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.

The space station places a hard limit on the amount of self-preserving foot-dragging the president can do.

His options are:
1)Get back in the game and hope the third incident doesn't happen before a suitable replacement is nearing completion or
2)Look stupid abandoning billions in space station hardware.

Besides, your assertion that there is no political support for a replacement is largely groundless. Funny how you attribute political support for space to the very generation that ended it. If anything, people are astounded by the apparent lack of progress and asking why. The president just threw half a billion at NASA and nobody blinked.

And the bomber analogy is irrelevent. B17s and B24s were being destroyed delivering conventional weapons in wartime. B52s were developed during the Cold War to deliver nuclear weapons. B1s and B2s had their production curtailed by the end of the Cold War. Now there just isn't much use for nuclear bombers. We are facing third rate powers run by incompetent blowhards, not vast superpowers bent on world conquest.

The analogy between manned space exploration and bombers is also based on cost. To enhance functionality, the cost rises and fewer are built. A B-17/B-24 cost $50K. A B-2 $1B+.

The easiest, lowest cost and most valuable uses of space are mature or maturing -- communications, navigation, weather, land use, and intel satellites in low-earth and geosynchronous orbits. When the Shuttle was conceived in the mid-60s, the purpose was to reduce the cost of putting these satellites into orbit. At the time, a simple calculator weighed as much as a small warship's anchor. They didn't expect technological advances and surplus throw-away boosters to achieve what the Shuttle unfortunately failed to achieve, because reuseable boosters didn't prove to be so reuseable without substantial maintenance and replacement.

From here, manned space exploration becomes ever more expensive and the economic rewards ever less attractive (at the mid-to-late 21st century state of the art, mining and colonization are laughably uneconomic.) They could complete the space station for $100B+ to do the make-work experiments all the time that they now do occasionally on the Shuttle. They could return to the moon and essentially create another space station, although virtually the entire Apollo infrastructure would have to be recreated from scratch. If they wanted to bust the economy they could go to Mars and the asteriods once or twice. And that's it. The other planets are too inhospitable, and the rest of the universe is too far away unless they can find a way to go substantially faster than light.

The '60s were the heyday of manned space flight. It's an artifact of the era, like the Beatles, psychodelic fashions and love beads.

So there it is. They've created a space program virtually whose entire program funding goes to keep three aging Shuttles flying 4-5 missions a year to build the space station. The station is behind schedule, over its $90B+ budget, and the Russians are patently unable to play the role assigned to them.

My bet is that Bush appoints a blue ribbon panel to determine the cause of the Columbia disaster, pays for the lower-cost fixes to keep the remaining three Shuttles soldiering on, funds development, but not construction of a second generation Shuttle, and stretches development into his successor's Administration. The space station crew will be brought home in due course, and construction at a leisurely pace once Shuttle flights resume. There is no hurry to finish the station because it delivers no benefit.

You're making the same mistake that NASA has made: equating the Shuttle program with the Space Program. The Shuttle should be ditched because it is standing in the way of progress in space.

That may or may not be true, depending upon numerous factors, research objectives and military applications far too numerous to be debated with a sentence or two. My point was more one of timing. People who let fly with "cut and run", even as the body parts are crashing to earth, are doing nothing more than taking advantage of the publicity surrounding a disastrous situation to spew their political venom upon uninformed people.

We didn't stick with biplanes and conventional explosives after Pearl Harbor, we developed jets and nuclear weapons.

Are you kidding? After Pearl Harbor, we fought back quickly and vigorously with what we had. Conventional explosives were loaded on old airframes and creatively launched off an old aircraft carrier in Dolittles' shock attack on the Japanese homeland. The old aircraft carrier USS Yorktown was severely destroyed at the Battle of Coral Sea, but it was creatively "patched" and put back to back to sea in time for the Battle of Midway, which turned the tide of the Pacific war.

The jets, nuclear bombs and high tech weapons were part of a long range plan for future wars. The "old" stuff was upgraded and mass produced to win WWII. The Nuclear bombs dropped on Japan were merely the final blow in a war already won that saved American lives by quickening the end.

