Happy Groundhog Day!

I neglected to note yesterday that it was the fourth anniversary since the loss of Columbia (hard to believe, just as it’s hard to believe that last Sunday was the twenty-first since the Challenger loss, and last Saturday was the fortieth of the Apollo fire).

Here are my immediate thoughts upon hearing of the event.

What does it mean for the program?

Like Challenger, it was not just a crew that “looked like America” (two women, one african american) but it also had the Israeli astronaut on board, which will have some resonance with the war.

Instead of happening just before the State of the Union, it occurred three days after. It also occurred two days before NASA’s budget plans were to be announced, including a replacement, or at least backup, for the Shuttle.

The fleet will certainly be grounded until they determine what happened, just as occurred in the Challenger situation. Hopefully it won’t be for almost three years. [Note: It turned out to be.] If it is, the ISS is in big trouble, and it means more money off to Russia to keep the station alive with Protons and Soyuz. The current crew can get back in the Soyuz that’s up there now. They will either do that, or stay up longer, and be resupplied by the Russians.

The entire NASA budget is now in a cocked hat, because we don’t know what the implications are until we know what happened. But it could mean an acceleration of the Orbital Space Plane program (I sincerely hope not, because I believe that this is entirely the wrong direction for the nation, and in fact a step backwards). What I hope that it means is an opportunity for some new and innovative ideas–not techically, but programmatically.

Once again, it demonstrates the fragility of our space transportation infrastructure, and the continuing folly of relying on a single means of getting people into space, and doing it so seldom. Until we increase our activity levels by orders of magnitude, we will continue to operate every flight as an experiment, and we will continue to spend hundreds of millions per flight, and we will continue to find it difficult to justify what we’re doing. We need to open up our thinking to radically new ways, both technically and institutionally, of approaching this new frontier.

Anyway, it’s a good opportunity to sit back and take stock of why the hell we have a manned space program, what we’re trying to accomplish, and what’s the best way to accomplish it, something that we haven’t done in forty years. For that reason, while the loss of the crew and their scientific results is indeed a tragedy, some good may ultimately come out of it.

They seem (at least to me) to have held up pretty well, and as usual, NASA learned the wrong lessons from the disaster. And while some good did come out of it, the program is still on the wrong track, in terms of prospects for making space affordable.

You can also read many other posts on the subject in the following days. Scroll to the bottom and work your way up.