America is parking a working spacecraft nose to nose with its prototype at the Smithsonian annex today. The shuttles that made space flight routine are officially retired. America has no means to put humans in space on our own.
I’ll never forget where I was in March 2002. After watching Space Shuttle Columbia launch at dawn from Kennedy Space Center, feeling the heat from her engines from three miles away as she lit up and vaulted toward the clouds, I and several of my colleagues from the Space Telescope Science Institute traveled to the Johnson Space Center in Texas to monitor the astronauts’ intricate mission. I was producing a documentary on the mission, which would be called Hubble Reborn and has been playing in museums large and small for a decade now. This was STS-109, or in the world of the Hubble Space Telescope to which I belonged, Servicing Mission 3B. The astronauts had one of the most difficult missions ever performed in space ahead of them: They had to shut Hubble down entirely for the first time since its launch from Discovery in 1990, and replace its power system. It was a delicate mission, with no guarantee that the most successful space-based research instrument ever built would be able to turn back on and function properly. Hubble would face a Lazarus moment, in the hands of some of America’s bravest flyers.
So one night that chilly March, my colleagues and I stepped away from our monitoring stations at JSC for a few moments, went outside, and looked up. The dark sky south of Houston was dotted with stars, and at the expected time, a new star appeared. It was by far the brightest dot in the sky, and it didn’t flicker. It moved across the entire sky in the span of a few minutes. It was the shuttle Columbia with Hubble attached, the combined reflectance of both dominating the night. We were seeing from the ground what would turn out to be Columbia’s final completed mission. Astronauts in low earth orbit were, at the moment we stood on the ground seeing them as a brilliant dot, hurtling along at 17,000 miles per hour working on Hubble’s deep systems.
Understand being perturbed about us not currently having a means to put people in space, but most people seem to miss the significance of the ‘private’ space efforts: they will be cheaper than what has preceded them. That they are ‘subsidized’ by NASA doesn’t bother this taxpayer, because I’ll be glad to pay way less per launch then was the case with either the Shuttle, or the misbegotten Orion/Ares proposal. That these private efforts use existing technology is beside the point for now. All “Big Aerospace” efforts have gouged the taxpayer with conventional launch technology for decades now. Time for a new paradigm.
I wasnt aware of your close association with the space program. This changes my ability to savage the space program, especially the STS.
Not a big fan of The Space Transportation System but very excited about the Stratolaunch and SpaceX systems.
Eight years on the Hubble project. I’m a big fan of the private efforts but they’re nowhere near the scale or seriousness that NASA has already achieved, and won’t be for a long time. The shuttle program definitely had its weaknesses and waste like any government program will, but it also achieved a milestone in human history by enabling us to do real work in space. That’s not a small achievement.
Again, Bryan — with all due respect — you, like many, miss the greatest significance of the so-called ‘private’ efforts: substantially reducing the cost of launching into and doing business in space. These cost reductions are likely to open up all sort of new possibilities for a greater variety of space projects.
Our government is broke. Spending money at exhorbitant rates gouged out of us taxpayers by the aerospace industry giants is no longer the way to go. Those big companies will be forced to find much cheaper ways to launch as well. Boeing is already doing so with the development of the CS-100 space capsule.
Incidentally, none of the big companies are advancing space launch technology in any significant way at this time. If there is any justifiable major expense we taxpayers should fund it would be a big aggressive push for new propulsion and launch technologies, which the big companies are best equipped to do. The new guys can do the transportation stuff in the meanwhile.
The Saturn V was a government program. Worked pretty good I think. Didn’t kill anyone and came in under budget as well.
So did Gemini. I think even today, Gemini would be a good spacecraft to have around in the inventory.
(And thanks Brian for the work…)
Concerning Gemini: It was the only program to RETURN money at the end. (This was because of cancelled flights.) Still, imagine such a thing happening today.
The Saturn V didn’t kill anyone, true. But Apollo 1 sat on top of an earlier model that was part of the program leading up to the Saturn V, and 3 astronauts died. So you can’t say the program didn’t kill anyone.
It wasn’t the rocket that killed the Apollo 1 crew. It was the standard NASA practice of filling the capsule with 100% oxygen under pressure (IIRC, 16-20 PSI) for their “plugs out” testing. That, and the fact that the Block 1 Apollo capsule was full of problems and faults. The accident investigation ruled that an electrical short under Gus Grissom’s seat caused a massive fire. The capsule door opened inwards (a lighter weight design) and when the fire started, the high pressure pressed the door so hard against the frame that it was impossible to open.
