Goodbye Shuttle! Where do we go from here?

Update: Congrats to Atlantis and her crew for a successful mission!

Shortly before 6 am July 21st, residents of southwestern Florida will be awoken by two sonic booms half a second apart. The Space Shuttle Atlantis’s calling card will be heard one final time before it touches down at the Kennedy Space Center at 5:56 am.

Why two booms? Because the shuttles are so long (122 ft) there is a boom from both the nose and tail and they arrive about a 1/2 second apart.

For Cosmoboy this final flight marks the end of an era. I remember exactly what I was doing the day the first shuttle mission launched – playing soccer in a cub-scout tournament. I was really upset that I had to miss the launch! But it didn’t matter, because even the second one got quite a bit of press, and the third. But I don’t think TVs in classes got turned on to watch launches beyond that.

I’ve written at length about the shuttle program before. I still feel the greatest success of the shuttle is the amazing repair work it did on the Hubble Space Telescope. It took spacewalks to new levels of sophistication, making astronauts actually perform operations with the dinky little screwdrivers used to fix computers. Amazing what they accomplished!

But the shuttle has had it’s critics. Truth be told, if all you care about is getting satellites into orbit you can do it much cheaper with disposable rockets. The shuttles absolutely spectacular mission success rating of 98.5%  puts it on par with the fabled Soyuz-U. But NASA was never able to bring costs down sufficiently to realize the 50 missions a year idea that was floating around at the beginning of the 1970s.

So where do we go from here? Economic downturns, lack of funds seem to putting an end to interest in venturing out into the unknown. The corporatization of space is well underway, and that shouldn’t be surprising and at some level it is a good thing. Low Earth Orbit is a car ride away straight up. But what about to the Moon or beyond? Most people think the fact that “it’s been done” means there is no interest in going back to the Moon or further out. The costs and the risks of manned missions to Mars are far beyond what any Presidential mandate could achieve. The Space Race ended a long, long time ago.

That’s the real reason for the downturn in the space program. With the end of the cold war, the political need for reaching the highest frontier has long gone. It isn’t so much about money – the US GDP in (2005 dollars) in 1970 was $4.3 trillion, in 2010 it was $13.2 trillion. The US was in Vietnam in 1970, today it’s in Afghanistan and Iraq. For all the arguments that NASA is expensive, it really fades into comparison with the US military expenditure on supporting and creating air conditioning in Afghanistan and Iraq ($20 billion). The 1.2 trillion that have been spent on the operations in Afghanistan and Iraq make the budget overrun on the JWST look like pocket change.

But rant over on that point. Military operations are expensive whatever the country. (Oh, did I mention that while there is one Hubble Space Telescope, the military was given funding about 15 “keyhole” satellites all of which supposedly use very similar designs to the HST, sorry I said I would stop! 🙂 )

Unlike many of my colleagues I remain a supporter of manned exploration of space. Astronauts know the risks and we celebrate them for having the nerve to do what they do. Space exploration is never going to be safe. It’s never going to be cheap. I for one am not convinced the commercialization of space is going to magically fix the problem of an ever dwindling tax base for public programs in the US (the rich continue to get richer and pay lower taxes – just ask Warren Buffet what he thinks).

And that brings me to the biggest problem facing US space exploration – there is no overriding vision for what they want to achieve. Let’s face it, it’s never been first and foremost about doing science. Military or political ideology are stronger motivators.

But now manned exploration that goes further than we have before seems to be viewed as a luxury. The only vision statement a President can make is about something to be achieved in twenty or thirty years time. JFK is probably crying somewhere.

If you want to create a heavy lift vehicle, it would be a really good idea to know what you want to do with it. The general idea of being able to put 130 tons (or so) into LEO so that we can go beyond that at some point is not a good mission outline. Neither will it capture anyone’s imagination. It has an indefinite timeline that can just be delayed.

30 years ago, as an 11-year old kid, I saw hope and excitement in the space program. I saw a future prepared to take on real risks for real achievement.

Today, the end of the shuttle and the looming cancellation of JWST bring with them great uncertainty and will certainly not excite our children. Mastery and challenges are what truly motivate people to be successful.

Having programs that inspire a new generation with the joy of discovery, from where our future is born, is not a luxury.

< End opinion piece 🙂 >

Last flight of Discovery

Update: February 24th 2011. Discovery final launches into the sky for the final flight – about time! I’ve left the article as it was originally written – I think it still works.

On Nov. 3rd (hopefully!) the Space Shuttle Discovery will launch on it’s final mission.  Discovery first flew when I was just 13 years old – the summer of 1984. That’s the year of the Los Angeles Olympics, Frankie Goes to Hollywood and Ronald Regan was in full speed at the White House.

26 years later Discovery shows it age, and well I guess I do too. But what is the legacy of the shuttle program? Setting aside the heart-wrenching Challenger and Columbia disasters, are we going to look back on the era of the shuttle with enthusiasm or criticism?

Speaking as an astronomer, I have a special attachment to the shuttle. It’s hard to believe that the servicing of the Hubble Space Telescope could have been achieved by any other vehicle. The astronauts needed to be up there a long time as well as carrying large pieces of equipment. Despite the main mirror disaster, being able to upgrade the instruments on the HST has made it the most successful telescope in history.

And the most expensive. I’ve heard estimates that if you add the cost of all the shuttle missions to fix or add new instruments to the HST, the total cost of the HST program is north of 10 billion dollars. Ouch! Shuttle flights are phenomenally expensive at 1.3 billion dollars each!

And that is the most common criticism aimed at the shuttle. The orbiters themselves are outrageously expensive too. But a large part of that expense helps make the shuttle close to being the most reliable launcher available. Reliability costs money. Even the fabled Russian Soyuz launcher is no more reliable than the shuttle when it comes to launching satellites.

For the time being reuseable vehicles are off the space exploration table. While the US has not figured out what its “heavy launcher” will be, a new generation of commercial launchers such as Falcon-9 will see us go the smaller, faster, cheaper route for small to mid-range satellites.

Provided there is real competition in the launcher arena this could be a good thing. But I’m betting there won’t be. Don’t get me wrong, the whole Ares program was a massive miscalculation, but real innovation in the private sector requires money to enable real competition. I just don’t see there being enough cash to support multiple R&D efforts. Maybe it will take competition with the Chinese.

Whatever we wind up thinking about the shuttle program, Discovery holds some records that won’t be broken for some time. It’s flown the most number of missions (38), accumulated almost a year in space (351 days), and orbited the Earth 5628 times. Those are some pretty amazing stats.

After Discovery flies its final mission, Endeavour and Atlantis will fly the final two missions of the shuttle program. June 28th is the planned launch date for the final shuttle mission (STS-135) to be flown by Atlantis.

I really want to see it.