Posted on 07/26/2011 9:30:30 AM PDT by Shout Bits
The final Space Shuttle mission ended last week, amidst calls for Washington to cut spending. The Shuttle program cost over $200bln, not to mention 14 lives, while giving little in return. Clearly a Shuttle launch was a majestic site; no one had ever assembled a machine so complicated that had to perform perfectly. Still, at over $400 million per pop, these are expensive warm-fuzzy moments.
The Shuttles’ accomplishments were few. They launched satellites that could have been delivered to orbit cheaper by unmanned rockets. They built a space station that replaced an existing station – both of which served no purpose that unmanned experiments cannot fulfill.
Similarly, the Shuttles’ failures were many. Due to basic design flaws, they twice failed, killing all on board. Their reusable design philosophy held back engineering advances for decades. The next generation of space vehicles starkly resembles the Apollo modules. Because of the political investment in a space plane, it will take forty years to return to the Apollo solution that was first and best. Imagine if the Shuttle engineers had spent the past forty years perfecting the capsule rather than patching a design that quickly proved to be deeply flawed.
All of the interesting exploration and scientific inquiry of the past thirty years has been done by robots. Pork barrel pols could have directed similar funding to unmanned missions with the same political benefits. Even professed fiscal conservatives loved the Shuttles, but why? Nationalism drives governments to create spectacles of their power, even if they are a waste of money.
Perhaps the greatest display of waste in the name of a nationalistic pride is the Egyptian Pyramids. The Pyramids served no purpose other than to demonstrate the power of Egypt’s dictators, and they wasted the labor and talents of generations of men. Likewise, the US does not need a manned space program; it serves no purpose other than to pump nationalist pride. Without the Shuttle, the talents of thousands of the US’s best minds can now be put to better purposes.
Spectacles of power do not befit the US, because at its finest, it is not a nation of nationalism. Placing a few men on the Moon pales in comparison to the US’s great accomplishments. The US invented the free individual, teaching the world that The People can rule their government, the inverse of thousands of years’ history; the US doubled life expectancy through its medical innovations; the US eliminated starvation throughout the world, except where dictators like Stalin and Mao murder their own people; the average American lives a life of greater comfort than did Egypt’s pharos. None of these accomplishments involved a central plan. None of these accomplishments came with a grandiose spectacle of government might. These accomplishments are a testament to freedom and the power of the individual, and they are inherently not nationalistic because they are open to anyone who will have them.
NASA claimed the last Shuttle launch as a symbol of a great nation. No doubt a few pharos made the same claims about their Pyramids, but that is the mindset of a central power. When the final book is written about the US, the Moon landings and NASA will surely be mentioned, but the bulk of the history will be wonderment at how a few powerless colonies transformed the world in the blink of history’s eye. To whatever extent abandoning the Space Shuttle shifts US pride away from a symbol like the Space Shuttle, and toward the US’s unique purpose, all the better.
To facilitate the discussion let me throw out some facts.
We are stuck in this solar system for the foreseeable future.
The only habitual place within the solar system is Earth.
There is nothing we currently know of in the solar system that isn’t also available on Earth.
It is also a fact that there is serious debate between scientist about whether robot explorers might actually be superior to humans in exploring our neighborhood.
habitual = habitable.
habitual = habitable.
There’s been a lot of unmanned exploration during the shuttle era. Given the fact that the shuttle was the cheap option, and actually had a lower budget than the original cheap option that was presented to Nixon, it accomplished a lot. It kept the Hubble going, helped build the space station, tons of science happened up there. Yes we could have advanced the ball further, but that option was removed when Nixon decided the space program was a Kennedy thing and pushed them to the cheapest way to continue. Trying to cast it as a complete failure and total waste of money is just plain silly.
Don't be too quick to call that one a failure. As bad as it hurts to think about it, OBoy may get reelected. He's got millions of taxpayer's dollars to spend on the 2012 election.
If he does win, the Muslim outreach thing may be the only task NASA has left.
The problem with robot explorers is they don’t encourage speed. All our unmanned craft are “fire and forget for a couple of years (decades even)”. While they get good information it’s very slow. When we send people out we go faster, because we don’t want to stick people on a 7 year one way trip. In the long run we have to get a sustainable population of people out of the solar system, sending people around our neighborhood is a better step on that path than sending robots.
Your boosters have split apart at the o-rings.