The Saturn 1, 1B, and V all had perfect flight records, which was pretty remarkable for rockets that were at the cutting edge of technology. As Larry J said, the problem was in the Apollo capsule.
The Shuttle program, if the cost of 300billion for the whole program is accurate, was $42,000 per pound of lifted payload capacity. Since they frequently went up part loaded, per pound it was higher. SpaceX is $5000 per pound list cost for their smallest least economically efficient booster. That’s serious.
NASA was a large scale joke, not a serious effort. A serious political effort, yes. A serious make work program for other than useful technology combinations, yes.
But a joke.
It killed 14 people, so it’s a bad joke. The Shuttle did about 1/20th of it’s job, and that was best NASA could do with it’s previous contractor model. Way late, way over budget, way too expensive to operate, and couldn’t fly the mission count by almost a factor of four. I’m sure it was wonderful for you, and I am glad you could participate in it, but this maudlin post dries up in the face of the facts.
Even Hubble, you may recall, was built wrong, and needed a fix.
Of course America will go back to space. Here in about a week or two. And with people here in about 2 years at most–and if it were required, yes it could be now.
So when we go back, it will be an actually serious effort.
It’ll be to make money, and it will be sustained.
If fully loaded and utilized, one Falcon9 from SpaceX will run about $500.00/#. If they have the demand to build many of them, it will go down to $50.00/#.
That’s serious, and it’s nothing NASA could manage (a very deliberately chosen word), on it’s best day.
The technology to do that has been had for 50 years or more. So why didn’t NASA do it?
Because NASA wasn’t able.
It may have been politics that meant it wasn’t able, doesn’t mean in the end it wasn’t able.
The shuttles look better in museums.
“If fully loaded and utilized, one Falcon9 from SpaceX will run about $500.00/#. If they have the demand to build many of them, it will go down to $50.00/#.”
Sorry, that should be the FalconHeavy. The 9 comes in at about $1,250/#.
“It will be to make money.” So you say. But so far all I see is space tourism (the High Frontier reduced to a roller-coaster ride) and selling payload capacity principally to the government (in effect, tax farming). IOW, I remain unimpressed with the promise of private-enterprise space exploration as an improvement over NASA.
No, that’s not small at all.
But that doesn’t mean that more of the same is the best way forward.
I’m happy to see fewer tax dollars spent on space for now. We have other fish to fry at the moment.
Retaining our present liberties and regaining lost ones is much more important. Without those, space doesn’t mean anything at all.
The shuttle program…achieved a milestone in human history by enabling us to do real work in space. That’s not a small achievement.
True, and that’s an important point. I think the problem with the shuttle was that it was designed to do a little bit of everything, but wasn’t optimized to do any one thing efficiently. Look at military aircraft: You have fighters, bombers, ground attack aircraft, surveillance planes, cargo planes, medevac helicopters, etc. Nobody tries to design a single aircraft to perform all of those roles.
We need specialized spacecraft as well. Looking at the movie 2001: A Space Odyssey, there was an airplane-like shuttle that ferried passengers from Earth to the space station, and then a moon shuttle that took them from the station to the moon. Then there was the Discovery interplanetary spacecraft, which went to Jupiter. The latter two were pure spacecraft and were not intended to be launched from or landed on Earth. They were assembled in orbit.
Even as far back as the 1950s people like Arthur C. Clarke and Wehrner von Braun realized that one of the most important functions of a space station was assembling spacefaring spacecraft. A satellite repair ship would probably resemble a disembodied shuttle cargo bay, with facilities for the astronaut/repairmen, grappling arms, etc. It would travel back and forth between the space station and stricken satellites, but it would not be designed to land on Earth.
The problem with the ISS is that it wasn’t designed to build spaceships of any kind. As far as I can tell, it was pretty much built in order to give the shuttle a destination to go to.
Yes, but only if the bureaucrats and pork meisters don’t get in the way. I spent yesterday afternoon at the National Space Symposium here in Colorado Springs and will return today. Many companies big and small are there. You have all of the traditional cost-plus business-as-usual players like ULA, Pratt & Whitney Rocketdyne, ATK, Lockheed-Martin and others there hoping to continue sucking billions from the government teat like they’ve been doing for decades. You also have the up and coming commercial companies like SpaceX, Sierra-Nevada, Bigelow and others who’re working on a completely different cost model – fee for service.
