Posted on 02/08/2003 7:40:16 AM PST by SJackson
Years ago, the aged chief of Enewetak, in the Marshall Islands of the Pacific, was asked if he knew that men had landed on the Moon. He took a while replying. "Yes," he said finally, "and I hear they came back."
This meant something to the chief because his people were at last returning to their atoll, once a test site of hydrogen bombs. For him, coming back, despite assurances, was not risk-free. Nor is it ever for astronauts, as the Columbia disaster reminds us. But more than the chief could know, the words "they came back," in another sense, have echoed through the American space program since the end of the glory days of the Apollo lunar landings.
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When the last of the moonwalkers returned, in 1972, their success was clouded with uncertainty. Someone in celebration, then others, invoked the Churchillian lines: "This is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning."
Yet the dreams and ironclad commitment that energized Apollo were set aside. The race with the Soviet Union, the thrust behind it all, had been won. The United States then turned its back on distant space as a destination for human exploration, and for the last 30 years not a soul has ventured more than 300 miles above Earth's surface.
The future of interplanetary travel seems mired in the past. The dreams and predictions of visionaries have been packed away, except in fiction (and even movies like "Star Wars" are not really about space travel but about mythic worlds). There are no Carl Sagans today. Conferences of technologists are seldom electrified by bold concepts and plans for new ventures deeper into the solar system. Except for those arresting images of planets and stars from unmanned probes, the old excitement about space flight evaporated.
There was the nagging realization of limitations. Goals more distant than the Moon would be enormously expensive and fraught with impediments and perils. Concerns about radiation hazards and physiological deterioration from long-duration weightlessness loomed larger.
No political leaders since the 1960's have been willing to rouse the country to take greater strides in space. They did not feel it necessary, especially after the cold war. They probably did not think it politically sustainable in a society grown increasingly wary of big government projects that might increase taxes, a society, on the whole, more defensive, less optimistic and more inward-looking.
The space shuttles that followed can fly no higher, only cruise around and around the world they came from.
Many shuttle missions could have been more efficiently accomplished by unmanned spacecraft, and at less cost. True, the shuttles have had their moments, as when they launched and serviced the magnificent Hubble Space Telescope. For the most part, though, they have come to represent retrenchment and a surrender to limited vision, something unimaginable in the heady optimism of the Apollo days — the ultimate coming-home of human space flight.
Though ballyhooed as reusable vehicles to make space flight almost routine, the shuttles proved to be hard to maintain and expensive to fly. The Challenger explosion in 1986 ended the myth of low-risk flight. The loss of the Columbia exposes the vulnerability of the shuttle's defining feature: the ability to glide safely to Earth, to come back and be reused time and again.
The Columbia disaster presents an opportunity — indeed, an imperative — to look beyond the immediate cause of the failure, and how to fix it, and conduct a long-needed examination of what the country wants and expects from space exploration. In short, what will it take to restore more of the resolve and direction that contributed to the early successes?
Scuttling the entire program does not seem to be an option. Last week, President Bush and many Congressional leaders vowed to push forward, and public opinion polls have shown consistent approval of space flight as a national pursuit. "Despite the dangers, human space flight is here to stay," says Brian J. Cantwell, a professor of astronautics at Stanford.
I'll try to make it back later. I have to do some chores.
Apollo was political crap.
Go, Dyna-Soar! :-)
113 times with two mishaps, producing 14 fatalities. That works out to one fatality for every 8 trips.
That said, the early voyages of exploration and early American colonization also had a high fatality rate. The final reward, though, was high, and now transatlantic travel is very safe. I do think, though, that the days of sending up schoolteachers, etc as publicity stunts are over. The space program will be (more accurately) looked at as a game for risk-accepting test-pilot types.
It's also well past time to retire the Shuttle and develop something better, using the lessons learned, and not repeating the mistakes made, in the shuttle program
Thanks. There is a lot more to the story but I didn't want to bore all of you.
You're comparing apples and oranges. It would be more accurate to compute an average of seven crew per trip, times 113 trips, equals 771 crew-trips. Fourteen fatalities equals about 1 for every 55 crew-trips.
The orbiter has a solid, decent record, and has done everything asked of it.
'Space is the high ground. We need access on a ho-hum basis. Fly into space, return the same day. Fly into space again. When this happens, the United States will become the Federation. We will inhabit space. We will make sure that a representative Republic rules the high frontier. Commercially, privately, governmentally, militarily, this should be the only acceptable outcome to citizens of the United States.'
Air Force imagery confirms Columbia wing damaged
It will take time and treasure and yes, more lives; but like small boats led to Cruise Line vacations, Mankind can open the universe.
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