There is at least one, and possibly two ignored elephants sitting in NASA’s living room, that they’re going to have to start to deal with soon, as a result of the president’s new space policy. They’re called Space Shuttle and International Space Station–the two fundamental components of what currently passes for the nation’s civil government-funded space program.
As Keith Cowing reports, they’re only starting to come to grips with the associated issues, but if the answers aren’t forthcoming yet, it’s partly because everyone knows them, but don’t really want to say them out loud. We have a policy that we’re going to shut down the Shuttle when station is completed, but what if we have problems along the way, and the station still has some way to go at the point we’ve a priori decided to shut down the Shuttle? And how do we transition personnel from the Shuttle to other programs, when it’s not clear that the current skill set is what is needed for future activities? Dwayne Day examines these questions, and as already noted, the answers may not be very pretty.
More fundamentally, since the Shuttle phaseout plans are now being driven entirely by ISS considerations, to what degree does continuing to do ISS make any sense? In my opinion, of course, to the degree that NASA’s space station plans ever made much sense (i.e., very little), that degree went to zero in 1993 when it became almost purely an instrument of foreign policy having almost nothing to do with the advancement of useful goals in space activities. Taylor Dinerman discusses some of the issues facing the international partnership (as does Jim Oberg), particularly in light of the politics with Russia and Iran.
I think that in announcing a 2010 end of the Shuttle program, the administration was just kicking the can down the road, but I don’t think they can do it much longer, because hard decisions have to be made as to how much more Shuttle hardware must be procured (a decision complicated by the fact that some, including the incoming administrator, want to build a Shuttle-derived heavy-lift vehicle for the lunar and Mars program). It’s probably not (yet) politically tenable to do so, but I think it’s almost inevitable that once we really confront the realities of the mess that the past thirty years of space policy have wreaked, a decision will have to be made to just hand off ISS to the Europeans, Japanese and Russians, to do with as they will, allowing us to shut down Shuttle as well. Simply giving them the facility outright could obviate some of the diplomatic damage of withdrawing from our agreements, while allowing us to end the farce that is the current US manned space program and get on with something worthwhile.
Some will complain, of course, about writing off the many billions invested in station to date, but there’s an old sayng in investment circles about throwing good money after bad. Unfortunately, Americans (and particularly the American government) aren’t always good investors.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s just one example of how absurd it is to continue operating the Shuttle, at least with the current risk-averse mindset:
NASA has from May 15 to June 3 to launch Discovery. Otherwise, it must wait until mid-July for the proper daylight conditions needed to photograph the entire ascent. The Columbia accident investigators insisted on multiple camera views at liftoff in order to check for debris or damage.
That constitutes a six-week period during which this vehicle cannot be flown, for the sole reason that they can’t take good pictures of it during launch.