Wanted: A new vision for space exploration

Our manned space program, belly up

It didn’t take long for the chorus of hosannahs that accompanied Tuesday’s launch of the space shuttle Discovery to fall into brooding silence. After debris fell away from the shuttle during liftoff, NASA grounded the entire fleet - about two years too late.

The shuttle platform has been in use for twenty years, and its underlying technology is older than that. The infamous heat-dissipating tile technology - “the long pole holding up the tent,” as former shuttle project director Mike Malkin described it - is alarmingly fragile, as sad history has demonstrated. All it takes is a chunk of foam to damage the tiles and put the vessel and its crew at grave risk. Originally envisioned as inexpensive space access costing five million per launch, the shuttle actually costs about a hundred times that: five hundred million dollars per launch. The economic assumption underlying the shuttle - that the program would pay for itself as it went on, or would actually make money - was a fiction.

“The shuttle was sold to Nixon on the basis that it would be a money-making venture,” said John Pike, a former space policy director for the Federation of American Scientists. “By the time of the Challenger accident (in 1986), the problem they were having was that they were trying to get the flight rate up to 24 flights per year. There was pressure to fly, which was driven by the fundamental economics of the shuttle program.”

The economics of the shuttle were this: The cost goes down the more often you send it up with paying customers. By launching military and private satellites and by doing it more than 50 times a year, NASA told the White House, the amortized cost per pound of payload would be less than $200, an astonishingly low number given the more than $10,000 per pound it was costing to launch a Saturn V.

Problem was, it wasn’t even close to true. Whether top administrators at NASA actually believed they could achieve that figure, or whether they were simply saying what Nixon wanted to hear, has been debated for years.

We’ve fallen a long way from dreams of a mission a week.

Gregg Easterbrook of The New Republic and the Washington Monthly has been a longtime critic of the shuttle program, dating back to 1980. His famous short piece for Time - “The Space Shuttle Must be Stopped” - was written just after the Columbis disaster, but its warnings are as applicable this week as they were then:

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.

Desultory attempts at devising a replacement for the shuttle must be immediately replaced with earnest efforts, and something more. As NASA labors to ensure a safe return of the Discovery crew, it’s to be hoped that technocrats, politicians, and ordinary citizens will focus on the demands and hazards of spaceflight and realize this one thing: much more than a replacement space access platform is required now. Space exploration must become purpose-driven, and that purpose must be clear. Only then can we stop putting the cart before the horse, and devise tools and craft worthy of their missions.