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.

How The West (Space) Wasn't Won (Food For Thought Re: NASA (a.k.a. 'NAFA') and the Shuttle Program)…A Fable

by I M Patient

Of course the Americans conquered their Western frontier pretty effectively. But there was another country which set about the same task in a different way.....

This country was bounded to the West by a desert. One day a telescope built on one of the country's mountains revealed what looked like sea far away beyond the desert which would have to be crossed in order to discover if there was habitable land on the coast. So the politicians got together and established a government agency to send some people through the desert. They called it the National Agricultural Frontier Administration, NAFA for short, and charged it with a dramatic task to demonstrate the vigor of the nation: it would carry out a "mission" to send people right through the desert to the West coast of the continent and bring them back safely, within a decade.

NAFA got to work. They used the telescope on the mountain bordering the desert to look out and prepare the best maps that they could. They mounted short "missions" of one or two days out into the desert and back again. And finally they produced designs for a special "desert-wagon" that would be able to take a crew of three people across the desert and back again, carrying all its own supplies in case there was nothing but desert beyond. NAFA called the people who were to go on these "missions" "WAGGONAUTS". A special feature of NAFA's desert-wagon design was that as supplies were exhausted, the "waggonauts" would abandon individual parts of the enormous vehicle in order to save taking them all the whole distance, arriving back home in just a little wagon.

So then NAFA divided up the work and gave contracts to companies in every part of the country to help build this astonishing vehicle, and finally they carried out the "mission". The whole nation was fascinated to hear the result, and the public were all very pleased that it went smoothly: The desert-wagon worked fine, and the "waggonauts" returned quite safely, saying that the desert was a truly beautiful place, and there was indeed plenty of land beyond. The bill for the "mission" was as much as the whole nation normally spent in a year on clothing, but no-one minded because it was so exciting.

Then NAFA mounted a second "mission". This was exactly like the first. And like the first it returned safely, with similar reports. The crew of "waggonauts" made stirring speeches about the importance of their great "mission", and the public were pleased that they all got back okay.

Then NAFA mounted a third "mission". People weren't quite so interested. After all, everyone knew what the "waggonauts" would say when they got back: "There's lots of land out there, and the views during the journey are fantastic." This "mission" didn't work so well. Several parts of the desert-wagon and much of the crew's supplies were severely damaged in a fire one night, and the "waggonauts" only just managed to return safely. The public were relieved at that.

Then NAFA mounted a fourth "mission". The public really weren't very interested this time, but it went fine anyway.

Then NAFA mounted a fifth "mission". That was very like the fourth. By now the public were beginning to ask why NAFA kept sending out these "missions". NAFA spoke of their high duty, and said that they had to keep sending "waggonauts" out there in case they discovered something new.

Then NAFA mounted a sixth "mission". This was pretty much like the fifth "mission" except that this time the "waggonauts" took some special bicycles with them and wheeled about in the new land they had found. They said it was good fun. But they didn't discover anything new, and the public began to complain that they shouldn't keep spending taxpayers' money on these pointless "missions". NAFA didn't agree, and spoke of the high duty of their "waggonauts" to explore this distant land. So the public said that if the land was so important perhaps more people should get to go and live there. But NAFA said that this wasn't a good idea. Only "waggonauts" could go on "missions"; it was far too expensive for anyone to go there to live; and the land wasn't actually at all valuable; but NAFA should still be paid to go on sending "waggonauts" out there.

So NAFA mounted a seventh "mission". This was exactly like the sixth "mission". When they returned, the "waggonauts" made stirring speeches about this new frontier, but frankly no-one was very interested in what they had to say about their exclusive, taxpayer-funded carryings-on, and finally they voted to stop the "missions".

But by now NAFA was an impressive organization. Its desert activities were the largest research effort in the country, indeed in the world, and everyone agreed that "desert engineering" was an important new field. So although the government told NAFA to stop these "missions" to the West coast, . they didn't close NAFA down. In fact NAFA had begun to campaign for funding to enable it to "open up" the desert that their "waggonauts" had begun to explore. They spoke impressively of their high duty, and proposed in particular to build a NEW TYPE of desert-wagon which would carry more "waggonauts", and would be "re-usable": It could be used over and over again, a bit like an ordinary wagon in fact, so that the cost of each mission would be less.

