Jeff Foust points out that the usual suspects in Congress are trying to defund the president’s new space initiative. And as usual, they have the same stale, non-sequitur arguments about the relative cost effectivity of “science” between humans and robots, as though that’s the only reason we have a space program (as I point out in comments over there).

Jim Pinkerton agrees with Stephen Hawking, that we need to get some of our earthly eggs into other baskets.

…until the registration rates at this year’s Return to the Moon conference in Las Vegas (which, at least for this year, also coincides with the annual Space Frontier Foundation conference) go up. It’s at an auspicious time of the year–it will be the week of the thirty-seventh anniversary of the first steps on earth’s moon. If you can’t attend the conference, I hope that you’ll celebrate it at home.

SpaceShipOne first flew into space. I was there (posts are here and here–you might want to hit “previous” or “next” for a few other related items). Jeff Foust has some thoughts. And Robin Snelson has a report on goings-on in Mojave now.

One of the reasons that NASA is willing to launch the Shuttle, even though they can’t fully resolve the foam issues, is that they’re not concerned about losing a crew from it, as they did with Columbia, because they’re going to ISS, and can remain on orbit if necessary, at least for a while. I should note that I may have been the first to publicly discuss this option, less than a week after Columbia was lost, in which I advocated that we tame the wilderness into which we had sent the crew of that ill-fated ship:

I’ve written before about the fragility and brittleness of our space transportation infrastructure. I was referring to the systems that get us into space, and the ground systems that support them.

But we have an even bigger problem, that was highlighted by the loss of the Columbia on Saturday. Our orbital infrastructure isn’t just fragile–it’s essentially nonexistent, with the exception of a single space station at a high inclination, which was utterly unreachable by the Columbia on that mission.

Imagine the options that Mission Control and the crew would have had if they’d known they had a problem, and there was an emergency rescue hut (or even a Motel 6 for space tourists) in their orbit, with supplies to buy time until a rescue mission could be deployed. Or if we had a responsive launch system that could have gotten cargo up to them quickly.

As it was, even if they’d known that the ship couldn’t safely enter, there was nothing they could do. And in fact, the knowledge that there were no solutions may have subtly influenced their assessment that there wasn’t a problem.

The lesson we must take from the most recent shuttle disaster is that we can no longer rely on a single vehicle for our access to the new frontier, and that we must start to build the needed orbital infrastructure in low earth orbit, and farther out, to the moon, so that, in the words of the late Congressman George Brown, “greater metropolitan earth” is no longer a wilderness in which a technical failure means death or destruction.

NASA’s problem hasn’t been too much vision, even for near-earth activities, but much too little. But it’s a job not just for NASA–to create that infrastructure, we will have to set new policies in place that harness private enterprise, just as we did with the railroads in the 19th Century. That is the policy challenge that will come out of the latest setback–to begin to tame the harsh wilderness only two hundred miles above our heads.

Note that in its proposed ESAS architecture, NASA has not learned those lessons, though COTS may be a baby step in that direction, if it survives.

In any event, I wonder if they’ve really thought the scenario through?

OK, they launch, and the cameras reveal that they’ve taken some foam hits on the way up. They get to ISS, and do an inspection. There are three possibilities:

1. The damage is obvious, and will obviously be fatal if a return attempt is made
2. The damage is minimal, and it’s obvious that a return is safe, or
3. The damage is obvious, but less obvious is how dangerous a return attempt would be.

Scenario 2 is easy–just come home.

Scenarios 1 and 3 are more problematic. Scenario 1 is actually two potentials–one in which there is no hope of repair, and the other in which a repair attempt can be made, which converts it to scenario 3, since the degree of confidence in an in-space repair will be unknown, given our lack of real-life experience with it.

But for Scenario 1 in which no repair seems possible, the orbiter is now the largest piece of space junk ever launched. What do we do with it?