Just as a comparison, NASA has paid Lockheed-Martin over $5 billion to develop the Orion space capsule. Orion is several years and billions of dollars away from being able to launch humans into orbit. Compared to that, SpaceX has spent about $1 billion developing the Falcon 1, Falcon 9 and Dragon capsule including multiple attempts. That also includes developing the launch facilities at the Cape and Vandenberg, mission control, research & development, all production facilities, etc. Of that billion, about $300 million has been NASA funding for services rendered. If all goes well, they intend to launch their Dragon capsule to the ISS on April 30th. With perhaps $300 million more funding, they hope to be able to launch up to 7 humans to LEO within 3 years. Sierra-Nevada is working on a space plane and Boeing is also working on their CST-100 capsule on a fee for service model. All of those projects put together cost less than half of what NASA has paid for the Orion alone, much less anything to launch it.
America is in deep financial trouble. We can’t afford the luxury of nostalgia to maintain multi-billion dollar programs like the SLS and Orion. If we’re going to continue sending people into space at all, it needs to be fee for service, just the same as when NASA needs to send employees on a business trip. They don’t own their own airline. Instead, they buy a ticket just like everyone else. That’s the future of space travel.
“The space shuttle could go from dead stop to orbit in 8.5 minutes.”
Yeah, but after how many weeks/months/years of inspections, overhauls, accidents, delays, etc., etc. The Hubble mission was brilliant – the kind of thing the Shuttle was born to do. The rest of the time? The only thing more boring than the average Shuttle mission was WAITING for the average Shuttle mission.
Meanwhile, little robots launched on top of old-fashioned rockets were sending us close-up pictures of other worlds, landing on asteroids, rendezvousing with comets…
Dead on! The shuttle was a huge step backward for the U.S. space program. The whole idea of the shuttle was it was supposed to be cheaper and more efficient than one offs like the Apollo spacecraft. Instead, it cost just as much if not more to launch and spent months and months in maintenance. And the kicker, it didn’t have the “range” capability of the Delta rockets and the Apollo spacecraft.
The shuttle really only had two advantages over Apollo:
1. Payload. It could carry more. More people, more gear, and longer.
2. Returnabilty. The shuttle could return those larger crews and land them on, well, land.
But with those monster boosters and huge fuel tank, it was never a serious fulfillment of the dream of easy up, easy down, that was the original vision for a shuttle.
1. Payload. It could carry more. More people, more gear, and longer.
2. Returnabilty. The shuttle could return those larger crews and land them on, well, land.
On the topic of payload, the Saturn V could put much more mass into orbit than the Shuttle. The last Saturn V was a 2 stage version that put the Skylab space station into orbit with a single launch. IIRC, a Saturn V could put almost 5 times the payload into orbit than a Shuttle. If you count the weight of the orbiter, then the Shuttle put about as much mass into orbit as a Saturn V. However, the orbiter generally isn’t included in the payload.
On the human side, a Shuttle could carry up to 7 astronauts while Apollo only carried 3. Interestingly, the SpaceX Dragon, Sierra Nevada Dream Chaser and Boeing CST-100 are designed to carry up to 7 people. IIRC, the $5 billion and counting Lockheed-Martin Orion only carries 4 people.
As for the “longer” part, the longest Apollo missions to the moon took about 2 weeks, which was also about the longest time a Shuttle could stay in orbit. Apollo Command and Service Modules were docked with Skylab for up to 3 months.
I don’t know that any of these private efforts will succeed, “Apollo Project” is geekspeak for something that HAS to work the first time. This will ALWAYS be an order of magnitude more expensive than normal projects, and the sheer magnitude of the energy needed to get to orbit, is often grossly underestimated. If indeed it works, and comes in even a factor of two less expensive, I will consider that a wild success.
Will America Go to Space Again? – Short answer is “No.” You need a groundswell of public supprot for such a project and it just isn’t there anymore. When it comes to space (at least reight now) exploraiton is for it’s own sake without any prospect of a “return on investment.” The pride in putting one of your own countrymen someplace where “no man has gone befoe” simply doesn’t exist anymore.