There was a lot of debate over this plan; people weren't sure it would be worth paying NAFA to build a NEW type of desert-wagon. But politicians in every part of the country argued that it would "create jobs" locally. People weren't ENTIRELY convinced by this argument; after all, if you spend money on ANYTHING you "create jobs". Even some politicians understood this, but they argued it anyway. Being seen to "create jobs" was good for getting votes, after all.

And then the military said they wouldn't mind having a vehicle to place large telescopes at certain points out in the great desert. NAFA enlarged their new desert-wagon design to accommodate this, and the government finally voted to pay for it.

The new desert-wagon took a lot longer to develop than the original one. NAFA had scrapped that one and destroyed all the plans (nobody was QUITE sure why) and was starting from scratch. Once again NAFA gave contracts to companies in every part of the country. To cut a long story short, the "new, improved" desert-wagon carried six "waggonauts" instead of three, and it cost TWICE as much to carry equipment with them as the original vehicle.

It also turned out that the new desert-wagon wasn't very reliable. By now the public had grown used to the idea that NAFA continually spent vast amounts of their money to send small numbers of NAFA staff out into the desert, but they were rather-surprised when one of the new desert-wagons burst into flames in full view of the crowd that was waving goodbye, and the "waggonauts" were all killed.

Politicians immediately explained that it would be quite unreasonable of the public to expect desert-wagons to actually WORK. After all, the desert was a "new frontier" (well, only three decades old), and everyone should be grateful to NAFA for, er, something or other (it wasn't QUITE clear what). NAFA officials of course spoke impressively of their high duty to explore this terrible frontier, and built another vehicle exactly like the one that had exploded, at further enormous cost to the public.

Now around this time a number of ordinary wagon-designers, who had been ignored for years, began to say that they couldn't understand what the fuss was all about. Sure, a trip to the West coast was a long journey, so you needed a pretty carefully designed wagon. But, now that they knew what was involved, and ' NAFA had designed a whole lot of systems that worked perfectly well and were public property, it wasn't difficult to design a vehicle that would cost as little as 10% of the cost of the original missions.

Some of these independent designers even went as far as trying to raise the money to do it. They reckoned that if they could make it quite cheap to get to the coast, people would find some use for the desert instead of just driving about in it making scientific measurements. But they had a real difficulty: No-one with any money believed them. After all, NAFA employed 40,000 experienced desert-wagon engineers, If, with all their combined experience, they designed vehicles that cost a vast amount for each "waggonaut" to travel out into the desert, that must be what it cost, mustn't it? When the independents explained that NAFA had no interest in designing cheap desert-wagons, people didn't believe this. And when they pointed out that after 25 years of effort NAFA had actually raised the cost of going into the desert by more than 100%, people thought it was pretty unpatriotic to criticize NAFA, which had done so much to open up this great frontier for, er, for their "waggonauts".

Now, in order to "protect the public", the government had also made it illegal for anyone else to go out into the desert in a vehicle without NAFA's officials okaying the design. And somehow none of the independents' designs ever quite reached NAFA's standards, which weren't actually written down anywhere, but were based on their enormous experience. As a result no members of the public were killed, only NAFA's "waggonauts".

Actually, in private a number of desert-wagon engineers agreed that maybe "desert research" might be done a BIT cheaper. But they wouldn't say this in public. NAFA was the only source of desert-research funding around, and of course they didn't want to lose their contracts.

By now, true to its high duty, NAFA had developed educational programs which they gave to schools across the whole country, teaching children the history of NAFA, and the details of all their past "missions", and how to design desert-wagons, and the names and life-histories of the heroic NAFA "waggonauts", arid the glorious plans for future NAFA "missions", and how to write to politicians to persuade the government to increase NAFA's budget. Taxpayers paid for all this as well of course.

Furthermore other countries with similar bureaucratic tendencies had established their own agency, called FAFA. They were pretty proud when, starting decades after NAFA, they got their "mission" costs to the same level as NAFA! They also called some of their own staff "waggonauts" who had special meetings with NAFA's "waggonauts", while their administrators met and discussed the cost of desert-wagons, and how to get more money from taxpayers.

