As much as Dittemore may have wanted to defend NASA’s original assessment, he couldn’t. The physical constraints of manned spaceflight may be harsh and unforgiving, but so are the institutional ones. Because NASA was reluctant after the Challenger explosion in 1986 to make certain key disclosures, current NASA chief Sean O’Keefe has been adamant about conducting this investigation transparently. “We’re not favoring one principle or possible explanation over another,” he said. Even the embarrassing ones can’t be dismissed. Dittemore parted from this script only once, last Wednesday. “We don’t believe it’s this foam,” he said, brandishing a football-size hunk. “It’s got to be something else that we don’t know about yet.” The next day he reasserted the company line–NASA minds remain open–but insisted there was still some “missing link” to be found.
As NASA handed off the investigation to an independent commission, it couldn’t have been encouraged by its progress so far. What was at the beginning of the week a short list of probable causes evaporated into a deepening mystery. A search for debris scattered over several states turned up what may be a chunk of the left wing, but otherwise no major clues. Data beamed to satellites during Columbia’s final seconds turned out to be nonexistent. Late in the week, the U.S. Air Force produced photos taken during the Columbia’s re-entry that appeared to show damage to the left wing, but NASA isn’t sure. What may have caused the damage in the first place–a collision with space junk? the loss of tiles?–is still anybody’s guess.
A lot is riding on the outcome. The shuttle program won’t resume until NASA finds the cause of the accident. But there’s another, more urgent undertone: the feeling that NASA is on trial, and with it, the whole worldwide enterprise of manned spaceflight. In the United States, the political will to send people into space has waned steadily since the moment Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon in 1969. After September 11, it began to seem like an extravagance. Now, with war pending in Iraq and budget deficits stretching to the horizon, the case for spending billions on the International Space Station (ISS) and $500 million or so each time a shuttle goes up is getting ever more difficult to make. The Columbia tragedy is so recent, no U.S. politician has dared express anything but support for NASA. But criticism will come, judging from the chorus of pundits last week. “Some commentators have suggested that the Columbia disaster… marks the end of the whole space shuttle program,” wrote New York Times columnist Paul Krugman. “Let’s hope they’re right… Manned space flight in general has turned out to be a bust.”
This kind of talk is a good thing. What this patient needs, after all, is shock therapy. For three decades, U.S. politicians and the public have never honestly addressed the most important question of all: what is the point of sending people into space? This failure, more than wars, budgets or accidents, is why the enterprise of manned spaceflight is now in so much trouble.
The worst possible outcome would be a resumption of business as usual. For decades, NASA’s manned space program has suffered a slow, painful decline. The space station isn’t even built yet, and already it is starved of cash. It currently accommodates a crew of three, no more than Russia’s now-defunct Mir space station did, and at a far higher cost. With the space-shuttle fleet grounded, Russia’s tottering space program is now the only ticket to the ISS, and sanctions preclude the United States from paying Russia to pick up the slack. It’s conceivable that a temporary hold on construction of the ISS could evolve into a permanent scrapping of the project.
This state of affairs traces back to the early 1970s, when the shuttle program first began. To get the project approved, NASA designers sold the ship as an all-purpose, reusable vehicle that could replace existing expendable boosters–the kind that launched the Apollo capsules and fell into the ocean afterward. But the need to be all things to all people made the shuttle big and expensive. The Air Force liked the idea of using the shuttle to fix broken satellites in orbit. Because military satellites tend to be as big as Greyhound buses, the shuttle had to be even bigger to accommodate them–even though, in 20 years, the Air Force has never once used the shuttle to fix a single satellite.
Even so, the shuttle might still have been far cheaper to launch had NASA gotten enough money for its original design. Not only was the winged orbiter, where the crew rides, supposed to be reusable, so were the booster rockets that carry it. To save construction costs, NASA was forced to compromise. The result is the current configuration–a reusable orbiter riding piggyback on a big fuel tank and boosters–which costs a small fortune to launch. Engineers never liked this design. “It never passed the ’look right’ test,” says Gregory Bennett, a former Boeing engineer who worked on the space station. One reason: debris from the fuel tank could fall off and strike the shuttle–a possible cause of Columbia’s demise.
No wonder, then, the shuttle program has been a disappointment. But what were we expecting? What was the shuttle supposed to accomplish? NASA over the years has offered a litany of important jobs–microgravity research, fixing broken satellites in orbit, building a space station. But neither research nor satellite-fixing could ever justify the huge price tag. Building a space station is the real reason for building a fleet of shuttles. Nevertheless, it took the better part of two decades to get the ISS going.
By then, the shuttle fleet was already in decline. That’s the gist of Richard Blomberg’s testimony to Congress a year ago. The former chairman of NASA’s Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel said that as experienced personnel retire, NASA hasn’t been able to lure enough smart, motivated people to replace them. “Apollo vintage” launchpads and test equipment haven’t been replaced. NASA has deferred upgrades but has no adequate plan for acquiring spare parts (buying them on eBay, as NASA reportedly has done, doesn’t qualify).
Scrapping the shuttle at this point would be painful, not least because NASA has failed to develop plans for a successor. The X-33 space plane, which was supposed to take off like an airplane, without a booster stage, was developed at considerable cost in the 1990s. But NASA was concerned that the X-33’s technology–notably a new type of engine–was too expensive and risky, so it scrapped it. “If George Bush said tomorrow, ‘I’ll give you $15 billion to replace the shuttle,’ I don’t think NASA would know how to do it,” says John Logsdon, director of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University. “We’ve depended on the shuttle too long.”
Only in the past few years, with the assembly of the ISS, has the shuttle fleet come into its own. The shuttles have ferried innumerable big parts, fitted neatly in expansive cargo bays, to Earth orbit, along with seven-person crews to assemble them. Without the shuttle, the space station would be doomed. No other vehicle can handle the job of building and maintaining it. The European Space Agency’s Automated Transfer Vehicle, scheduled to be launched in 2004, will carry three times more cargo than Russia’s Progress ship, but it’s still not big enough for some ISS modules. And for the time being, Russia’s three-person Soyuz is the only passenger vehicle going.
Perhaps letting the space station die would be a good thing. After all, it suffers from the same problem as the shuttle: lack of purpose. If the shuttle is too expensive a laboratory, the space station is off the scale. Scrapping it would free up NASA to send even more robotic probes to the solar system and telescopes peering back to the beginning of the universe. Our scientific return on investment would increase.
But we would also lose something. Without the space station and the shuttle to service it, forget about going to Mars or building outposts on the moon. A quick visit to Mars would take two years. The only realistic way to prepare for such a trip is to cut your teeth on a space station in Earth orbit. What we have to decide is if such a trip is worth making. The human exploration of space may or may not be worth doing, but it’s not to be undertaken lightly. That’s what got us into the present mess.