Well, if we had ever installed the servos necessary to drop the gear and control the nose wheel and brakes, we could send it down sans crew with fingers crossed, and hope that we could recover it regardless of the damage. There would, after all, be nothing to lose. Presumably this would be an Edwards landing, so the breakup, if/when it occurred, would happen safely over the Pacific (no need for recovery of the pieces, since there will be no doubt of what caused the vehicle to break up).

But wishes aren’t horses, and the vehicle is in fact not capable of landing without someone in the cockpit (a state in which it has remained for years as a result of pressure from the astronaut office, or so rumor has it, out of a fear of redundancy). So any return of the crippled orbiter has to be a planned crash landing, should it beat the odds and survive the entry.

So, do we just drop it in the ocean, or do we attempt to belly it in (again, at Edwards). The former is the safest option from the standpoint of third-party hazard, but if we could get it down in (sort of) one piece, then we might learn more about how the damage to the tile seen on orbit correlated to damage that occurred during entry, which would be useful for future TPS design work. We would also have a source for cannibalization of parts should Mike Griffin change his mind and decide to finish out ISS with only two vehicles remaining.

So, those are the options where we are reasonably sure that we have a doomed vehicle. Not easy decisions, but neither are they ones that will keep a NASA administrator up at night.

The really ugly choices come in with the scenario in which the prospects for a safe entry are uncertain.

We still have a three orbiter fleet. It would be highly desirable to keep it at that level. Depending on the perceived level of damage, do we get a volunteer to attempt to bring home a very valuable national asset (one is enough, I believe)? There’s a limited pool, of course–it has to be one of the crew at the station, and only a small subset of that crew is qualified for the job. If someone does volunteer, does the agency accept it? It would be irrational to throw away a third of the fleet, and a multibillion dollar asset to avoid risking the life of a willing volunteer whose job it is to take such risks, but I can imagine the agency doing exactly that (with no doubt a lot of kibitzing from the peanut gallery on the Hill).

That’s the kind of decision that causes sleepless nights for flight directors and agency heads.

Note that in none of this discussion have I yet addressed how to ultimately get the crew down, and to support them at a crowded ISS until such a time as we can do that. Options for crew return are multiple Soyuz flights, or simply chance another Shuttle flight, with the risk of stranding yet another crew, but only a two-person crew this time. The chances of two incidents in a row (and three out of four in a row, counting Columbia–though that makes it a conditional probability) seem pretty slim to me, but of course the probability of heads on a coin toss is always fifty fifty, regardless of the history. If this option is chosen, likely this will be the last Shuttle mission ever flown, regardless of its success. Unless we become more rational about such things, in which case we may do one more to repair Hubble.

In any event, the administrator may have set himself up for some very interesting decisions in the near future with his decision to launch.

[Update late afternoon Pacific]

I see over at The Flame Trench that NASA plans an August 21st rescue mission with Atlantis (a week earlier than its planned August 28th mission) should it be necessary. That means a seven-week stay at ISS.

Some people are criticizing Mike Griffin’s decision to overrule some of his managers, and go ahead with the next Shuttle flight, claiming that “schedule pressure” is driving the agency to make a decision in defiance of launch safety, as occurred with Challenger and Columbia.

I disagree, of course. The only thing wrong with Griffin’s decision is that it came almost a year too late–they should have restarted the regular schedule after last summer’s return to flight (and in fact, the return to flight should have been much sooner). I’m on record of long standing as believing that the CAIB’s recommendations were unrealistic, and if they weren’t at the time, they certainly became so when Bush came out with his new policy in early 2004 (which included retirement of the Shuttle fleet in 2010). The Shuttle is as safe as it can practically be made (and despite a lot of confusion among many, including professional “safety” engineers, “safe” is a relative, not absolute state).

I’m doing a lot of work right now with a company that specializes in this sort of risk analysis (though we fine tune it a little more, using a five by five matrix, rather than a four by three). While useful, this kind of analysis is more art than science, with an unavoidable level of subjectivity.