Also, from a psychological standpoint, we don’t need to go into space. Modern CGI effectsa and gaming software now provide a large chunk of our population with a convincing illusion of space travel. We live in an entertainment-saturated culture that demands immediate gratification. Some kid playing a video game is getting the same satisfaction from his space pirates video game that we used to get by getting a man closer and closer to the moon. It’s pretty pathetic but there you are.
Yes, America will go into space again. Were not abandoning “Space” what we are abandoning is the “New deal-ish – Big Government” approach to going. We went as far into space as we could with that process. Its time to try something else.
Watch for SpaceX to go to the ISS on April 30th. Watch how the Stratolaunch system comes together between now and 2015. Watch as SpaceShipTwo proves the viability of airlaunched platforms – this year. This success will lead to Suborbital trips to other parts of the globe on a safe, multi use, profit making platform. that’s how we are going back into space. Not on the backs of the taxpayer but on the investment of shareholders. With Paul, Bigelow and Musk showing others how to get into space and to make a profit, lets watch as others follow in the same way.
Were soon going to be going into space more than we ever did. Its just that we are launching from Mojave now rather than Florida.
Buck up folks, were Americans. Hell, We invented the future!
(Go Team Rutan!)
If we’re depending on private space flight, we’re now far back in second place behind the Russians.
Bryan, if Dragon is recovered after its flight next month with a return cargo from ISS, SpaceX will be ahead of Progress-M. And if it had to, it could carry seven crew in an emergency (it would just be a riskier mission without an abort system).
Yes, we will go to space again. Given that half the country voted for an unreformed socialist and the other half for the socialist lite “option”, it’s just a matter of a few years to where we get back to monster “exploration” projects to boost employment. Unfortunately, these make work government funded white elephants will do nothing in the long term – except entertain the couch potatoes and fool the “intellectuals” into thinking there’s some kind of progress being made – just like the moon landings. All fascist countries, even the democratic fascist ones, must have their bread and circus’s, and to compensate for a cowed, cradle to grave moribund population they are constantly funding “world’s largest” projects and stimulants which are primarily boondoggles – like the Shuttle.
Why is arithmetic so hard for so many people who comment on the relative capabilities of “NASA” and the private rocketry startups?
There is a big difference between hundreds of millions of dollars, and tens of billions of dollars.
There is a VERY big difference between approximately $1B (mostly of it private capital) spent to develop two rocket designs and a capsule (all of which have flown successfully) and approximately $10B (mostly taxpayer-derived) spent for rockets and spacecraft that haven’t flown at all, and may never fly (Constellation, Ares, SLS).
Why don’t people get this? (Especially my fellow conservatives, who really ought to.)
YES, AFTER WE PAY OBAMA DEBTS…LETS SEE, AROUND 3001
I agree, but there’s no need to SHOUT ABOUT IT!
Why?
The United States government is CREATING SPACE right here on earth. The next move will be to tax it.
Look for taxes on your unemployment, EBT card, and food stamps, after November 2012.
God has abandoned the United States. The Democrats have not because there’s a few drops of blood left.
I remember when I got to see the movie “2001: A Space Odyssey” when it premiered in 1968.
One thing I noticed immediately, was that NASA–or even just the NASA logo–was nowhere to be seen in the movie.
Instead, the space shuttle was flown by Pan Am, and the orbiting space station was apparently run by Hilton Hotels.
The future depicted in “2001″ was one in which private companies ran Earth orbit missions.
And that is the correct future to aim for.
After 50 years of launching men and machines into orbit, NASA should get out of the Earth orbit business. Completely.
I remember seeing that movie when it was released too, and I vividly remember seeing those company logos on so many things.
They had the right idea, though it is rather sad that the companies themselves are largely gone. Whirlpool is just a name for others products. PanAm is a feeble bit of its old self. The Bell companies are no longer what they were.
The American Government has little business going in to space. Our companies DO. The Rutan design for a very large aircraft launch system to launch rockets to orbit is exactly the sort of thing that we should have done decades ago.
The space shuttle was a committee creature. It was ridiculously large, it was an amalgamation of stupid, incompatible ideas; and the fact that it flew at all is no small miracle. We can do far better, but to get there we have to get government out of this business.
My only fear is that some will be motivated to regulate this industry to death before it has a chance to grow up.
I see a lot of articles and comments lamenting the end of the Shuttle era. I’ve been a space buff all my life, and I don’t share the feeling of despair.
