Obituary for a Space Shuttle

The Space Shuttle, which retires next week from active duty, was a remarkable vehicle in the history of space exploration. There wasn’t anything before quite like it (except Air Force projects like the X-15) and there may not be anything like it again for some time. It’s pretty to look at, seems slick, and NASA tried its best to sell the hell out of it for the past 30 years.

But it wasn’t enough. I remain unconvinced that the shuttle was a good thing for the space program, and celebrate its retirement. Now free of the boondoggle that the shuttle became, NASA can move ahead with the program it planned in the early 1970s and explore the solar system like we always wanted. That’s worth celebrating.

As for the shuttle, it seems to me that it will go down in history as a monument to the lack of vision and leadership on space encountered by NASA in the wake of the Apollo program. Pretty much right after the first moon landing in 1969, the US government started dropping the ball on space in a big way. It has continued to do so to the present day.

How We Got Here

The shuttle was designed as part of a large array of space systems proposed to the US government in the early 1970s. These included a plan for building a moon base, a trip to Mars, and most importantly a series of increasingly large and complex space stations in earth orbit that were the foundation of everything that would come after. The shuttle was proposed as a cheaper, faster, more effective way to transport humans and materials to and from the space station complexes.

President Richard Nixon didn’t exactly understand the space program. Not a dreamer like his arch-rival, John F Kennedy, Nixon viewed the most important part of the program as providing America with “heroes”. Preferably on the cheap. He certainly lapped up the political capital that came along with Apollo 11 in 1969 and he must have reveled in “beating” the Soviet Union to that arbitrary technological goal. But almost immediately afterwards, in early 1970, the rest of the American space program started to fall apart, due to truly pernicious accounting on the government’s part.

First to go was the MOL, or Manned Orbiting Laboratory program. The first of many space stations, this Air Force space program was actually a cover for an extensive series of military space objectives, first of which was surveillance but later plans called for satellite retrieval and even space warfare. The astronauts who had been training for ten years, and were only months away from making their first flight, were mostly reassigned to the shuttle and Skylab programs.

Then the Apollo cuts came. First Apollo 20, conceived as the grand finale of the first generation of moon exploration, with a landing on the far, or “dark”, side of the moon and a small one-man exploration pod was cancelled, supposedly to free up its rocket for the Skylab program. (*) Soon after, Apollo 18 and 19 were cancelled. The insane thing about these cuts is that the hardware was already bought and paid for. The astronauts were already employed and continued to be. The training facilities were in place. The flights were ready to fly. The only money saved by cancelling them was the operational budget for the flights, a small fraction of what the program had cost up to this point. The best analogy I’ve heard is buying a Porsche and leaving it in the garage because you’re too cheap to pay for gas.

Then the rest of the systems came under fire. In this context, the final Apollo missions, 13-17, were somewhat of an unceremonious limp to the finish line, gliding on the momentum of the “space race” to a sad finish in 1972. (*)

The Orphan Shuttle

The only part of NASA long-term manned space program that was approved by Nixon was the shuttle. It made no sense: the shuttle was a piece of a larger program, the key component of which was the space station. The Soviets understood this and made space stations the central component of their space program from the 1970s until now. But NASA was left with a car and nowhere to drive it to.

Then came the design compromises.

First to go was the concept of 100% reusability. This was supposedly one of the main positive aspects of the shuttle: its economics. The idea was that by reusing the whole thing every time, the per-launch cost would be greatly decreased and the vehicle could attract commercial customers looking to launch their satellites. Budget cuts forced the designers to make the large external fuel tank a single-use object, and this led to other design compromises regarding the heat shield that, in February 2003, killed seven astronauts on the Columbia.

Even with design compromises, the shuttle was an orphan. A “Space Transportation System” (STS) with no destination, the shuttle had to accommodate a number of mission objectives that it was never originally meant to serve. It now had to be able to do enough work in space on its own to justify its existence. But at least it was partially reusable, which meant it was cheaper than throwing away 80% of your spacecraft every time you launched, right?

Wrong. The shuttle was actually more expensive than some space systems, and certainly not less than an Apollo or Soyuz-style capsule system for transporting people and equipment to space. One of the reasons for this lay in those old design flaws. Re-entry and orbit did so much damage to the vehicle that it took teams of repair crews and millions of dollars to process a returning shuttle for another mission. There were certain things only the shuttle could do, like launch and later repair the Hubble space telescope, but really it was a high-tech piece of showmanship. It was NASA’s way of saying “we’re going into the cosmos”, when in fact they were going up into low earth orbit for two weeks and coming back. That mission objective was accomplished in 1965.