But what it doesn’t take into account is the schedule and cost issues. I’ve noted before that we’re in the worst of all possible worlds right now (and will remain so until we start to fly again with regularity). We’re spending billions of dollars per year to not fly the system, and the date (admittedly arbitrary) of retirement looms, leaving less and less time to complete the ISS (the only reason that the Shuttle hasn’t already been retired). We know as much as we can know about how safe the vehicle is, we don’t know how to make it any safer, absent spending many more billions and years (money that would be much better spent on new systems). The crew are ready to fly, and most of the astronaut corps would have been the day after Columbia broke up. Or if not, NASA did a lousy job in choosing them. Even a “catastrophe” (loss of another orbiter and crew) wouldn’t be the end of the world (though it might be the end of Mike Griffin’s career, since he’s decided to do his job and make this decision), because we’re planning to retire the fleet anyway. But it’s extremely unlikely (and would have been had we done nothing after Columbia, as evidenced by the fact that it happened only once in a hundred flights). The chances of losing another vehicle in the few remaining flights are small.

Mike Griffin is right. It’s time, long past time, to fly.

[Update late afternoon]

There’s a pretty lively discussion of this over at The Flame Trench, with a post by Todd Halvorson. Some of the comments contain the typical fallacies. I loved this one:

You wrote your comment on a computer that without the NASA program would only fit in a large room, you probably cook on a teflon pan. The astronauts do not take up cargo bays full of cash and shovel it out of the airlock, the money is spent to pay salaries and for goods. This money is then returned to the various communities in the form of; buying houses, buying cars, buying groceries, and also paying taxes. Government employees are the only ones that “pay their employers for working”.

Let’s see, there are two false spinoff claims, the old “we don’t send money into space” strawman, and the “multiplier effect” (containing a version of the broken windows fallacy) all in one graf.

I liked this one, too:

If you think the program is a waste of money, think about this: After the Apollo program ended, the Brevard County Area was a waste land. Homes were worth zero and business folded. The Wedgefield area in Orange county is a prime example. Do away with the space program and you will have a disaster here. The economy of this area will drop to almost zero and your local investments will be worth zero. I realize some think it is a waste of money thats becuase you want that money to go into free government handouts for you. Get a job. If you do away with the program and let China get a foot hold in space, we will be in dier straits. The space program is Brevard, no program, no Brevard.

Yes, the taxpayers are clearly obligated to maintain home values in Brevard County. Well, and to keep the Yellow Horde (whose earliest prediction in their “race” with us to the moon is several years after NASA’s plans) from becoming our space overlords.

If this is true, that’s the ultimate product placement–for something that doesn’t yet exist. (Not implying that Mark isn’t right–just that I didn’t follow the link, because I didn’t want to see the spoilers.)

Someone over there has been noticing the new space industry:

New commercial markets, among them space tourism, have a great potential to become major drivers in space technology development. This study aims at the assessment of the feasibility of European initiatives to address these new markets through the development of crewed space vehicles.

The more the merrier, but given Airbus’ problems and the general bureaucratic issues over there (even worse than NASA, if that can be believed), I’m not as encouraged as some might be. In addition, they’ve even more of a nanny-state mentality than we do here, and they’ll have trouble getting the kind of flexible regulatory environment with regard to passenger safety that we just won from the FAA. Not to mention the fact that they don’t have any natural flight test sites there–they’ll have to go to Africa, Asia or the Middle East to find sufficiently large unpopulated areas.

It looks like we may actually have a Shuttle launch in a couple weeks. The best place to stay on top of this will probably be The Flame Trench, the Florida Today blog.

Keith Cowing seems to think that Stephen Hawking is being inconsistent:

When asked about his thoughts on President Bush’s proposal to put a man on Mars within 10 years, Hawking simply replied: “Stupid.”

This, in the context of the recent story that Dr. Hawking thinks that we must colonize space for our long-term survival.

I don’t see what the problem is. It’s possible to both believe that we should colonize space, and that the current policy is a poor way to do so, for the expenditures being proposed. I can attest to this, because I do in fact believe that.