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.
As I recall, the Orbiter has flown some 113 times with two (that's 2) fatal mishaps. In the entire history of the US space program, we have had three fatal disasters, resulting in the deaths of 17 personnel. By contrast, how many missions have demonstrated the POSSIBILITY of space flight? How many have SUCCESSFULLY returned to Earth and been reused?
As usual, succeed and no one knows your name. Only failure is written large to some people.
The shuttle is aging. It is time to put up or shut up on a SSTO space plane, but there isn't one chance out of 10 gazillion that we're going to abandon manned space flight. The human mind doesn't work that way.
That being said, in the context of the Columbia, the title of this article is misleading. One immediately assumes that the author is going to tell us that any adventure into space, even near space, is not worth the risk. Yet that is not what the article says.
He has a name like John Noble Wilford and writes for the New York Times. You were expecting something else?
And he doesn't write the headlines, the editors do that.
This should be a 'must read' for everyone. Asimov imagines the 50 'Spacer' worlds, increasingly dependent on robots and their strained relationship with an over-populated Earth where people live rat-like lives inside efficient, underground dwellings. Earthlings no longer dare see the Sun. Solarians are increasingly unconfortable dealing with each others and are more dependent on their robots than they should.
We must escape into space or we have no future.
With all of the shuttle bashing taking place, your is a refreshing post. Even though I have been contradicted many times, I still insist that the shuttle is an engineering marvel. It is expensive, dangerous, and unwieldy in some respects but a marvel nonetheless. Having said that, the future does not reside in the shuttle. I hope this tragedy serves as a catalyst to move us on to the next generation of vehicles.
It is no coincidence that sometime in the 1960's for the first time equal number of men and women voted and it has been this way ever since.
That is when the feminization of the U.S. began in earnest.
It is not in the nature of women to take huge risks and to continue full speed ahead in spite of loss of life and equipment, expected and unexpected.
Politicians, whose objective is to be elected and re-elected as a job that will bring them egomaniacal prestige and a significant income source for themselves versus a job of leadership and protecting our constitutional republic from socialism and communisim, pander to women and the 15-20% of feminized men for votes.
Sagan killed or tried to kill the space program. But the dream of going into space and exploiting its unlimited resources was put on hold by WTC911. Even before WTC911 the golden moment for advancing into space was looking like history; there was a moment for establishing a permanent presence in space, and that moment was reached in 1979: since 1979 the economic opportunity has been decreasing steadily. We can talk about what we might do in space, but the fact is that we are doing nothing to advance colonization and utilization of celestial resources. It's history.
I was in the room when DCX was proposed to the Deputy for Technology at SDIO. The High Frontier guys were adamant that single stage to orbit was doable. This was the stuff of fiction in 1989, beyond our technology it was thought. Aerospace Corp. was commissioned to examine the numbers presented and found it to be plausible, but just barely. DCX was given to SDIO to protect it from the USAF who wasn't particularly interested in a program that might threaten some of their pet rocks plus it didn't have wings which is a cardinal sin to the boys in blue.
DCX was interesting but it was a low cost project with very little capability. Vertical lift off and descent was demonstrated adequately but its capability overall was very limited. Pete Conrad had a lot of fun with it. He used to wear his red "Artillery" socks on flight day for good luck. He essentially flew DCX by computer in a small van outfitted for that purpose. Of course he died a few years later in a motorcycle accident. A great loss for us all. Finally, the DCX-A (the project was taken over at NASA when they established the Reusable Launch Vehicle Office (I had transferred over to NASA by that point). The DCX-A flew a few times successfully with some upgraded hardware but eventually did a tip and burn on landing. It wasn't an inherent flaw in the hardware but rather a mistake made by the operations team on one of the hydraulically actuated "legs".
Then came the effort to move technology forward in the RLV world. With a very limited budget, by R&D standards given the scope of the project, NASA put out an RFP for candidate RLV systems. There were more bidders than expected but the top three US contractors offered the best proposals. One had wings, one was a lifting body, and one was modeled after DCX, i.e. vertical take off and landing.
The Lockheed version was the most stressing case from a technology perspective, although it was generally accepted that a two stage to orbit reusable vehicle was probably more achievable. There wasn't enough money to create a horse race, you couldn't afford to buy two contracts. In fact, it could be successfully argued that there wasn't enough money to buy one contract. After weeks of evaluation and debate it was decided that going after the most stressing case would bring more advances than chasing a lesser technology challenge. Thus was X-33 born.
Now you must remember that the X designation means that it is an experimental craft. Experimental craft fail on a routine basis for a variety of reasons. Experimental means just that.
Lockheed overreached in some ways. Not only was the technology experimental but the contract was too. It was to be an industry led partnership with the contractor putting some of their own money at risk. It was thought that this would provide incentive to the contractor to ensure success.
Well, we all know the outcome now. The composite tank failed in testing. There were other comparable problems that were solved but the incredibly complex design of the tank doomed, it seems, the effort. As an aside, I should note that the less heralded X-34 successfully built a composite kerosene tank that passed all testing and was certified. However, the X-34 failed because Marshall Space Flight Center was unable to provide an engine, GFE as called for in the contract, to meet with the airframe in a timely fashion. So yet another NASA project was wrecked on the shoals of underfunding and misplaced pride.
Had the X-33 been a success it is doubtful that SSTO would have been the number one choice for an objective launch system unless Norm Augustine worked his persuasive magic with DoD. An SSTO vehicle is essentially a thin skinned balloon loaded with propellant. It is huge and if left on orbit for any length of time suffers from exposure to micrometeor damage. It is constrained because of its size from docking with space station because of the laws of God, read physics.
So you see, your SSTO put up or shut up statement is a little more complicated than it would seem on the surface. However, your intent is well founded.
Don't forget that we have flown radioactive power generators (RPGs) launched on expendable vehicles any number of times. They were always designed to be survivable in case of a catastrophic failure. Since no launcher with an RPG aboard ever failed I still don't know whether the designs were adequate.
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