With the final touchdown of space shuttle Atlantis today, that NASA program and an era of space flight come to an end. But more than a mere program has ended: America’s capability to accomplish missions in low earth orbit is, at least temporarily, gone.
We no longer have the assembled knowledge it takes to put humans into space, because with Atlantis’ successful landing, the expertise that it takes is collectively out of a job. Some will undoubtedly head off to private space companies, and others to other endeavors. But the teams and systems they formed will be gone as American astronauts will have to hitch rides just to get to the International Space Station for the foreseeable future.
If one believes NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, NASA has serious plans for the future of space exploration. But the Multi-Purpose Crew Vehicle Bolden touts is, at this point, vaporware. There are no serious timetables for its development or deployment. Rocket scientists have no real work to do on it. It’s a distant dream.
Meanwhile, the Russians have maintained a rudimentary but working space flight capability. The Chinese are developing theirs. The future is in space and beyond.
But as of today, America is not capable of things we could do 30 years ago, 20 years ago and 10 years ago. It was in March 2002 that I attended the launch of what turned out to be space shuttle Columbia’s last full mission, the mission to repair and upgrade the Hubble Space Telescope. The Hubble itself was possible because we had a shuttle program capable of carrying large machines into space, and capable of allowing astronauts to spend time in space to work on them. Hubble’s design took into account the possibility of periodically visiting the telescope 350 miles up as it orbited the earth, both to repair damaged systems and replace them with more advanced ones. Hubble first flew in 1990, on a planned 10-year mission. Hubble was an American idea, named for an American visionary, that was only possible because of America’s commitment to space and discovery and our technological prowess. After 21 years she is nearing the end of her mission, having far exceeded all expectations. As of today, we could not launch and we could not maintain or upgrade Hubble. And her successor was recently stripped from future NASA plans.
We shouldn’t delude ourselves. While the shuttle program’s end was scheduled under President George W. Bush, its successor was ended under President Obama. His lack of vision for America’s role in space leaves the space nation in the lurch. Administrator Bolden, initially confused about NASA’s mission himself, seems to be settling for something less than full American leadership.
Privatization may be the next step for human space flight, but again we should not delude ourselves. Private space flight is easy to talk about but still very hard to do. Most nations still cannot gather the resources and expertise that it takes to send humans to space and return them safely to earth. Privatization is decades behind NASA’s now former capabilities, and the scale of the effort it takes to meaningfully get to space to stay long enough to accomplish anything useful remains one of the largest scale human activities. Private space flight is now doing things that NASA did in the 1960′s. It’s reasonable to question whether this really constitutes progress. The commercial potential for sending humans to space remains elusive, while the science potential is obvious and the risks remain high. Getting to space and back safely is not yet easy and it is not yet cheap enough to make it routine outside a massive effort such as NASA, which itself operates like an umbrella organization uniting many private companies. The vast majority of “NASA” workers were people like I was, a contractor whose actual employer was a private company. With the end of America’s manned space flight, many if not most of those companies will now refocus on other lines of work that hold a future for their bottom lines and for their workers. NASA will suffer a brain drain. America’s technological leadership in aerospace may suffer.
What is America’s future in space? No one knows. That’s what concerns both the first man on the moon and the last man to set foot there, and it should concern us all. We have spent ourselves close to national ruin, and out of our ability to take hold of the future. Our wings are now clipped, at least temporarily, and we have climbed down from where we once stood on the shoulders of giants.
Cue the zealots.
Better to be thought a zealot by the clueless (that would be you) than a moron (that would also be you) by those of us who actually work on space systems.
Alas, the personalized ad hominem attacks commence.
Commenter dangles red meat in front of attack dog, gets attacked. Film at 11.
I suppose calling people who point out how wrong you are “zealots” isn’t an ad hominem attack in your world. Not only are you uninformed about space, you’re a hypocrite. Or are you just oblivious to your own words?
For the most part, NASA is done. The next phase of America’s space program will be all military. The militarization/weaponization of space is the next logical step in the evolution of the program. Sadly, most of this will be kept very quiet. So the glory days of Astronaut celebrity is over.
(Something went horribly wrong when I hit Submit, so this may appear as a duplicate.)
You ask, “What’s Next?” Rumor has it that NASA, no longer distracted by the whole spaceflight thing, is collaborating with Hollywood on a series of remakes:
2011: A Spaceless Odyssey
Killer Khalids from Outer Space
Burka Space Girls in Beverly Hills
Killer School LGBTs from Outer Space
Undocumented Alien, Undocumented Aliens, Undocumented Aliens 3, Undocumented Alien Resurrection
But, wait there’s more! To highlight its new mission, NASA is producing a thrilling docudrama:
Watching Medieval Muslims do Math ’cause Someday it Sorta Leads to Spaceflight (a 5-part series due for release this fall on PBS)
The good news is this: NASA expects these blockbusters to earn sufficient funds (can’t say profits) to payoff 1/10 of 1% of the US deficit (not counting taxpayer-funded production costs and support of PBS, of course).
Sadly, moon-walk conspiracists are now right: There is no spaceflight, just Hollywood sets.
If NASA had been doing a good job for the last 30+ years, we wouldn’t be having this conversation. Instead, every manned space system they’ve worked on since 1981 has failed. The Shuttle itself was years late and almost 100% over budget. Long delays and huge overruns are the norm at NASA, not the exception with many programs getting cancelled (as is likely for the James Webb Space Telescope, among others).
When Ronald Reagan proposed building space station Freedom in the 1980s, it was estimated to cost $8-12 billion. NASA reportedly spent around $8 billion on paper studies before cutting the first piece of metal. The end result, after many design iterations, is the ISS. How much has that cost and precisely what value are we getting for our investment?
Let NASA go back to technology development like their predecessor NACA to advance American aerospace. They’ve actually done a pretty good job of that, what with their pioneering work with communications satellite technology, weather satellite technology, heat shield technology (SpaceX adapted NASA heat shield techology for their Dragon capsule) and the like. NACA did a lot of great work over a period of decades and US aerospace prospered as a result. At no point did NACA try to run an airline or restrict others from doing so.
Speaking from experience (I did work on the ISS and have work of my hand and mind in orbit there now), NASA was the most annoying USG agency I’ve dealt with (and I’ve dealt with all the armed services and the FAA in the course of my career). They really need to get bqack to the R&D and advisory role that their NACA predecessor had and leave the Earth orbital transport to private companies; transportation to space is where air travel was when the original air mail contracts were let and needs similar encouragement and assistance to grow.
What are the odds that private space exploration will be crippled by the bureaucratic mentality of NASA, EPA, TSA and every other federal permitorium?