The Shuttle was a marvelous technological achievement, but it never lived up to its promise of making spaceflight cheap and routine. I’m old enough to remember the Gemini and Apollo missions, and while I looked forward to the initial Shuttle flights, it was a bit of a letdown knowing that they were built only to fly in Earth orbit and not to go to the Moon. It seemed like a step backward.
And many people forget that, due to problems and delays, there was a six-year gap between the last Apollo flight in 1975 and the first Shuttle flight in 1981. Back then, buying rides from the Russians was not an option. So for six long years, Americans had no way of flying into space. That’s not the case today, and it’s a good thing that we now have better relations with Russia than we did back then.
I remember when the Soviet space program was shrouded in extreme secrecy, and it was a big deal to see a still photo months after the event. Today we can watch their launches live on the internet, and the videos are posted to YouTube in a matter of minutes. I call that progress. I watched the Soyuz TMA-22 launch live back in November (which carried an American astronaut), and that was a fun one to watch. They launched through a driving snowstorm. A couple of hours before liftoff, they had the ground crew out shoveling the launch pad! I guess I’m not used to seeing that during American launches from Florida.
Also thanks to the internet, I’ve been able to follow the progress of the various companies that are working on private rockets and spacecraft. They get little or no coverage in the MSM, so it’s understandable that people who depend on old media for their information have no idea of what is going on. As for me, during the past two years or so, I’ve become very excited and optimistic about the future of spaceflight, including American spaceflight. Several projects are about to come to fruition, and in a few years I think we will see more activity in space than ever before.
It’s hard, really hard, to look back on half a century and realize it was all a mistake, but it was. Oh, there are many achievements — Hubble being one of them — but we ought to get a Clew from a simple fact: Nothing that was done during Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo left anything whatever behind that could even be used for the next mission, much less for any subsequent program. A real space program would have left infrastructure behind. Instead, it was all thrown away.
The engineers and scientists and technicians who worked on the program may very well have been dedicated people who wanted to develop space, but the politicians who funded them knew very well what was going on: a publicity stunt cum pork-barrel program. As such, the requirements were simple: do it quickly and cheaply, leaving plenty of funds to spread around Congressional constituencies.
I quit caring about Shuttle when they abandoned the flyback booster, and that happened in the very early days. What ought to be posted between the noses of Enterprise and Columbia isn’t a paen to the space program. It should be a picture of Prince Piotr Potemkin. That’s truth, however bitter to admit. It wasn’t a space program. It was a political program using space as a vehicle, and it’s over now. We can’t afford that kind of flamboyance any more.
The good news is, at Mojave and a few other places around the country, it’s 1962 again. Private companies who want to go to space for reasons that might turn a profit (which is to say, somebody other than the company’s employees want it) are starting over, doing the things that should have been done half a century ago. It won’t take them as long, because the Potemkin space program did have to develop real hardware they can take and improve, but that’s the image to have in your mind — not 2012, but 1962 except what we have is NACA and no Mercury. Maybe, just maybe, it might go better this time.
In December 2010 SpaceX flew its first Dragon test flight. It lasted only two orbits. Afterwards, I saw a number of comments saying, “Bah. So what? NASA did that 50 years ago.”
Well, I regarded that as a feature, not a bug. I’m a little too young to remember Mercury, but I knew that those brief flights, lasting only a few hours from launch to splashdown, electrified the whole nation. People stopped what they were doing to follow the progress of the flights on radio and TV.
I followed Dragon on blogs and Twitter. That flight gave me a slight taste of what those pioneering Mercury flights must have been like. It may not have electrified the nation, but it sure electrified me.
ULA, SpaceX, Orbital, Sierra Nevada, Boeing all are American companies working to get Americans back into space. SpaceX is scheduled to begin that at the end of this month. While the NASA is ‘subsidizing’ part of the cost of developing these new capabilities the best estimate is that is costing one tenth what it would cost NASA to do under the usual government command and control model. And then NASA will be buying services as they need them, not having to carry the cost of maintaining their own fleets. New ventures, like Bigelow’s space stations and prospective efforts toward asteroid mineing will use these companies as well. That to me does not sound like the U.S. is abandoning space.
we aren’t completely out of the space program. has everybody forgotten the U.S.A.F.? the whole time the shuttle was launching, so was the air force. they are rumored to have their own version of a shuttle, and who knows what else? their primary launch vehicle (we know about) is the delta rocket, unmanned. it has always been the most reliable space vehicle. they fly into space on a different trajectory from n.a.s.a. from cape canaveral. pan am was their main contractor in the old days.
do not underestimate the U.S.A.F. i just hope they have been able to avoid odumbass. moochelle probably has them giving her top secret rides to the moon. this bunch of spend spend clowns could screw up a wet dream.
they are rumored to have their own version of a shuttle, and who knows what else?
