This would normally be another rant, but it's late and I'm tired so it's going to be short.
Anyway. I was just reading about the Soviet Space Battlestation Skif, which was the Soviet Union's response to Reagan's Star Wars program. What's interesting about it isn't the concept of space-based warfare so much as the method that was to be used to put it in to orbit: the Energia booster rocket, the same vehicle used on the Buran space shuttle.
Why is it interesting? Because that's what the Space Transport System is supposed to be (as I understand it) - a booster platform to loft things in to space. The Shuttle is just something that gets tacked on to the side of it. In all of the talk of what to do about the Shuttle, maybe it's worth noting that the STS is still a nice way to put lots of things into space; not just the Shuttle.
One of the concerns about the early termination of the Shuttle program is what to do with the ISS; well, why not strip the life support equipment out of one of the Shuttles and make it a fully automated box that just goes in to orbit? The Soviets did it with the Buran, and it seemed to be able to get up and down without incident (the problems with the Buran all involved what happened once it was on the ground). With life support equipment removed from the Shuttle, heavier cargo could be lifted as well. And when it's time for people to go to and from the ISS, a crew module could be fit in the cargo bay of the Shuttle. It might seem odd having the Shuttle crew as passengers, but why not? After all, the Shuttle wasn't supposed to be the glamorous part.
Just a thought. I'm off to bed.
Note, 30 May 2020: As with other space-related posts from this era, 2020 me doesn't totally agree with 2004 me, and there are some very confident statements that seem a bit questionable, but overall the post isn't bad so I'm posting it anyway.
I visited the Kennedy Space Center tourist attraction last week, which was pretty fun. It's an interesting place to go and look at authentic-looking replicas of cool space technology, and they have a big gift shop.
On the way back, David and I were talking a bit about the space program in general, and it got me thinking about current events in the space program.
In a time when NASA is thinking about retiring the Space Shuttle early, the 35th anniversary of man's first steps on the moon pass by with barely a mention, and Russian Space Shuttles are turning up abandoned in the desert, I think it's important to ask: what's the deal with the space program? Why do we have it? What's the goal? And what do we do
the Space Shuttles?
As I've said before, the Shuttle was a great first step, but it's time to move on.
But to where? Over the last couple of decades, when we should have been looking forward, we've been focused intently on low Earth orbit. Without clear goals for the future, we experimented with a few neat ideas, but nothing really took off (so to speak) because they weren't any better than the Shuttle at performing the same tasks, and they didn't really take us any farther than the Shuttle could. So NASA dumped some money at them, learned a few neat things, came up with some nifty ideas, and then pitched them all in the trash. (In theory, all of those ideas are recorded somewhere, but for practical purposes, my guess is that most of them are permanently lost).
So now we're left with aging (and ailing) Shuttles, but nothing to replace them. Our esteemed president has suggested a new mission (first the moon, then Mars), but we don't have the slightest idea how to do it.
How is that possible? I mean we've already been to the moon, right? So we know how to do that, right? Wrong. We've forgotten how, because we've totally ignored it for 20 years. One would assume that all of the data still exists somewhere, but it's more likely that the data has been lost, or destroyed, or purged. And the people who worked on the Apollo project have long since retired or died, and since there was no continuing work done, none of that information was passed on to the next generation. So we have to learn it all over again.
In the last twenty years, we could have been learning how to keep astronauts in space for months on end without any intervention from Earth-based assistance. We haven't figured that out yet - the small crew of the ISS spends all of their time desperately trying to keep the thing working; without frequent supply missions with food, water, and spare parts, the ISS would kill its occupants and come tumbling to Earth. And it's not even technically in space - it sits in the layer of plasma that surrounds the planet. (If this doesn't seem like an important distinction, ask the crew that decided to run the US-built solar panels at 130-180V why plasma is different than space).
There are many reasons for our lack of progress, but I think that it comes down to two main reasons: lack of defined goals and a subcontracting fetish. I'll address the two separately.
All dressed up and nowhere to go
The prime of NASA's existence was when the US was focused on getting to the moon. At that time, the agency had a concrete goal and the means to get there. The best science and engineering in the world was happening at NASA, and because of that they attracted the finest minds in the world. As we made our first stabs at the moon, we inspired a generation of students to become scientists and engineers - through the 80s and 90s we reaped the benefits with amazing scientific discoveries and engineering feats. This is starting to taper off; our generation's inspiration comes from people who dropped out of college and became millionaires in the personal computer industry: hardly positive role models.
Though getting to the moon was an excellent goal and worthy of doing, we went about it for the wrong reasons: once we got to the moon, Americans immediately lost interest and wondered why we needed to be spending all of that money playing low-gravity golf and lugging rocks around space. Indeed, even NASA seemed to have a hard time justifying itself once we had been there a few times, and we cut the number of moon missions short. Thankfully, there were still communists to compete with, so somebody got the great idea of making a reusable launch vehicle (also an excellent goal worth pursuing), and NASA jumped on the task.
The only problem was that while a reusable launch vehicle might be practical, it wasn't all that exciting. Indeed; it was named the "Space Shuttle" precisely to conjure up images of routine, uninteresting voyages in to space: the Shuttle was to be means to an end, a way to haul the interesting stuff in to space. So we came up with the Shuttle, and everybody looked around again for something to do, but couldn't find anything: NASA had already expended all of its political capital justifying the horrendous budget overruns the Shuttle had produced, and explaining why it was so expensive and non-routine to launch, and couldn't get congress to give them any more money until they made it cheaper.