We didn't rebuild the Arizona, we built the Missouri.

I am not certain, but I believe the Big Mo was already built or on the drawing boards before Pearl Harbor. At any rate, it was later mothballed and put back in action for the Vietnam War, and again for Operation Desert Storm - 50 years after Pearl Harbor. Likewise, the "aging" B-52 was built in the 1950's as a high altitude SAC nuclear bomber. As technology advanced, it was refitted for low altitude air defense penetration and as an AGM missile carrier and launch platform. Long after SAC was disbanded, the "ageless" B-52 became a high altitude carpet bomber and cruise missile launcher in Desert Storm and Afghanistan. It will probably be in action again very soon. When it goes into action, it will be accompanied by the KC135 strato Tanker, a 1950's Cold War air refueling cousin of the B-52. And, don't forget "Puff the Magic Dragon" was a 1920's cargo plane that was converted into the much feared attack gunship during the Vietnam War 50 years later, about the time Apollo Astronauts flew to the moom.

Like the space shuttles, the old aircraft and battleships were refitted and upgraded, to accomplish a needed mission. Even now, the Big Mo waits quietly in "mothballs." If the mission objectives dictate, the space shuttles will be no different. If the mission objectives change, then like the Big Mo, the space shuttles will retire. But, they will retire, because the mission objectives and technology change - not because a opportunist "cut and run" media liberal stampedes the weak and uninformed.

That's the real spirit.

The real spirit is, and always has been, exemplified by "Yankee Ingenuity" that improvises or changes depending on technological necessity and financial reality.

So true. This author is a jack ass. And how about Don Nelson. His "I-told-you-so" tirade included this complaint:

If nothing else, he said the space agency could have equipped the shuttle with a crew escape module that would enable the astronauts to survive even the disintegration of Columbia 40 miles above the earth. Nothing came of Nelson's efforts. He blamed that on "NASA culture," but the agency attributed it to money limitations. Preliminary estimates said an escape module would cost as much as $4 billion. From Reuters story, today.

Not to devalue human life, but think about that statement. Why not put parachute pods in all airplanes? You could probably pull that off for a few hundred billion and you could save hundreds of lives a year. Manned space flight is a risky business! It will always be so. Despite horrific failures like Columbia, I believe the NASA culture is safety first, tempered with a rational and reasonable understanding that you cannot eliminate all risk and that $4,000,000,000 for an escape pod dooms the program, budget-wise.

I'll bet next week's pay that if you polled the astronauts and engineers, they would say "screw the $4 billion pod" and move on to find better designs to obviate the need for escapes.

Nelson's harrangue reminds me of the EPA regulations that cost business millions to fix a ten cent problem that no one was aware of or cared about until a career bureaucrat wrote a memo speculating that this-that-or the other thing was a menace.

The analogy between manned space exploration and bombers is also based on cost. To enhance functionality, the cost rises and fewer are built. A B-17/B-24 cost $50K. A B-2 $1B+.

Check and see what a B17/24 would cost to build today. It won't be 50k. What blows this comparison out of the water is that manned space and bombers are apples and oranges. That you think you can compare them shows an incredible lack of understanding.

The easiest, lowest cost and most valuable uses of space are mature or maturing -- communications, navigation, weather, land use, and intel satellites in low-earth and geosynchronous orbits. When the Shuttle was conceived in the mid-60s, the purpose was to reduce the cost of putting these satellites into orbit. At the time, a simple calculator weighed as much as a small warship's anchor. They didn't expect technological advances and surplus throw-away boosters to achieve what the Shuttle unfortunately failed to achieve, because reuseable boosters didn't prove to be so reuseable without substantial maintenance and replacement.

Maybe you should check the cost of those disposable boosters again. They only look good in comparison to the shuttle, which is like declaring someone compassionate relative to Stalin. Also, using the shuttle as a benchmark for reusability is laughable as well. It isn't reusable, it is salvageable. And it isn't what anybody had in mind when the idea was conceived. It is what Nixon and the socialists in congress were willing to fund.

Sattelites are not drasticly smaller, disposable boosters have not come down in price or gone up in reliability. The problem is still waiting for a solution.