Many people must know, including those whom they couldn’t help telling. I’m not some HAARP nut who thinks the government is reading our minds, but don’t tell me all of those mars missions could really be failing…
The USAF “shuttle” is not a rumor but a spacecraft that is in orbit right now. Search on X-37B.
There has been some talk of using it as a basis for a crew vehicle.
oh, now that Gingrich has been pumelled into submission, it’s ok for republicans to be pro-space again.
There isn’t an iota of difference between ruling class hypocricy and libral hypocricy. Actually, it’s worse.
Of course ruling class hypocrisy and liberal hypocrisy are the same thing.
How could it be otherwise?
The liberals are the ruling class.
Every government program ends up doing its damndest to destroy whatever they were tasked to promote. Private companies can’t afford that sort of bull.
The Department of Energy and the EPA are trying to destroy the oil industry and raise the price of gasoline. Amtrak runs, but it’s the land-going equivalent of a cruise ship, and loses tons of money. The TSA is doing worse things to citizen morale than terrorists could. ATF is a gunrunner.
I’m glad to see private space programs. There’s not a spigot pouring money, nor an overseer demanding full adherence to minutely detailed rules. And if a company does counterproductive stuff, it’ll wither and go away. You can’t expect that of a government program.
I’ve been a space buff since I was born. I remember watching the Apollo and Skylab missions and I was SO excited by the concept of the Shuttle. Then I saw the reality and I was horrified.
Since then, I’ve done a lot of learning – We were months from a functioning, re-usable orbital space plane and we threw it away to focus on putting a single man in a barrel and firing him out of a cannon. Remember the X-15? But we had to compete with the Soviets! So, trash the spacecraft and let’s go with Verne’s barrel and cannon concept from 1865. Idiocy.
And NASA’s latest big idea is just SO amazing…it’s beyond imagination! Instead of putting THREE men in a barrel and firing them out of a cannon, we’re gonna put FOUR guys in there and fire them out of a cannon! Jules Verne, eat your heart out.
In a few years, I anticipate Rutan and Scaled Composites putting together a SPACESHIP that is FLOWN by pilots. With ion drives and thrusters on the same control surfaces used in atmosphere and they’ll fly wherever they want. Meanwhile, NASA will still be struggling to get four guys in a barrel, fire them out of a cannon, and have the ballistics bring them back to Earth safely. But they’ll have spent about $250B on it.
No more big government ANYTHING. Cut private industry some slack, get THEM the funding that NASA’s been wasting on manned space flight, and drive on.
Orion
I have to quibble with your assertion that we were months away from a space plane in the late 1950s. The X-15 wasn’t capable of going into orbit and the X-20 was still several years away. The whole point of the “Spam-in-a-can” approach of Project Mercury was that it could be done quicker, but alas, not quick enough to beat the Russians who used the same approach with Vostok.
Granted – The X-15 WAS capable of sub-orbital flights (and indeed completed two, IIRC) much like Shepard’s first flight…
I DO wonder though, if the resources of the Mercury Project had been, instead, thrown at the X-20 project, if that might not have been completed MUCH faster. And where would be be if it had?
Orion
There was a proposal to build the X-15B (sometimes referred to as the Super X-15) to beat the Soviets into orbit. It might’ve worked but it would’ve been little more than a very dangerous stunt.
The X-20 DynaSoar was an early attempt at a military space plane. I don’t think it would’ve had great operational utility but it could’ve lead to more advanced vehicles. It wouldn’t have been useful for Kennedy’s moon trip.
The sheer waste and ultimate failure of this program are just staggering, and, in retrospect, it’s looking more and more like our vaunted “Space Program”–whatever its original intentions may have been–ended up being just a gigantic boondoggle; a “Space Program” that was a way for members of Congress to pay off their favored constituents with contracts, with no thought given to the future, or to its end result.
