Nine Years Of Space Policy Disaster
Nine years ago today, the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated in a hurricane of plasma in the early morning sky of Texas, scattering debris and the remains of her crew over a vast swathe of the southern American heartland. It was the second loss of an orbiter (this past Saturday, January 28th, was the 26th anniversary of the Challenger disaster), reducing the fleet size once again to three remaining. It made it very clear that the program was never going to achieve its original goals of the seventies, of low cost and high reliability, and it turned out to be the last straw. A year later, in January 2004, the Bush administration announced that the Shuttle program would end in 2010, after completion of the assembly of the International Space Station (ISS), for which it was essential:
Our first goal is to complete the International Space Station by 2010. We will finish what we have started, we will meet our obligations to our 15 international partners on this project.
…To meet this goal, we will return the Space Shuttle to flight as soon as possible, consistent with safety concerns and the recommendations of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board. The Shuttle’s chief purpose over the next several years will be to help finish assembly of the International Space Station. In 2010, the Space Shuttle — after nearly 30 years of duty — will be retired from service.
The problem was that after the ISS was complete, without the Shuttle, the U.S. would have no capability to reach it, and there would be a “gap” in capability until some sort of replacement was developed. At the time of the announcement, the “Crew Exploration Vehicle” (CEV) was the proposed means, but it wasn’t expected to be ready until 2014, resulting in a “gap” of at least three years, and probably longer. When Mike Griffin replaced Sean O’Keefe in 2005, he rolled out a concept called Constellation, which included the CEV, renamed at that time Orion. It also included a new rocket for it, that had not been anticipated in the original Bush plan, called Ares I, despite the fact that existing rockets, such as the Atlas V or Delta IV, could have done the job. Griffin even originally claimed that his plan would reduce the gap, being ready by 2011.
Unfortunately, the design chosen was flawed, and ran into technical difficulties immediately, increasing its costs and stretching its schedule. Because there had not originally been plans for a new launcher, there wasn’t sufficient budget to support it, and other budgets, in science and technology, and the hardware actually needed to get back to the moon, were raided to feed the rocket disaster. The schedule was slipping more than a year per year, and by 2009, when the Augustine Committee was convened to evaluate the situation, it moved rightward to 2017, with only a low probability of hitting that operational date.
Meanwhile, we are totally dependent on the Russians for both transportation to and from the ISS, and for emergency lifeboat services, for which (unsurprisingly) they have been increasing the cost since the Shuttle was belatedly retired last summer, and shipping taxpayer funds overseas to them. Worse, each time we give them a new contract, we have to waive the Iran North-Korea Syria Non-Proliferation Act which prohibits trade with countries who aid those nations in the development of missiles and nukes, because Russia continues to help Iran with both.
A republican progressive will be more effective than Obama has been in growing the federal and state government. If one values liberty, Obama is the safer progressive for 2012. I’m planning to vote solid republican except for president, assuming Romney gets the nomination.
I would never vote for Obama, but I will most likely vote Libertarian if Romney gets the nomination. At least a Libertarian administration would get the government’s boot off the neck of the private sector, which would allow private space companies to stand or fall on their own.
But, but the muslims feel great about all their contributions to science, right?
That’s really all that counts.
What Space Policy/Program?
It seems to me that–despite spending hundreds of millions of dollars on it, and devoting decades of work to it, we don’t have one; “launch facilities” with nothing to launch, no functional vehicles to get into orbit, much less to the Moon or Mars, a lot of plans and fancy Project names, money going to selected Congressional districts for something or other, but not much else.
It seems like we have been most successful in producing miniature “concept models,” and fancy “mission patches” for sale to the public.
If this isn’t a bureaucratic nightmare, a disaster,a huge wast of money, effort and talent, and a classic cluster f*** I don’t know what is.
Nine years? We were through when we cancelled Apollo. We showed then how dull and stupid we were; how incurious and apathetic.
Stuck in low Earth orbit. Yay!
There has been little progress as far as public demonstrations like the moon landing.
There has been massive progress in Space for weaponry and defense industries, which seems to have been the goal once the moon landing was achieved.
It’s a government agency. What do you expect? It’s the DMV in space.
But now we have muslim outreach so jihadists can feel good about themselves on the basis of scientific innovation in the Arab world that their forebears actually crushed in the spread of Islam that instigated the Crusades in response. Yay!
I know it is off topic sort of. Since your attacking the media. PJMedia spent quite a bit of effort to inform us of one Newt Gingrich’s attacks on capitalism, calling it anti-capitalist.
I am looking for the outrageous outrage at a real anti-capitalist attack laid against our free market capitalist society in the form of Mitt Romney saying he believes in an automatically increasing minimum wage. What says anti-capitalism louder than telling people that they are not allowed to work if the value they can create is below an arbitrary price tag? That people are not allowed to enter into contracts of their own volition?
I think he also said that our welfare state is working pretty good, and I guess that was warming up for the fact that his policy would put more people on it.
Look toward the private sector, however, and you’ll notice that there are people who are working to fill the void. Paul Allen is working with Burt Rutan to build a space plane that will launch from a very large aircraft.
This is what NASA couldn’t do. They know how to build rockets, but they don’t know how to build them cheaply. When this stuff starts to make economic sense, nothing will stop us from going to the moon and beyond.
We don’t need a president telling us how to do it. Just step aside and don’t stop us.
We can’t afford space stuff anymore.
It would seem we peaked on July 20 1969.
Don’t worry about the wasted money, when the United States declares bankrupcy and defaults on it’s debts sometime during Obama’s second term or Romney’s first, NASA along with everything else will be cut.
Gas may cost US$100 a gallon and a loaf of bread US $50 but at least the spending will be bought under control. If not hyperinflationary collapse will render it irrelevant anyway.
The United States of Argentina – Change…
The space program is a perfect example of what happens when politicians and bureaucrats take charge of something. Up until the first manned moon landing the ‘rocket scientists’ ran things. Then the ‘Can do’ folks got replaced with ‘We need to have a committee do a feasibility study on this’ people.
Rand consistently avoids the core of the policy disaster, which is the ISS. The best thing that could happen to the US space program would be its evacuation and subsequent deorbiting. Where’s a James Bond villain when you need him?
Question should be; what are we going to do with all of that Iranian space junk?
Question. What are we going to do with all of that Iranian space junk?
The shuttle program could have met it’s goals of being cheap and reliable, if only Congress and NASA had not decided to “go cheap”. The original design did not include two solid fuel boosters and a tank. If you remember, neither the Challenger nor the Columbia failed because of the orbitor. The Challenger failed because of the solids and the Columbia failed because of the tank. Neither item was in the original design.