No sir. It was then very much the same as it is today...governments will control space exploration, and claim the planets they colonize. I don't see Bill Gates financing an expedition to claim Planet Microsoft.
"Why not develop huge undersea colonies? That would inspire *some* people. Why don't we spend *your* tax dollars on such an inspiring goal?"
Why not?
Or do you believe that the human spirit of adventure and exploration is gone from us?
Know your enemy. -- Sun TzuWell, probably Sun Tzu, what do I know? I never read Sun Tzu. Anyway, I know how you think by now. It's easy to engage in a good -- if contentious -- conversation with you.
You seem to be a fan of his work. I wonder if this is an example eerily similar to Republicans getting an op-ed in the New York Times. The Shuttle program is a pet project of Easterbrook (which, frankly, is a topic that makes him a bit hysterical) and Time takes the opportunity to use a well-respected journalist through whom they can speak.
and the Lodges [speak] only to God,
Hey, if there's something you need me to pass on, let me know. After all, mathematics is the language of the Almighty.
Are we a little paranoid these days? What if we took the money being wasted on shuttle flights to conduct science fair experiments and play like we're exploring and put it into research to go to Mars within fifteen years. That would mean we had a real objective and were not just pissing away good money after bad on welfare for geeks.
If a new Shuttle is needed so badly to conduct important research, blah blah, what is this important research? I would like to know two specific things of value that the Shuttle flights have accomplished over the past twenty years? Come on, you must have one or two, other than providing full employment to rocket scientists and technicians in Florida, California and Texas. Of what benefit have these flights been? How has the public benefited? Someone out there must have at least one.
Hey, if he can move the goalposts, so can I. How many people have been killed by NASA, today, in my living room? Why, none.
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