The Space Shuttle Must Be Stopped

Time ^ | 2/2/2003 | Gregg Easterbrook

[Tall_Texan]

I have a nasty feeling that in the end we will hear of engineers who begged Flight Control to modify Columbia's mission in light of possible damage to the heat tiles during liftoff and were ignored.

I'm going to go out on a major limb here and say that the malfunction was due, in large part, to the dynamics of re-entry. If the craft had been damaged at lift-off, it could not avoid having to go through re-entry to get it back down. In other words, they reached the point of no return as soon as they left earth's atmosphere. They might as well have carried on the mission from that point on.

Mission Control said yesterday that they have no way to do a thorough eyeball examination of the shuttle, even while docked. The mission did not call for a spacewalk so no spacewalk equipment was loaded.

So the only alternatives to bringing home a damaged spacecraft as they did yesterday is to either release it unmanned to the heavens as space junk (and you could bet the folks at Time would decry the waste) or make as little of the crew (one or two pilots) try to fly the ship home knowing there's a good chance they won't make it - leaving the rest on the space station until another ship can transport them back.

But that, of course, goes on the assumption that NASA can accurately determine how well the spacecraft would survive re-entry and I guess yesterday's experience demonstrates that they don't have that expertise down yet.

[Physicist]

Good question. I'll say 50-50.

[Man of the Right]

Manned space flight is an anachronism. It's a 1940s concept. It's been superceded by the computer revolution, robotics, miniaturization.

[Man of the Right]

The notion that you need to have spam in a can to exploit space is a 1940s Sunday matinee concept. Technology and the world have moved on.

[tet68]

".....(a) system that is too expensive, too risky, too big for most of the ways it is used, ,,,,,,,"

Who needs the Panama Canal anyway?

[Man of the Right]

NASA is killing more Americans than Al Qaeda.

Hopefully, when all 5 Shuttles vaporize, the program will end. It's too bad another 21 people will have to die before that happens.

[Pearls Before Swine]

I have a nasty feeling that in the end we will hear of engineers who begged Flight Control to modify Columbia's mission in light of possible damage to the heat tiles during liftoff and were ignored.

Maybe. However, the two situations are different. With Challenger, the decision was made while the shuttle was sitting on the ground; with Columbia, you are talking about a split-second decision to try a pre-orbital abort, which is very risky in itself. Organizationally, NASA wouldn't have had time to react in this instance.

[Physicist]

NASA is killing more Americans than Al Qaeda.

Smoke what!?!

That's the sort of thing Ed Asner would say.

[Tall_Texan]

I saw a 1981 DeLorean last week. On the outside, it looked as sleek and breathtaking as it did in Back To The Future. On the inside, it was a piece of junk with an engine on its last legs. There is something to be said for metal fatigue, just as with airplanes. Perhaps its just time for the old ladies to be retired (what's left of them).

[Timesink]

This backseat-driver piece read like standard-issue "stop the military-industrial complex!" liberal claptrap from the first word. But it was when I got to this line that I had to completely give up because I was too busy laughing: "...no escape-capsule system was added to get astronauts out in a calamity, which might have helped Columbia."

Notice he doesn't explain a) How this "escape capsule" would have helped save the astronauts when the 3000° heat and Mach 18 speed caused the rest of the shuttle to break apart after one minor failure, or b) How they would have had time to get to said "capsule" when the entire disaster happened in a matter of two or three seconds.

The only important line in the entire article is in his bio blurb: "Five years before Challenger, he wrote in the Washington Monthly that the shuttles' solid rocket boosters were not safe." In other words, it took 21 years to prove it, but "I was riiiiiight! Nyah nyah!"

[AmishDude]

It's all about satellites. Television, mobile phones and a whole host of technologies depend on them. You've got to send people up there sometime.

I'd love to go up there. If they told me the failure rate was 90%, I'd be saying "How do I zip up this spacesuit?"