Like NAFA, FAFA's administrators and "waggonauts" also made speeches about how important their work was. The public in these other countries tried hard to be interested, but they could never really QUITE grasp the bit about why THEY had to pay for the "waggonauts" and their "missions"? "Because it's too expensive for the "waggonauts" to pay for themselves, of course" they were told. "Yes, but, um, why does that mean that WE, have to pay?" "Because of our high duty." So it went.

However, by now NAFA were engaged on developing a "waggonaut habitation facility" at truly stunning cost to the taxpayer.

This would house six "waggonauts" right out in the desert for fully several weeks at a time, and could actually be VISITED by the desert-wagons during their "missions".

The independents were amazed. They pointed out that the "waggonaut habitation facility" was in fact a small house, and could be built and transported out into the desert for little more than the cost of an ordinary house. And they went further. Technology had been developing so rapidly during NAFA's thirty-year life that the independents had improved their own designs of desert-wagon so far that they could now see how to reduce the cost of desert travel by 99% to a level that many of the public could afford. The public were of course fascinated by the idea. They had all heard "waggonauts" giving speeches about how amazing it was out in the desert, and they were keen to see for themselves. So they asked NAFA if they could go too.

At this the officials at NAFA became very solemn. This was ABSOLUTELY out of the question. ONLY NAFA's (and FAFA's) "waggonauts" could go out into the desert. "Missions" were FAR too important and difficult for mere "ordinary members of the public" to take part. But, since this showed that the public were keen for even more space activity, NAFA was happy to propose that the public should pay for NAFA to start a new "Desert Exploration Initiative", greater and more difficult than any previous mission: NAFA would build a fleet of ENTIRELY NEW desert-wagons, which would carry at least six NAFA "waggonauts" right across the desert (something they hadn't done for twenty years now despite the cosmic amounts of money that they used), and then explore RIGHT ALONG THE COAST. This would cost a truly heroic amount of taxpayers' money, commensurate with NAFA's importance, and fully ten times what the original mission across the desert had cost. It would double the nation's debt at a stroke, and demonstrate clearly what a stupendous organization NAFA was..... or something.

The public were amazed at how expensive this new frontier was. And some of them began loyally campaigning for the government to raise taxes to pay for the new "DEI",

The independents were aghast, not only at NAFA's increasingly insane behavior but also at the public's gullibility, and they wished that the people did not have such blind faith in politicians and their agencies.

Then NAFA had another setback. They had designed a colossal "desert mirror" that their desert-wagon would place out on a mountain in the desert in order to see the coast better. At a cost to the public one thousand times that of an ordinary mirror, this was put on top of the chosen desert mountain. But when the "waggonauts" got back they discovered that the mirror was the wrong shape. The public were puzzled. Didn't NAFA employ tens of thousands of the most highly qualified desert-engineers? So how come the mirror didn't work? But NAFA explained smoothly that this was an IMMENSELY difficult task, way beyond anything that the public could reasonably expect them to achieve, and that in any case it was really very valuable having a slightly bent mirror on the desert mountain, at whatever cost.

The public weren't all convinced by this, though, and some journalists decided to investigate the story. They discovered that in fact NAFA no longer employed the best engineers. Indeed it was full of elderly managers who had helped with the very first mission over twenty years before, and who liked best to reminisce about those days. And far from being heroic figures, the "waggonauts" were perfectly ordinary, in fact rather boring people, very like people you find in any large government bureaucracy.

All the young engineers - well there weren't actually many young engineers in the country any more. Young people found it more fun to watch fictional movies of what it was like on the frontier, rather than study engineering just to help a tiny number of government "waggonauts" make occasional incomprehensible "missions" out into the desert.

At about this time NAFA started a "commercialization initiative": They invited businesses to pay for some of their "missions", or bits of equipment on the desert-wagons. This of course made no sense at all commercially since a business has to earn revenues to cover its costs. But NAFA argued that the reluctance of businesses to join in their "missions" showed what a good job NAFA was doing performing tasks too difficult for mere "private enterprise" to carry out.

Some journalists now began to describe NAFA as a "stagnant bureaucracy", and so the Vice-President of the country announced that he would establish a Committee to examine "without fear and without favor" whether NAFA still served the public interest, or whether, as government departments sometimes need, it should be re-organized. This seemed a good idea, and was a popular move.

