Well, I was wrong.
A year ago, right after the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia, I predicted that the standdown from the Columbia disaster wouldn’t be anywhere near as long as the one after the loss of the Challenger (over two years), but it now looks as though it may in fact approach it.
My reasons for that prediction were two:
First, that the shuttle was needed to support the continued construction and maintenance of the space station (a circumstance that didn’t hold in the late 1980s). Second, I didn’t think that the investigation would reveal as much of a problem this time as when Challenger was lost, in terms of poor NASA judgement.
But apparently, in the wake of the harsh criticism of the Gehman Commission, NASA has become ultraconservative in Shuttle operations. The unwillingness to risk a Hubble maintenance mission is one symptom of this. The recent announcement that the first post-Columbia flight will be delayed until at least a year from now is another.
I didn’t agree with the Hubble decision (and continue to disagree), and I think that NASA is being too cautious now in delaying return to flight. Of course, I thought they were after Challenger as well–they could have safely flown a month later, as long as they did it in reasonably warm weather that wouldn’t freeze O-rings, and much of the redesign of the Solid Rocket Booster joints was overkill, or at least it wasn’t necessary to wait until it was complete to start flying again.
Is the Shuttle as safe to fly as it can possibly be right now? No, but that’s a foolish standard.
While “Safety First” has a nice ring to it, there has to be a rational balance between safety and effectiveness. After all, the safest flight of a Shuttle (or for that matter, any vehicle) is the one that doesn’t occur at all (effectively the course taken over the past year, and apparently the next as well).
We are spending almost as much on the Shuttle when it doesn’t fly as we would if it were–NASA can’t simply put the processing staff in cold storage until they decide to fly again, and if they lay them off, there’s a good chance that they won’t be available when they decide to return to flight, so we’re spending the money and getting very little value for it.
I’ve long argued that, despite the national keening and wailing when astronauts die, the real asset at risk in a Shuttle launch is the orbiter itself, of which we now have only three left, and each of which would cost many years and several billion dollars to replace, given that the tooling needed to build them, and many of the subcontractors who contributed to their construction no longer exist. We simply couldn’t afford to risk losing another one, and have any hope of maintaining a viable fleet into the future.
But that argument went away on January 14th, when the president announced his new space policy.
In fact, as September 11, 2001 was a watershed date in our foreign policy, January 14th, 2004 was, or at least should be seen as, a similar demarcation in national space policy. On that date, among other things, it became formal policy of the United States that we would no longer rely on the Space Shuttle into the indefinite future. That policy implicitly converted the Shuttle fleet from a precious and irreplaceable asset to be protected at all costs, to a depreciating one, from which as much value should be extracted as possible before it is retired in a few years.
The Gehman Commission report came out before January 14, and while it requested a new space policy vision, it didn’t necessarily anticipate it. While it recommended augmenting Shuttle with a new manned launch system, it didn’t necessarily recommend eliminating the Shuttle quite as quickly, and if it had, the recommendations might have been a little different. To the degree that NASA policy remains driven by the CAIB recommendations, it would be useful to have a reconvening of the commission and revisit them to determine if the president’s new policy might modify them.
Under the new policy, there will be no more than another couple dozen flights or so of the fleet. It’s unlikely that what happened to Columbia will happen to another vehicle, because even if the foam problem isn’t fixed, the chances of a repeat over that number of missions is very low. After all, this was the first time it happened in over a hundred. And even if there is another event, we could probably still complete the ISS with the remaining fleet of two, though it might delay it another year or so. In addition, the president’s policy implies that completion of the ISS is no longer an urgent national goal (most Beltway insiders know that the main reason it wasn’t cancelled was to avoid upsetting the international partners–not because it’s in any way essential to the new goals).
Under those circumstances, we really should ask ourselves if the costs of modifying the Shuttle system for improved safety, and the opportunity costs of not flying while continuing to pay the salaries of the Shuttle program personnel, are really worth the avoided (low) risk of not losing another orbiter and crew.
A rational assessment might indicate that the answer is no, but then, one can’t always expect rational assessments to prevail in programs so dominated by politics as our space program remains, and I suspect that decisions will continue to be made on the basis of a mindset that’s “soooo January 13th.”