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.

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.

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.

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).

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!"

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.

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.

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>.

"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.

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.

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.

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