From here, manned space exploration becomes ever more expensive and the economic rewards ever less attractive (at the mid-to-late 21st century state of the art, mining and colonization are laughably uneconomic.)

For that matter, colonizing Australia was uneconomic. Without government subsidy, laying rail across America was uneconomic. Government subsidy aided the fledgling aviation industry. At some point though, all these things became self-sustaining and very rewarding. You just have to draw the time line out to see that such things benefit societies and civilizations rather than corporations. The power to fund such things is actually in the constitution because some very worthwhile things are simply too big for private enterprise to tackle.

So there it is. They've created a space program virtually whose entire program funding goes to keep three aging Shuttles flying 4-5 missions a year to build the space station. The station is behind schedule, over its $90B+ budget, and the Russians are patently unable to play the role assigned to them.

And that is the creation of an America-hating democratic congress. At some point, the Chinese will ramp up, at that point we will have no choice but to match them because to do otherwise will be to cede the high ground and fade from history. You look at what we have and assume that it will always be thus. You don't even understand what the original goals of the shuttle were, or what the goals of those seeking a replacement are. You just assume that everyone wants the status quo. You are wrong.

My bet is that Bush appoints a blue ribbon panel to determine the cause of the Columbia disaster, pays for the lower-cost fixes to keep the remaining three Shuttles soldiering on, funds development, but not construction of a second generation Shuttle, and stretches development into his successor's Administration. The space station crew will be brought home in due course, and construction at a leisurely pace once Shuttle flights resume. There is no hurry to finish the station because it delivers no benefit.

Do you really think the station can be abandoned indefinitely? Do you think that this nation will swallow a hundred billion writeoff? Do you think that in the wake of 9/11, people are so willing to accept defeat? If you do, you have moved on from cough syrup.

I oppose a Pavlovian response to a Chinese manned space program and a new space race. If manned space were a path to global technological and military pre-eminence, then the Soviet Union would be the world's most powerful nation. They pioneered space flight. I encourage the Chicoms to destroy their economy exploring space. It's a dead end.

Your analogy between space and the transcontinental railroad is ridiculous. At the time Congress authorized the project, Kansas, California and Oregon were states. Nevada joined the Union before the project got under way. The Union Pacific & Southern Pacific financed the project themselves in London and New York from unoccupied land along the proposed route ceded to it by Congress. No direct transfer of public funds was authorized. The project cost millions -- in the low hundreds of millions in 2003 dollars, not trillions. The entire right-of-way was settled in less than a generation without altering the local environment.

I split my side laughing at proponents of manned space travel who believe that space colonization or mining will be economic in many, many generations, if ever. In the 1990s, I was a corporate officer for a mining company whose principal properties are located in the Western United States. It was a challenge to earn a profit with properties along the interstates. Loons who support space mining actually believe transporting ore from the asteroid belt will enjoy a cost advantage. The cost of subsidizing space colonies will make the space station look like a 5-cent ice cream cone. By definition, every colonist will be a millionaire or even a billionaire, because that's what it will cost to subsidize them.

Profitable exploitation of space beyond geosynchronous orbit lay in the distant future, if ever. The extraordinary cost is unjustifiable. There is no constituency capable of delivering the funds needed.

The Administration and Congress will give exploration lip service to keep the lobby of aerospace companies and communities and buffs off their backs, and contributions coming, but funding will continue to dwindle.

My bet is the Administration and Congress will authorize development, though not construction, of a second generation shuttle. Development will be stretched out as long as possible. If necessary, one second generation shuttle may be built eventually. The so-called space station will be mothballed when the current crew is returned to earth (assuming they're not killed on Soyuz). The station will be activated once grounding of the shuttle fleet is lifted. Construction will proceed in slow motion. Politicians will be in no rush to restore manned space flight, because don't want a threepeat of the Columbia incident on their watch and because there is no benefit from the Shuttle or so-called Space Station. Their motivation is to keep contributions flowing and criticism muted from aerospace companies, aerospace communities and buffs, while they focus on real-world concerns such as national defense, the economy, and funding old age and education.

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