Pat Santy has a twentieth anniversary update on her ruminations from last year’s anniversary.

I’m still on vacation, though.

It’s twenty years today since Challenger was lost with all aboard. It was the first real blow to NASA’s confidence in its ability to advance us in space, or that our space policy was sound. It finally shattered illusions about twenty-four flights a year, to which the agency had been clinging up until that event, but it wasn’t severe enough to really make a major change in direction. That took the loss of Columbia, three years ago this coming Tuesday.

Unfortunately, while that resulted finally in a policy decision to retire the ill-fated Shuttle program, the agency seems to have learned the wrong lessons from it–they should have come to realize that we need more diversity in space transport, and it cannot be a purely government endeavor. Instead, harkening back to their glory days of the sixties, the conclusion seems to be that, somehow (and inexplicably) the way to affordability and sustainability is exactly the approach that was unaffordable and unsustainable the last time we did it.

But one has to grant that Apollo was safe, and probably the new system will be more so than the Shuttle was. But safety shouldn’t be the highest goal of the program. Opening frontiers has always been dangerous, and it’s childish to think that this new one should be any different. The tragedy of Challenger and Columbia wasn’t that we lost astronauts. The tragedy was that we lost them at such high cost, and for missions of such trivial value.

This is the other false lesson learned from Challenger (and Columbia)–that the American people won’t accept the loss of astronauts. But we’ve shown throughout our history that we’re willing to accept the loss of brave men and women (even in recent history) as long as it is in a worthy cause. But NASA’s goal seems to be to create yet another appallingly expensive infrastructure whose focus is on recapitulating the achievements of four decades (five decades, by the time they eventually manage it, assuming they keep to their stated schedule) ago.

Will the American people be inspired by that? I can’t say–I only know that I am not.

Would they be inspired by a more ambitious program, a riskier program that involved many more people going into space at more affordable costs, even if (or perhaps because) it is a greater hazard to the lives of the explorers? I surely would. But it seems unlikely that we’re going to get that from the current plan, or planners.

I’m pretty busy and don’t have time to write anything particularly profound about it (I’m about to get on a flight to the Great White North, where we may have a mini bloggerbash in Edmonton), but as I mentioned on The Space Show a couple hours ago, tomorrow will be the thirty-ninth anniversary of the Apollo 1 fire, in which Gus Grissom, Roger Chafee and Ed White were suffocated and burned. Saturday will be the twentieth anniversary of the loss of the Challenger. Here were my memories of that event from a post four years ago. Jim Oberg takes advantage of the anniversary to explode (so to speak) several myths about the disaster.

And of course, next week will be the third anniversary of Columbia’s breakup over Texas. I may have more to say on that when the date arrives.

I’ll be on The Space Show in about half an hour. You can listen live on the net.

Three days before the twentieth anniversary of the Challenger loss, Clark Lindsey muses on what might have been.

I’ll be on The Space Show tomorrow morning (Thursday, January 26th) from 9:30 to 11 AM Pacific, if anyone is possessed of sufficient masochism and fortitude to listen to my latest blather.

Rick Tumlinson has some space policy advice for the White House. As one of the people in attendance at the meeting last fall that Rick mentioned (and who has signed off on the consensus document that resulted), I encourage you to read the whole thing.

I doubt if they’ll pay any attention, though. I think that this administration’s space policy is pretty firmly fixed now, absent some new unexpected event (e.g., another Shuttle loss, assuming that it ever flies again), and there are many more critical issues to them at this point, both from the standpoint of the national interest and electorally. I suspect that they think that space policy is currently one of those things that ain’t broke, so there’s no need to fix it, relative to more pressing concerns. I think that the best we can hope for, at this point, is that the policy is sufficiently non-hostile to private enterprise that current NASA activities and expenditures won’t hold things back too much. This is not to say that NASA isn’t doing useful things for the private sector, but the amount of resources being expended in that direction, relative to those being spent on centralized (and ultimately unaffordable and unsustainable) fifteen-year plans, remain tragic.

As Clark Lindsey (and Keith Cowing) notes, NASA hasn’t formally dropped methane propulsion from Constellation, or CEV. The final CFI doesn’t, after all, forbid methane, or specify hypergolics. They simply appear to have dropped it in the final version because the earlier draft version of the CFI so emphatically required it.

However, given the risk aversion of industry, it’s almost a foregone conclusion that neither bidder on CEV will propose methane propulsion, absent a strong sense of a desire to have it on NASA’s part. The driving requirement at this point seems to be cost and schedule (including schedule risk), which means avoiding any unnecessary technology development programs on the critical path. So despite the fact that methane propulsion isn’t intrinsically risky, the fact that it’s currently non-existent in terms of the technology-readiness level that NASA will want at the Preliminary Design Review probably assures that it won’t be incorporated into the CEV, at least for the initial version. It could, however, be an upgrade later, assuming that the program gets to the point at which upgrades will occur.

One of Alan Boyles’ readers repeats a common myth about the emerging space industry:

“OK, rocket-powered planes have been around since the early

I’m busy writing a proposal or two, but here’s an innovative way to get to the Moon. Much lower marginal cost, and exactly the kind of things that NASA should be considering.

[via Mark Whittington]