This article, describing the potential danger of an uncommanded thruster firing, is just one more illustration of why the Shuttle has to be retired, and the sooner the better.

Back in the olden days, when I worked at Rockwell in the eighties and early nineties, some of my colleagues would write technical papers, in all seriousness, that we would likely be flying the Shuttle well into the 2020s or 2030s. Ignoring the fact that this was a self-serving delusion (we were, after all, in the business of building and flying the things), their logic was that it was designed for a hundred flights, and at the low flight rate we were getting out of it, it would easily last well into those decades. I didn’t make myself very popular when I laughed at this logic, but I did nonetheless.

Setting aside the issue of what a disaster it would be for space policy if we were still flying such an economically absurd system five decades after it had been designed, they didn’t seem to understand that, like the old oil commercial, “think months, not miles.” The fleet is aging, as we saw a couple years ago with the cracks in the fuel-cell liners. The standard rejoinder to this argument is that we are still flying B-52s that were originally built in the 1950s, and in some cases we have grandsons of some of the original flight crews flying them today.

That ignores the economics, of course. B-52s are heavily used, still flying sorties every day, and it makes sense to continue to maintain and inspect them, because the cost of doing so is amortized over a large number of flights. But it’s hard to justify the expenditure of many millions of dollars to replace wiring in the RCS, when the fleet is going to be retired soon anyway, and only flies a few times a year. This logic applies to almost any maintenance/replacement issue with the vehicles, all of which are uniformly hyperexpensive to implement. Unless it’s a clear and obvious safety issue in the context of the next couple dozen flights, it’s very hard to justify the expense at this point.

You know that space tourism is being taken seriously when you can read about it in Travel and Leisure magazine. This piece by Los Angeles writer M. G. Lord was in the January issue, which Patricia just pointed out to me.

I last saw M. G. last June in Mojave for the first SpaceShipOne flight into space. I hadn’t realized that she has a new book out. It looks quite interesting. Check out the review by NASA historian Roger Launius.

Jeff Foust has an article today on a recent speech by Gene Kranz (yesterday was the thirty-fifth anniversary of the successful return of the crippled Apollo XIII). It’s become popular myth as a result of Ron Howard’s movie that Gene was the director of flight control, solely responsible for getting the crew back safely, when in fact there were more than one. In my opinion, Glynn Lunney in particular gets short (in fact zero) shrift in the movie, though the work obviously had to be done in shifts.

But I’m afraid that we (and I include Gene in this) take the wrong lessons from that incident. Yes, the teamwork was splendid, and the improvisation excellent, and they did everything they needed to do to get them back. But as I commented back in days immediately following the loss of Columbia, those are necessary, but not sufficient, to ensure that we won’t lose people in space. It has to be recognized that in addition to all of the smart moves on the ground, that crew was also damn lucky. If that explosion had happened while the crew was on the surface, or on the way back from the Moon, they’d have died, no matter how much derring do was on display in Houston. A lot of other things could have gone wrong that would have killed them, and no amount of teamwork, training, and smarts would have prevented it.

Sending people into space is a risky business, and we have to accept that. It sounds nice when Gene says it, but “failure is not an option” isn’t a realistic attitude. As someone once said, when failure isn’t an option, success gets damned expensive. And of course, the easiest way to ensure that failure isn’t an option is to not even make the attempt.

My current partner in crime here, Sam Dinkin, has some interesting ideas about how to encourage space activity and drive down costs over at The Space Review today. I don’t agree with all of them, and I’m sure that in some cases there may be some bad unintended consequences, though I haven’t given them enough thought to identify any yet.

I like the idea of subsidizing EELV at the margin. Government policy in general doesn’t seem to understand the concept of marginal cost (one of the reasons that both Shuttle and ISS are programmatic disasters), and a more explicit recognition of its importance could have some good policy outcomes.

I’m not sure what he means by “privatizing ISS and Shuttle,” I think that the infrastructure to maintain both of them is too expensive for anyone to operate at a profit, even if they were given away.