Space Forum / Shuttle / April 2006

Mission to nowhere
As the space shuttle struggles to return to orbit, Americans are
wondering aloud whether it's worth the effort, writes Cameron Stewart

19apr06

PORTRAITS of dead astronauts line the walls of the Outpost Tavern in
Texas. Their ranks have doubled since the explosion in 2003 of the
space shuttle Columbia, and the astronauts' sunny smiles seem all the
more haunting given the horrific manner of their deaths.

Yet the locals in this ramshackle wooden watering hole near the Johnson
Space Centre never complain about the grim memories hanging from the
memorial walls for the crews of the ill-fated Columbia and Challenger
space shuttles.
This is the pub where NASA's astronauts come to play after a hard day
of mission training. It is therefore one of the few places where they
can talk frankly and freely about what has gone right - and wrong -
with America's space program.

But lately NASA might be relieved that it cannot hear the
Budweiser-fueled rantings of its astronauts.

It is 25 years ago this month since NASA launched its first space
shuttle with the promise that it would revolutionise the nature of
space travel. A generation on, that dream has gone sour.

Fourteen dead astronauts, two lost shuttles, continuing safety concerns
and huge budget blowouts have combined to cast a pall over the future
of America's space program.

As NASA administrator Michael Griffin admits: "What we have ahead of us
represents a challenge significantly greater than when we first went to
the moon."

Although NASA is celebrating the 25th anniversary of the first shuttle
mission in April 1981 with all the gusto its public relations team can
muster, some members of Congress, who hold NASA's purse strings, are
quietly wondering if it has all been worthwhile.

"This can't go on forever," a senior shuttle manager at the Johnson
Space Centre told The Orlando Sentinel. "There is some concern among
management that if we aren't able to solve the engineering problems
soon that Congress will grow less and less likely to continue funding
the program."

The shuttle program has failed to live up to expectations for several
reasons, not all of which can be blamed on NASA.

UPS AND DOWNS

The space shuttle program was launched in January 1972, when Richard
Nixon was US president, to provide a link to a proposed space station
which then failed to materialise.

The first shuttle spaceflight was in 1981. Shuttles spent the next 17
years conducting research and carrying satellites into orbit. They
finally began helping build the International Space Station (still
incomplete) in 1998.

The craft has three main assemblies: the reusable orbiter vehicle, the
expendable external tank, and the two reusable solid rocket boosters.
The tank and boosters are jettisoned during ascent.

Five operational shuttles were built - Columbia (lost 73 seconds after
lift-off in January 1986), Challenger (lost on re-entry in Febuary
2003) Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour. (Enterprise - named after the
Star Trek spaceship - was used only to test gliding and landing.)

Shuttles have spent 1046 days in space, have orbited Earth 16,557 times
and have travelled more than 692 million kilometres.

There have been 114 flights manned by 703 crew. The program employs
25,000 people.

Total cost is estimated at $US145 billion.

The much-touted scientific breakthroughs that were promised 25 years
ago as a result of on-board experiments in space have largely failed to
materialise.

Over the years thousands of experiments have been conducted on a
dizzying range of subjects from learning how quail embryos grow in zero
gravity to how alcohol ferments in space.

Many of these experiments had noble aims, such as helping improve the
quality of drugs or understanding the effects of ageing, and not all
have been in vain.

But if shuttle science has helped trigger any significant scientific
breakthroughs NASA has remained silent and the general public is none
the wiser.

Many scientists, such as Norman Sleep, a geophysicist at Stanford
University, says the scientific return from the shuttle program has
been limited at best. He and others point out that many of the shuttle
experiments can now be automated, making astronauts largely redundant.

The focus on science has also had the unfortunate effect of helping to
kill public interest in the space program.

NASA has found it impossible to sell the benefits of quail-egg
experiments to an American public steeped in the glory days of the
Mercury, Gemini and Apollo spacecraft, when chisel-jawed fighter jocks
held the nation spellbound as they were catapulted into space.

Back then astronauts were super-heroes in an era when president John F.
Kennedy pointed at the moon and Congress promised unlimited funding.

Youngsters were raised on the story of how Alan Shepard, strapped on
top of his Mercury-Redstone rocket in 1961, waiting to become the first
American in space, urged the control room to hurry, saying: "Why don't
you fix your little problem and light this candle."

The astronaut corps in those days drove fast Corvettes, cavorted in
Camelot with the Kennedys and addressed Congress.

As Tom Wolfe wrote in his 1979 book The Right Stuff, it was a life of
"flying and drinking and drinking and driving".

