Space shuttle stupidity
As people obsess over whether we’re going to tear apart another Space Shuttle, Maciej CegÅ‚owski writes about the point of the program:
In the thirty years since the last Moon flight, we have succeeded in creating a perfectly self-contained manned space program, in which the Shuttle goes up to save the Space Station (undermanned, incomplete, breaking down, filled with garbage, and dropping at a hundred meters per day), and the Space Station offers the Shuttle a mission and a destination. The Columbia accident has added a beautiful finishing symmetry – the Shuttle is now required to fly to the ISS, which will serve as an inspection station for the fragile thermal tiles, and a lifeboat in case something goes seriously wrong.
This closed cycle is so perfect that the last NASA administrator even cancelled the only mission in which there was a compelling need for a manned space flight – the Hubble telescope repair and upgrade – on the grounds that it would be too dangerous to fly the Shuttle away from the ISS, thereby detaching the program from its last connection to reason and leaving it free to float off into its current absurdist theater of backflips, gap fillers, Canadarms and heroic expeditions to the bottom of the spacecraft.
I have long felt that the Space Shuttle is basically little more than a big huge boondoggle to justify various people’s egos, but it has not even the most loosely-related attachment to the real problems of science. It’s time to mothball it, call it the dinosaur it is, and start sending a lot more unmanned stuff that if it blows up, we can just worry about the money, and not the lives.
History is not made with safe adventures, but with the riskiest and most daring.
This entry was posted at 7:32 pm on 8 August 2005 and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the post-specific RSS 2.0 feed.
I couldn’t find any pictures on the web, but an early concept design for the space shuttle was named the Dinosoar. I forget what the “dino” part stood for, but the basic design looked a lot like the modern space shuttle.
Authors such as Jerry Pournelle have long said similar things about NASA. I can sum up my recollections of his comments as “insufficient testicular diameter” but he may have had other specific complaints. We over-engineer. I hope that private efforts will get the job done if NASA no longer can.
Risk is a propensity for failure, not the loss of human life. What we have now is a situation where the potential loss of human life means we don’t take any chances, and we end up with this absurdist theatre. Billions are spent to do nothing but fly in circles with zero real-science done as a result.
The ISS is doing a bit m ore than flying in circles. The science of most missions has moved from the shuttle to the ISS. The shuttle’s purpose was to be ferry the module (already built and in storage at Kennedy’s huge clean room) to enable additional science.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/station/science/index.html
Just because the shuttle is focusing mainly on construction doesn’t mean that hard science is not being supported by these missions. Additionally, Americans are bored with space travel, and bored with science in general so the stuff that may be cool to some of us isn’t even reported in science journals anymore.
At the same time the shuttle is horribly outdated and needs to be replaced with a more efficient design.
I think Bob Parks has the best takes on it. As he comments, most serious scientists don’t think there’s any real science going on on the ISS either. Lots of PR Science, but that’s not really advancing the cause. Then again, ever since we killed the SSC over political ego, this country has had a hard time doing real science.
The real science at NASA is being done by unmanned probes. The astronauts are just a PR stunt.
Gizmodo points to a space lamp today here: http://www.gizmodo.com/gadgets/home/rocket-lamp-and-i-think-its-gonna-be-a-long-long-time-116490.php with a description that I thought fit this thread so well:
‘Instead, this “accent” lamp, priced at about $240, is shaped just right to suggest a space program blunted by fear and the effects of an extremely litigious society.’
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History is not made with safe adventures, but with the riskiest and most daring.
um… doesn’t that argue for continuing “manned” flights?
IMO, we should scrap the current space shuttle and build something with all the lovely new technology we have.