It’s tough to check the self-destructive tendencies one has, before they do major damage. THAT was one BIG problem of NASA, in general, and more specifically, in the Shuttle Program. Scientist Feynman pointed that out very clearly after the Challenger disaster.
NASA excelled in one area. PR. Public relations.
Of course the Shuttle was deficient in all technology and technology management areas, compared to other technologies developed in the same time frame. But one area the program excelled in, besides providing a massive jobs and crony-tech political rain-making ability, was selling itself as a Grand Heroic Purpose.
There was a post like a spin out on the black ice of an emotionally driven response.
Not saying it was a total waste of money or a complete failure...of course we learned from it, and gained technology wise in the process. The question is was the amount of gain worth the money spent? I personally don’t think so.
BTW, the whole concept of the shuttle’s value as a ‘reusable’ platform is very silly, given the cost to return it back to ‘flight ready’ status after a mission. That albatross had to be stripped down and almost completely rebuilt every time it flew. Not efficient at all.
The shuttle had its’ place, and did have some value. But it was obsolete very soon after it started flying. It should have been more transitional, and should not have lasted as long as it did.
I believe that such medical devices as heart monitors which can be warn on one’s wrist and transmit data to one’s cardiologists were developed so that astronauts could be monitored here on earth.
On a closer-to-home level, I believe that the material that was developed to shield the nosecones from heat on reentry translated into Corningware which allows casseroles to go from the freezer into the oven.
The space program unleashed much research and development and has made our lives better
The Shuttle was ever a majestic cite.
Yes, one of its main purposes was to provide a PUBLIC SPECTACLE of a works project, as was the space station.
Pharo is a fine spelling. Perfectly understandable. What year did the spelling as “pharaoh” become law? Never! English has no such laws. What year did it become a hard standard? Also never, because the word originates around 3,00 years ago as Egyptian term. Hieroglyphics.
That heart monitor development predated the Shuttle. It was part of the capsule based programs. Most of the claimed innovations which are real are fruit of non-Shuttle space programs, imo. And even those, many of them would have been invented in other areas of human enterprise.
In the missing 265 missions would be the implementation of a permanent Moon base or maned exploration of Mars for example. Or, the building of a capability to intercept asteroids or comets that threaten Earth. Or, a Holiday Inn with a fantastic view. We'll never know. It wasn't allowed to happen.
Would be interesting to know more detail of the orignal vison.
Here is how they made Tang in space. A waste of time and resouces in my opinion.
http://www.geekosystem.com/shuttle-urine-recycling/
As much as I loved the Shuttles, this article makes some very good posts. The Shuttle system simply did not work out as hoped. It was supposed to make spaceflight relatively cheap, it did the opposite. The real shame is that we did not take the time to develop a BDB (Big dumb booster), or a series of scalable boosters. Should have shaved one shuttle flight per year, and used that money for R&D. I mean, this should have been going on for 20 years at least, when it was known that the Shuttles would not be the great boon to spaceflight that they had hoped they would be.
One NASA spin off that doesn’t get enough recognition is engendering/project/manufacturing management. There is a theme in the Apollo 13 Movie that too many people don’t recognize. The project management of the Apollo 13 equipment was so good that, after the explosion, the people on the ground knew every option available to the astronauts in space. They knew every screw, nut and inch of tape that was on that flight and they had the info available immediately. That level of engineering management did not exist before the Apollo project.
Today, almost every auto parts house in the Country can use those types of systems to identify a replacement part for your vehicle.
That’s just another spinoff of scientific/engineering development from NASA.
I am so skeptical of the claim that the auto parts systems (which are truly a miracle of efficiency) would not have happened without NASA. Sorry, I just don’t buy it.
The autoparts system you are talking about is implemented on an advanced database. Private industry invested to develop those, not government. Private industry has invested 10X more than NASA to develop computer business hardware and software systems.
NASA may have given them an early boost but that boost ended 40 years ago.
If mankind is to move off this planet and survive beyond the planets accommodation, we have to move into space and learn how to live there. Like most such endeavors, there will be many follies and failures. Just like the Roanoke Colony was a failure, man will see failure and wasted effort in space. But, that's how we learn.
The alternative is to not try. For people that think like me, that is a much bigger waste and failure. How would a person ever know if they can swim across the pool if they, forever, make excuses not to go in the water??
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