HOWEVER, NAFA was still a very large and influential organization, and of course it employed directly or indirectly ALL the desert engineers in the country. So, in recognition of NAFA's expertise, it was decided that NAFA should choose the members of the Vice-President's Committee! And furthermore, as NAFA argued convincingly, the Vice-President was really not expert in desert-engineering matters, so it would be much better if the Committee reported to... the Head of NAFA!! ASTOUNDING though this may seem, this is what was decided!! (Fact is sometimes stranger than fiction!) You can imagine how the Committee's report read when it was finally published:

"Desert-research" is an IMMENSELY difficult undertaking. NAFA is a SUPERB organization, and it tackles this daunting task with imagination, dedication, and the bravery of its indomitable "waggonauts". NAFA's efforts are however hampered by one problem; its budget is far too small, and it should be increased by 100% - or, er, why not 200%?"

The public were reassured to know that the Vice-President's Committee had examined NAFA closely, and reached this conclusion. Especially when FAFA wrote to the Vice-President adding its impressive voice to that of all the desert-engineering experts who were unanimously praising the report.

Needless to say, the independents and the increasingly skeptical journalists were stunned, and they began to despair of ever escaping from this truly insane situation..... And the public, some of whom could remember thirty years before being promised excitement and wealth on this "new frontier", became increasingly puzzled, and lost any interest in the new frontier. In the schools the nation's children stopped studying engineering and science and turned instead to taking strange psychoactive drugs and following irrational religions, since the future seemed so unutterably boring.

"And so...." skeptical readers might well ask "assuming for the moment that we accept that this preposterous, incredible farce did actually happen, how do you propose that it finally ended?"

Unfortunately the story handed down becomes confused at this point. What seems to have happened is this: By now it could be only a matter of time before NAFA would be closed down - still several years, though, since politicians don't like to admit mistakes, and NAFA retained a great amount of influence to delay its demise. And of course, so long as NAFA continued to exist, no sensible commercial desert wagon business could start.

However, in the meantime NAFA became increasingly irrelevant, because it seems that some of the independent wagon designers traveled to a small country far away beyond the desert. There some ingenious engineers welcomed the independents, and listened to their ideas, and together they built cheap desert-wagons. These were so cheap to operate that they offered rides out into the desert and along the coast for paying passengers, and even built hotels there for people to stay in.

Eventually many ordinary members of the public were regularly going abroad to take trips out into the desert, and even seeing NAFA's "waggonauts" struggling with their strange equipment out there. Then they finally realized that NAFA's technology was not the best in the world, and that as a matter of fact it was over-sophisticated and commercially worthless. Then the politicians finally voted against giving NAFA any more taxpayers' money and it was closed down, having wasted a generation and allowed the country to fall behind other countries in desert activities.

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But of course this terrible story DIDN'T happen in the USA. Americans didn't do anything so stupid as to entrust the development of the new frontier to a government monopoly. They relied instead on the vigor and ingenuity of the people themselves to find ways of reducing costs and creating commercial opportunities - with great success. And in opening up the West they reinforced the "frontier spirit" that, has maintained the USA's" pre-eminence. And they did the same with equal success in the conquest of the air: It was the brilliant, independent bicycle-makers Wilbur and Orville Wright who invented flight not the government-funded Langley - and within thirty years commercial airlines covered the globe (though it took the US government 45 years to officially recognize the Wright brothers' genius),

And no such terrible thing could ever happen in the USA, could it? Because of course American ideology warns against any such foolish behavior. The long and bitter experience of the founders of the Constitution led them to warn specifically against trusting government. It's not that people in government are particularly criminal or dishonest or lazy (though they are no less so than anyone else), but "you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear", and there are some things that government cannot do.

Once you set up a government monopoly, particularly a large one, it rapidly becomes extremely difficult to control. The monopoly immediately develops its own objectives, the FIRST one being survival, so it NEVER FINISHES ITS TASK, which becomes more and more complex and expensive. It also creates interest groups; crushes incipient competition in order to protect its prestige; and develops power to influence the government, the behavior of whole industries, and eventually the perceptions of the whole population - particularly if it's allowed to use public funds to campaign for itself. So it can waste ANY amount of taxpayers* money; FAIL to achieve the task it was designed to achieve; and waste DECADES of time in the process.

So of course that's why this never happened in the USA. Lucky for America!

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