Fast forward twenty years, and here we are still trying to do that: the interesting work has all been done, and all of the great minds that NASA attracted in the 1970s and 1980s have all left to better paying, more secure jobs in the private sector. The underpaid, overworked subcontractors remaining do a great job under the circumstances, but they're doing exceptionally non-glamorous (and mostly thankless) work, with low-level (at best) scientific gain. NASA, once a powerhouse, lies slowly decomposing in the wide-open spaces it once filled.
Government == Bad?
People seem to have an aversion to government employees. I've never understood it, but it's there, and it's hit NASA hard. The end result of this feeling, of course, isn't to reduce the size of government per se; rather the standard reaction is to subcontract out government jobs. This way the size of government is technically smaller, though as a general rule the number of employees doesn't really drop, and the cost generally goes up.
NASA's prime contractor for Space Shuttle operations, the United Space Alliance, sports the following scope of work:
At the Johnson Space Center in Texas:
At the Kennedy Space Center in Florida:
... so basically, they do everything. Why do we need NASA again? All they seem to do is manage subcontractors and hand out money.
The fact is, subcontracting isn't the way to do science. Subcontractors spend half of their time justifying their existence, and the other half falsifying timesheets to maximize their paychecks. Despite any claims otherwise, much of the United Space Alliance's often mentioned $400 million per launch savings comes from cutting corners on safety and reducing staff levels in important areas such as pre-launch checking.
Non-governmental organizations, either privately held or publicly traded, are in business first to make money. That's what business is about: profit. At first glance, it seems like an excellent way to save money; if the corporation sees a way to operate more efficiently to save money, it will. Right? Of course: but remember that priority one is making money; safety, quality, and reliability straggle in at distant second, third, and fourth. United Space Alliance (hereafter USA) is not interested in the science. They aren't interested in discovery. They aren't interested in redesigning the Shuttle to be lighter, safer, or stronger. They're interested in removing pre-launch checks to save $20 per launch. They're interested in their award fee. And most importantly, they're interested in keeping their contract when it comes up for review: $12 billion over ten years is what they want.
Steps for success
This is getting long, but I feel very strongly about it. I feel that NASA shouldn't be doomed to irrelevance; there's so much we can learn from space that we shouldn't just abandon it. So how should we proceed? I'm glad you asked:
We shouldn't stay on our planet forever. It's human nature to explore, discover, and expand. There's still plenty to do on Earth, but we also need to start making tentative steps off the rock. It won't be cheap, it won't be easy, and it might be a little dangerous: but the payoff will be profound. We can make it happen, but only if we try. Let's get started.
Note, 1 May 2020: As I look at this post, almost 2 decades after originally posting it, I no longer agree with a lot of what I said here. In the intervening 17 years, I started working at NASA, the Shuttle fleet was retired, and then I stopped working at NASA (those three events are unrelated, I swear!). Anyway, I have a lot to say about the Shuttle program (mostly good things) and NASA in general (a lot of bad things) but some get said in later posts, and some I will keep to myself for now. Maybe I'll do another NASA post, or set of posts, in the future.
I spent most of this morning and early afternoon glued to the radio, listening to reports and commentary on the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia. I tried sitting in front of the TV watching CNN as I had done in September of 2001, but CNN's coverage of the event was sickening. NPR ended up having more intelligent coverage than any of the other news sources I tried.
The train of events leading up to the disaster is posted in so many places that I'm not going to bother mentioning it here. I'm also going to refrain from speculating on the direct cause of the disaster, because I don't have the requisite competence in this area. However, there is one nagging issue that I feel bears a closer look -- that of the piece of insulation that fell off of the OV (Orbiter Vehicle) at launch and apparently impacted the left wing.
What bothers me is not that this appears to be a smoking gun -- as I said, I'm in no position to speculate on that. The part that bothers me is the fact that once the Shuttle had launched, NASA had no way of inspecting the wing to see if it was damaged.
In one of the press conferences, we learned that Columbia was not equipped with an arm, there was no method of getting a view of the sides or bottom of the OV, and EVA was out of the question because even if one of the astronauts could get to the wing (they couldn't), there would be nothing for them to do because the astronauts do not have the training or equipment to make repairs of that nature to the shuttle. Furthermore, if there was in fact visible damage to the OV, the astronauts could do nothing but float around in space, because Columbia would not be able to (for instance) maneuver itself to rendezvous with the ISS, and even if it could it is not equipped to dock with the station. Furthermore, NASA's most optimistic estimate of how long it would take to launch a Shuttle to respond to some emergency is 2-3 weeks -- as long as there is already a shuttle on the pad, ready to go, and there are no crew change requirements. Otherwise, your emergency could have to wait 3-4 months to prepare a vehicle and crew for launch. Hardly a viable option.
Yes, it's true: NASA, which makes backups of backups of backups and contingency plans for contingency plans, has no way of saving astronauts once they are in space. Not only that; they have left themselves a huge blind spot (the physical condition of the bottom of the shuttle).
This blind spot is the cause of much speculation now on the cause of the Columbia disaster -- was there damage to the left wing of the OV from a piece of insulation that fell during launch? We may never know for sure. Any method of showing an image of the Shuttle's wing -- EVA, a camera, whatever -- could have answered many questions, and perhaps saved the lives of seven astronauts. If there are any benefits to be gained from this event, I hope to see:
It seems fitting at this point to refrain from drawing any conclusions. Hopefully, we will know more about what happened and what could have been done to prevent it in the weeks and months to come. Only then can a backseat engineer like myself feel confident in providing direction for the future of the space program...