Over a period of several decades of concentrated effort we pour what was probably hundreds of billions, maybe trillions of dollars, and uncounted millions of man hours into our supposed “Space Program,” build specialized launch facilities and infrastructure, create whole new industries, and establish a large “astronaut” training program; considering our vulnerability, jammed all together here on this one planet, and our increasing needs for the mineral and power resources available in our solar system, a critically important program to get us permanently out into space and able to get our fragile “eggs” out of just one basket, to plant settlements in orbit and on other planets, create whole new industries taking advantage of the radically different conditions in space, as well as to meet our needs for more resources.
But, after all these decades of massive effort and expense, what are we left with in the end?
We have a fancy Smithsonian “exhibit,” a doorstop of a retired “spacecraft” full of patched up and retrofitted essentially 1970s technology that will never fly again, except for an occasional launch of new satellites the infrastructure stands idle, our remaining “astronauts” have no “spacecraft” to fly and are drifting off to other pursuits, we have no new follow on craft ready to fly, no craft at all in fact and, thus, no way to get into space, and no certain prospect of doing so for many years to come, if ever.
And oh, yes, there is the patched together, kludge known as the “International Space Station” which, thanks to NASA’s great work, we no longer have the capability of reaching, and the same for the Hubble telescope, should it need any further repairs.
You can say “we learned a lot,” but the bottom line is that—despite what we may have “learned” at an extraordinarily high price in blood, work, and treasure–we no longer have any manned vehicles, or even the capability to get into orbit unless we beg the Russians or the Chinese for a ride, much less any way for American “astronauts” to voyage further out to the Moon or Mars, or to anywhere else, for that matter. We are grounded.
Boy, what “planning.” Boy, was that a good investment!
But, hey, it wasn’t all for nothing; we’ve still got the new Smithsonian exhibit, all of those photographs, and real fancy “mission patches” to remind us of all the glories and accomplishments of our now defunct “Space Program.”
P.S.–Am I bitter? You bet I am.
I grew up on science fiction—magazines like Astounding and Analog, stories like Heinlein’s “Have Space Suit, Will Travel,” and hundreds more. I could practically see the bustling space stations and habitats being built in orbit, the workers in their space suits jetting around, the new products coming down from orbiting manufacturing facilities, the new discoveries and whole new technologies that would come to be, the colonies start up on the Moon, then Mars; a New Frontier indeed, with all its energy, and promise, and excitement.
President Kennedy’s talk of the “The New Frontier,” and his goal of landing a man on the Moon, the, at first, live coverage and stories about each new launch/mission, about the new technologies and rockets, about the astronauts, and, later, films like “The Right Stuff.” It all seemed so promising and it was, apparently, all flash, for underneath the spectacle NASA was not building a firm foundation for (or, perhaps, never really had as its ultimate goal) a permanent human/American presence in space, further exploration, exploitation, or colonies in orbit, on the Moon and Mars.
I suspect, as well, that the three deaths of the Apollo I astronauts in 1967, then the seven Challenger astronauts in 1987, and finally the seven Columbia astronauts in 2003 may have eventually led to an unwillingness by NASA to gamble and to take the necessary risks anymore in what was—like it or not–a very dangerous experimental venture, and to the adoption of an increasingly risk-averse, very constraining, “fail-safe” mentality, and perhaps that is why the machines won the battle for funding.
So, after we reached the Moon, nothing much else really happened, NASA evolved into a gigantic, multi-level, hide-bound bureaucracy, there were the reported fights for influence and funding between those favoring manned vs. machine missions, the scaled down, ramshackle, trouble-prone International Space Station was slapped together, our astronauts had “missions” confined to low earth orbit, mechanical probes quite evidently won the funding battle, and “man in Space” just faded away.
So, if it was really all about humans pioneering and settling “The New Frontier, “ we—the tax payers/investors–were had; sold as much a bill of goods as investors in underwater swampland in Florida, stuck with the inflated check for a shot of cheap, rot-gut whiskey poured from a Chivas Regal bottle. Ir perhaps is was all about “perceptions” and what the meaning of “is” is.
With this past history, my guess is that any new American attempt to push for the publicly funded human exploration and settlement of space and the solar system will be met with deep suspicion and an enormous lack of enthusiasm, beside which, with our economy in the toilet, gigantic, crushing public debt as far as the eye can see that will –on its present course–only get increasingly worse, and 45 million people on food stamps, there is no longer any more surplus money or, I would think, public enthusiasm for such new “adventures.”
“Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.”