While going through some boxes at the house a week or two ago I came across a manilla envelope from my childhood. On the front I had drawn a picture of the Space Shuttle Columbia. Bold, black text proclaimed the debut of “America’s First Re-usable Space Craft!” Inside the envelope, labeled “File 136″ (so identified as to simulate the existence of a vast file repository. I actually underlined the number “1″ on the envelope as a clandestine way of indicating to those with need-to-know that this was, in fact, file number 1 of 1), were newspaper clippings from the launch of the first shuttle.
Having grown up on a diet of Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas, I was ready for the future. Among the highlights of my youth were trips to the Kennedy Space Center and the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. I figured it was highly probable that I would be able to live on a big rotating ring in space one day, if not a domed colony on the moon or Mars.
Hey, I wasn’t alone in my enthusiasm and geekery. Drummer and lyricist Neil Peart of the rock band Rush apparently had caught the spirit as well when he penned Countdown for the group’s Signals album.
Also in the envelope were other clippings that had been added from a somber day in 1986. That was, of course, the day when Columbia’s sister ship, Challenger, sent its seven astronauts into eternity while I watched the television in my math classroom, turned on to treat us to the event of the launch. Educators nationwide were understandably proud that one of their own, teacher Christa McAuliffe, had joined the astronaut ranks for that trip, but that pride turned to horror when the craft exploded just over a minute into its launch.
If you had asked me that same day whether I would be willing to fly on a space shuttle I would have answered without hesitation, “Absolutely.” I figured the odds of something like that happening again were slim; certainly worth the risk for the thrill of seeing the earth from space.
I would still love to see that sight, but I would say, “No, thanks” to such an offer today. The shuttle was once hailed as the pinnacle of man’s engineering prowess. Now we are on the edge of our seats just to see if it can survive reentry. Space flight has always been fraught with dangers for astronauts, but should it really be this big of a question mark as we approach the year 2010?
A gentleman named Maciej Ceglowski has written a blog article called Rocket to Nowhere* that explains what’s wrong with the shuttle, how it got that way, and why we should scrap it in order to devote more resources to truly productive enterprises. As someone who has almost unquestioningly assumed that we should be sending people not just to work in space, but to live in space, I confess I no longer think spaceflight is a very good expenditure of taxpayer resources, in its present form at any rate. At least, as Maciej points out, the unmanned missions are actually increasing our knowledge of the universe.
Meanwhile, while the Shuttle has been up on blocks, a wealth of unmanned probes has been doing exactly the kind of exploration NASA considers so important, except without the encumbrance of big hairless monkeys on board. And therein lies another awkward fact for NASA. While half the NASA budget gets eaten by the manned space program, the other half is quietly spent on true aerospace work and a variety of robotic probes of immense scientific value. All of the actual exploration taking place at NASA is being done by unmanned vehicles. And when some of those unmanned craft fail, no one is killed, and the unmanned program is not halted for three years.
Over the past three years, while the manned program has been firing styrofoam out of cannons on the ground, unmanned NASA and ESA programs have been putting landers on Titan, shooting chunks of metal into an inbound comet, driving rovers around Mars and continuing to gather a variety of priceless observations from the many active unmanned orbital telescopes and space probes sprinkled through the Solar System. At the same time, the skeleton crew on the ISS has been fixing toilets, debugging laptops, changing batteries, and speaking to the occasional elementary school over ham radio 8 .
While the author’s characterizations of the information obtained as “priceless” and “of immense scientific value” may be overstated, its value relative to the rewards of the manned program seems indisputable.
The article makes a convincing case for scrapping the Shuttle and ISS programs and suspending manned space missions until a clear mandate is issued and the budgetary resources are supplied to achieve it. In short, if we’re going to send people into space let’s do it right. Determine the task and design and build a craft that is optimized to achieve it. If the national interest isn’t served by that task, then let it be privately funded.
And much as it pains the sci-fi lover in me to say it… if there’s no compelling reason to put people up there then let’s keep them on the ground.
*(hat tip: IfElse)
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