Some very good points about the space shuttle

[gridlore]

The Space Shuttle Must Be Stopped
It's costly, outmoded, impractical and, as we've learned again, deadly

By GREGG EASTERBROOK


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.

Comments

[aurictech.livejournal.com]

Doug, is it just me, or have you become a reader of NRO's The corner (http://www.nationalreview.com/thecorner/corner.asp)? At least that's where I first saw both a link to the story you posted and the "French Military Victories" Google graphic.

Easterbrook does make some good points, although he links the shuttle with the International Space Station in such a way as to suggest cancelling the ISS. As with most SF fans, I want to see more humans in space, not fewer.

Meanwhile, I just read the following on The Corner:

AMERICA'S SADDEST HOME MOVIE [Rod Dreher]
Late local news here in NYC just aired a brief excerpt of a home video from the Ramon family, taken a week or so before he left on his ill-fated mission. The family watched together -- can you believe it? -- the movie Apollo 13. The home video showed someone asking the children what happened to the space capsule. "The ship blew up!" says Col. Ramon's five-year-old daughter. Nervous laughter all around. "That's in the movies," says Col. Ramon. "That's not real."

[jovianconsensus.livejournal.com]

As an SF fan, I feel cheated by the space station, which is only good for "exploring" low Earth orbit. Its budget and its effect on NASA's R&D priorities mean exploration of the other planets isn't even on the agenda.