Clark Lindsey deconstructs the latest argument that human spaceflight vehicles must be “certified.”
And yes, I have arrived safely in LA. Without my luggage (meant to last a month). Again.
At least this time it wasn’t a non-stop, so they have the excuse of missing the connection in Dallas.
It’s hard to believe, but the Columbia disintegrated, with seven crew, over the skies of Texas six years ago today. And our space policy remains as screwed up as ever.
[Update in the evening]
Clark Lindsey has links to some musical tributes to the disasters. Also, for those who missed the link on the earlier anniversaries this week, here are my thoughts a year ago on the cluster of space disasters at the end of January and early February.
[Bumped]
George Abbey and Neal Lane have a new white paper on space policy recommendations. I haven’t read it yet, but I expect it to be pretty bad, based on history.
[Update a few minutes later]
OK, I skimmed it. Other than the recommendation to cancel Ares 1, almost everything else is wrong. Certainly turning our backs on missions beyond LEO is, as is a focus on energy and the environment. There are other agencies responsible for this. I was amused by this:
It is distressing to observe the current state of the U.S. space program as the nation moves into a new progressive era with the inauguration of President Barack Obama in January 2009.
Emphasis mine. I don’t think that word means what they think it means.
[Mid-afternoon update]
Like one of the commenters over at NASA Watch, I too am shocked, shocked that John Muratore wants to revive X-38 and come back in a lifting body.
Wayne Hale is shocked, shocked to discover gambling in this establishment.
Sorry, but that’s how bureaucracies work, Wayne. It goes with being a federal agency, unfortunately, particularly when what the agency is doing is perceived to be politically unimportant.
More discussion over at NASA Watch, where I found this.
Challenger was destroyed live on television, in front of millions of schoolchildren watching the first teacher go into space. We learned many lessons from that event. Most of them are wrong.
As I noted yesterday, on the Apollo 1 anniversary, I had a piece about the tragic space anniversaries that cluster around the end of January a year ago.
A dispatch from an alternate reality:
I know you all have seen the public discourse regarding Ares and Orion and shuttle, and understandably such discourse can temper our resolve to push forward — if we let it. But, let’s review the bidding. First, we should remind ourselves, as we saw in intimate detail at last summer’s Lunar Capability Concept Review (arguably the finest such review the team has yet executed), that the Ares I/Ares V/Orion/Altair transportation system is highly integrated and keenly designed to open the lunar frontier to us in the years to come. Our driving requirements of going anywhere on the Moon, staying twice as long as Apollo in a sortie mode, sending twice as many crew members, and enabling their return at any time, must remain at the forefront of any consideration to alter the nation’s exploration launch architecture. I assure each of you that we are doing all we can to communicate this key aspect of our baseline plan — it is about much more than launching Orion to LEO (Low Earth Orbit).
And where did those (trivial) requirements come from?
We don’t know, because the agency continues to refuse to show its work.
But it’s pretty pathetic that forty years after Apollo, it thinks it the height of ambition to spend tens of billions of dollars on a system that, even in the unlikely event that it works as currently designed, within budget and schedule, will only do twice the number of crew for twice the duration for billions of dollars per flight. Such a paltry goal simply isn’t worth the money, even if we ignore all the design and management issues. If NASA doesn’t want to get serious about space, then it should stop wasting the taxpayers’ money, and let someone else have it who is.
Today is the forty-second anniversary of the deaths of the Apollo 1 crew, on the pad. I wrote about that, and the other deadly space anniversaries of this time of year (tomorrow is the twenty-third of the Challenger loss, and Sunday is the sixth of the Columbia loss), a year ago.
I was going to write about this latest attempt to resurrect the mythical “Apollo spirit” by former CNN science reporter Miles O’Brien. But fortunately, Paul Spudis gives him the history lesson so I don’t have to. Well, not just so I don’t have to — that’s just a nice side effect for me, because I’m busy.
As Paul notes, Mike Griffin and (to a lesser degree, even before Griffin) NASA’s biggest mistake is in assuming that we can just pick up where we left off with the unsustainable and unaffordable Apollo program and somehow sustain and afford it. NASA has to get much more innovative, think about how to use existing infrastructure that has other uses (which is why it should, at least initially, be EELV rather than Shuttle derived), encourage and involve the private sector to a much greater degree, and think marginal cost rather than development cost, or they’ll end up with another Shuttle, and station, regardless of what the mold lines of the vehicles look like.
[Update a few minutes later]
Unsurprisingly, Mark Whittington (who really ought to fix his permalinks so they don’t double the tag) is still guzzling the koolaid by the pitcher.
[Another update a couple minutes later]
Over at The Space Review (which now seems to be allowing comments, though there are none yet at this article), Stokes McMillan hopes that Kennedy’s first 100 days will be repeated by Obama.
Don’t count on it. In fact, don’t even hope for it, if it’s a repeat of Apollo. Apollo was a unique set of circumstances, and unlikely to repeat. In order for history to repeat, using the JFK model, would be for him to have some humiliating foreign policy event comparable to the Bay of Pigs (unfortunately, that one’s not at all unlikely…) and then another exogenous event that spurs us into another space race. The only thing that I could think of that would be comparable to the double blow of first being beaten into space four years later, and then beaten into a man in space in the first hundred days, would be a surprise manned Mars landing by (say) the Chinese. And even then, I wouldn’t bet on a revitalized American space program as a response.
Sorry, but compared to other administration perceived concerns (global warming, lack of health care, the economy, etc.) space simply isn’t important. And it hasn’t been for over forty years.
[Update a while later]
Don’t look to the Europeans to scare us into another space race. Space isn’t important there, either:
Sources close to the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Automated Transfer Vehicle (ATV)/Advanced Reentry Vehicle (ARV) team are telling Hyperbola that the November 2008 ESA ministerial meeting outcome was seen as catastrophic for the agency’s hopes for ARV operating before the International Space Station (ISS) is de-orbited, even with a 2020 end of life target, and a follow-on manned version of ARV.
But there will be plenty of jobs, so it’s OK.
I just want to pull my hair, of which I have little to spare, when I read editorials like this:
Luckily, technology means that man can explore both the moon and Mars more fully without going there himself. Robots are better and cheaper than they have ever been. They can work tirelessly for years, beaming back data and images, and returning samples to Earth. They can also be made sterile, which germ-infested humans, who risk spreading disease around the solar system, cannot.
Here we go again. Humans versus robots, it’s all about science and exploration. It is not all about science and/or exploration. The space program is about much more than that, but the popular mythology continues.
Humanity, some will argue, is driven by a yearning to boldly go to places far beyond its crowded corner of the universe. If so, private efforts will surely carry people into space (though whether they should be allowed to, given the risk of contaminating distant ecosystems, is worth considering). In the meantime, Mr Obama’s promise in his inauguration speech to “restore science to its rightful place” sounds like good news for the sort of curiosity-driven research that will allow us to find out whether those plumes of gas are signs of life.
Hey, anyone who reads this site know that I’m all for private efforts carrying people into space. They also know that I don’t think that anyone has a right to not “allow them to do so,” and that I place a higher value on humanity and expanding earthly life into the universe than on unknown “distant ecosystems.” What have “distant ecosystems” ever done for the solar system?
I also question the notion that Obama’s gratuitous digs at the Bush science policy had anything whatsoever to do with space policy. And of course, to imagine that they did, is part of the confused policy trap of thinking that space is synonymous with science.
Number 87 is up over at the Martian Chronicles.