[Lee'sGhost]

Hear, hear! (Or is it "Here, here?") Anyway, I agree with you both. I do, however, think we need to revamp the shuttle program. The technology is 30+ years old.

[JudgemAll]

5) The socialists at Time just can't seem to say the word that is really needed here - PRIVATIZE!

I beg to differ on that. Space programs should be MILITARIZED! We are the only country that treat space as a University project through NASA. It's nuts, it's open sourced, it's insecure.

THe rest of lower critical works should be indeed privatized, however that means using Russian, Euro, Japanese or even Chinese rocketry. How can we privatize when using foreign subsidised nationalised rocketry? It's nonsense. Privatize yes, but you must match the protectionism of other nations with your own protectionism, lest we become a banana republic.

[alrea]

The socialists at Time just can't seem to say the word that is really needed here - PRIVATIZE! We can have all the commissions we can stand, but bureaucracies cannot and will not change. If the US wants a small manned spaceplane, and I think that is a useful goal, from a national policy standpoint, how about we use capitalism to our advantage?

As in education, law and economics, there are those that want the "mixed" government corporate approach. While not a total failure we know the Government is at best...a jobs program; as it is in any socialist or communist country.

Government can not compete with a private model. It just has to be proven every now and then. Sadly, suffering often goes hand in hand.

[Timesink]

I have a nasty feeling that in the end we will hear of engineers who begged Flight Control to modify Columbia's mission in light of possible damage to the heat tiles during liftoff and were ignored.

It's already started. Last night I posted a ranting screed by some woman that was fired from NASA a few years ago screeching about how "I told you this was going to happen, and The Man tossed me out the door!" but the Admin Moderator immediately deleted it and neither he/she nor JimRob would respond to my freepmails requesting an explanation. And now there's this from the Guardian: <a href="http://www.observer.co.uk/international/story/0,6903,887236,00.html>Nasa chiefs 'repeatedly ignored' safety warnings</a>.

[No Truce With Kings]

"The Space Program isn't on his radar screen. The White House janitor supervises NASA."

Well, no.

W. is from Texas. He is aware of the space program. But he is also aware of the pathologies injected into the program during the reign of Dan Goldin. His people have been quietly purging the program of its poison -- getting rid of the people that dreamed small dreams in the '90s, the wienies that decided they would grade engineers on skin color and gender. He has been trying to transform the agency into what it was -- at least in the 1980s, if not the 1960s before going further.

W. has a business background. He wants NASA capable of running towards an objective, and not just another Federal bureaucray before announcing new initiatives. He is now about ready to do that -- and when they come, as with the tax cut and his military initiatives, they will take your breath away.

[Physicist]

But it was when I got to this line that I had to completely give up because I was too busy laughing: "...no escape-capsule system was added to get astronauts out in a calamity, which might have helped Columbia."

Yeah, that was a howler. But I thought that most of his other comments were spot-on.

[Man of the Right]

Your position reminds of B-grade Westerns. The Indians attacked until the last one was shot off his horse by the cowboys with repeating rifles. The Indians never stopped, canvassed, asked themselves "how are we doing?" and "is there a better way to achieve our objective, which is to preserve our land and way of life?"

Manned space flight was conceived in the 1940s at a time when there no computers, no modern sensors or communications, no robots, no miniaturization. The notion that you need spam in a can to exploit space is so lacking in vision, it brings me to tears. The Shuttle is a failure. Its premise, that a reuseable shuttle can substantially reduce the cost of access to space was proven false by the Shuttle. The folks who launch satellites--DOD and commercial interests--largely abandoned the Shuttle in the '80s. The Shuttle soldiers on. Two of the five Shuttles representing this 1960s technology have now crashed, killing 13 or 14 people. Three remain. Either the fleet can be retired, or NASA can operate it, statistically killing another 21 people over the next 150 missions, thereby terminating the Shuttle once and for all.