These days NASA's astronaut corps prefer to drive family station wagons
and drink quietly in the Outpost Tavern in the shadow of their dead
comrades. They are as anonymous as their predecessors were famous.

It says much that one of the few shuttle missions to capture public
attention in recent decades was in 1998 when John Glenn, one of the
original Mercury astronauts, returned to space aboard the shuttle at
the age of 77.

Officially Glenn's mission was to help the understanding of the ageing
process, but its real purpose was to rekindle public interest in the
space program.

Sadly, this interest was rekindled for the wrong reasons. The fiery
destruction of Columbia in 2003 underlined the shuttle's imperfect
design.

It took two years before the next shuttle was launched and when it was,
in August last year, the intense public interest had nothing to do with
science and everything to do with whether the shuttle Discovery and its
crew would survive the mission.

Fears of another catastrophe arose mid-mission when NASA noticed that
pieces of foam had fallen off Discovery's external fuel tanks, the same
problem that triggered the events leading to the loss of the Columbia.

The problem even caused veteran Australian astronaut Andy Thomas to
lose his cool. While on board the shuttle, Thomas controversially broke
NASA's code of silence, describing the falling debris an "an emotional
disappointment [and] also an engineering disappointment", comments that
saw him banned from the post-flight press conference.

Since then, NASA has struggled to fix the shuttle's problems and
recently pushed its next launch date back again, this time from May to
July.

Given these problems, some are asking why bother sending the shuttle
back into space at all?

President George W. Bush has said the shuttles will be retired in 2010
as part of a shift towards sending astronauts back to the moon and
eventually on to Mars.

Underlying this is the tacit realisation that the $US16.5 billion
($22.3 billion)-a-year space program has lost purpose and direction.
The shuttles have not left the legacy that either the White House or
NASA had hoped for.

But NASA has little choice but to keep the shuttles flying in order to
complete the construction of the international space station.

"We have to keep the space shuttle going until 2010 or until the
international space station is completed," US Senator Bill Nelson said
last week. "Not only for the obvious reason of being able to complete
this multibillion-dollar investment but ... from a standpoint of
keeping all of the educated and experienced workforce."

Existing plans are for a further 17 shuttle missions to assemble the
space station by late 2010, but unless safety issues can be resolved
quickly this schedule may be never be met.

The replacement for the shuttle is the capsule-shaped Crew Exploration
Vehicle, or CEV, which is still in the design phase and which is not
due to begin manned missions until 2014.

The new design abandons the shuttle concept of a fully re-usable
spaceship and goes back to an Apollo era-shaped capsule which is
perched on top of a rocket. Other parts, such as a lunar lander, will
be launched on a separate rocket that will be retrieved by the crew in
space.

The plan is that NASA will not only fly to the moon but will
effectively colonise it, staying there for months on end. On the moon,
"colonists" aim to be semi-self-sufficient, extracting oxygen from the
moon's soil and growing vegetables in lunar greenhouses. NASA plans to
get back there by 2020.

The plan eventually is that astronauts will become so self-sufficient
that NASA can one day attempt the holy grail of space travel: a manned
trip to Mars, a journey that would take three years.

A Mars mission would capture public attention like nothing since Neil
Armstrong first walked on the moon, but the scientific, technical and
logistical obstacles are huge.

"It's like Magellan," planetary scientist Wendell Mendell, manager of
NASA's Office for Human Exploration Science says. "You send them off
and maybe they come back, maybe they don't."

But the biggest obstacle may turn out to be political.

Congress is growling about the space program which, at face value, is
delivering nothing but bad news right now.

Political support for the program in the US has always been closely
married to national pride. Washington's support for the space program
has been strongest when it trumps the Russians or the Chinese or when
it creates new records and tests new boundaries.

But that support softens noticeably when shuttles explode and when NASA
has little to boast about.

After 25 years it is too harsh to brand the shuttle program a failure;
despite two crashes, the shuttle has worked largely as planned and has
carried out its missions, however uninspiring they may have been.

But the shuttle era will hardly be remembered as a shining success.

Perhaps its greatest sin was to strip the glitter from space travel.
Over 25 years the shuttle - when not exploding - has become a glorified
bus, dropping groceries off to the space station and helping to hatch
quail's eggs.

Without a target - such as the moon or Mars - it became the vehicle for
a journey to no-where, a mission without a purpose.

The Bush administration hopes to turn back the clock, to once again
shoot for the moon and beyond. It wants to revive the flagging interest
of a sceptical public.

But one wonders whether NASA will get over the limited achievements of
the space shuttle era. Or the haunting smiles of those on the wall of
the Outpost Tavern.

I often pine for the good old days when the S/N ratio was higher.