So, it wasn’t cheaper, it wasn’t entirely reusable, and it really didn’t open up anything new in low earth orbit operations. If that wasn’t enough, the safety record of this vehicle is atrocious: the worst of any space vehicle in history, in fact.

The Competition

For some perspective, let’s consider a hypothetical situation. Suppose the Russians developed a new kind of space transportation system in the 1980s and within a decade the ship had exploded on launch with no escape system killing seven cosmonauts. The US media would have been all over that Russian space “disaster” and criticizing them for putting mission objectives over human lives. Which is, of course, exactly what NASA and the US government were doing. Consider that just a few years later the same ship, still in operation, broke up in orbit again killing all seven cosmonauts. Aside from any politics, at some point you have to ask yourself the question: would you want to ride in that spacecraft? I wouldn’t.

Now consider the Soyuz. The Russian Soyuz system, originally designed under the genius Sergei Korolev, first launched in 1967. That first mission was a disaster, killing the single cosmonaut on board. In 1971, the Soyuz again malfunctioned on de-orbit and killed the three cosmonauts on board. But from that day to this, no one has been killed flying on a Soyuz. The Soyuz has blown up on the pad, just like Challenger, and the crew was saved by an escape system the shuttle lacks. The Soyuz has landed on its side, has malfunctioned in orbit and only recently became a digital spacecraft. All of those things might cause an ignorant westerner to snicker until they consider the hard facts: for over forty years, and especially since some major redesigns in the late 1970s, the Soyuz has gotten the job done, and done well and done safely. It’s had a destination (a series of Almaz and Salyut stations, and later Mir and the ISS) and a narrow range of mission objectives that have allowed it to rack up an impressive list of successes.

For the next few years, the Soyuz will be the only spacecraft available to carry crews to and from the ISS.

(The Chinese Shenzhou spacecraft is based on the Soyuz design and actually makes some significant improvements to it. In several ways, they have the best space program going at the moment.)

 From Here

We’re entering a new era now, when the whole organization of space technological systems is being revised dramatically. Essentially, NASA is getting out of the orbital business and into space exploration again. That’s a good thing, in my opinion, because it brings out the best and most noble of our instincts as a species to explore and try to understand the universe. In earth orbit, on the other hand, it’s going to be all about commerce and innovation.

NASA itself has been tasked to design a spacecraft for exploring objects in the solar system outside of near-earth orbit. So, we can expect an international mission to an asteroid, to Mars and perhaps back to the moon, in the next 20 years or so. (That is, assuming the politicians don’t change their minds again.) They’ll use a spacecraft unimaginatively named the “Multi Purpose Crew Vehicle”, which is essentially the same design as the Orion spacecraft, cancelled by President Obama along with the rest of the Bush’s Constellation program. It was described back in the Bush years as “Apollo on steroids”, but really it’s Apollo for the 21^st Century, and a natural progression upon generations of older spacecraft. We really should have had an Orion-type spacecraft somewhere in the late 1970s and we would have, had NASA not gotten caught up with the shuttle to nowhere. Better late than never, I suppose.

(Don’t count out the Chinese, who are boasting about their own space station and moon project. It’s entirely possible that the next person on the moon will be Chinese. You can say, “Been there, done that,” at your own peril when you consider that your own nation hasn’t been able to “do it” for a while and is just now learning how to “go there” again.)

Meanwhile, here in earth orbit, big changes are afoot, such as the spacecraft that will do what the space shuttle was always intended to do: move people to and from the space station. At the moment, the Russians hold the only tickets in town (and at $50 million per seat, it’s not cheap), but there are several American companies like SpaceX that will have some sort of ferry ready before too many years pass. Other companies like Bigelow Aerospace have plans for innovative, private space stations that can be serviced by private ferries. Bigelow’s stations are based on a creative inflatable design that gives lots of living space for very little mass, and could easily be affordable to private scientists or even artists. One should also never count out Virgin’s Sir Richard Branson in his efforts to make space travel just another form of extreme sport.

Much of the money for this innovation is still coming from government grants but the boasts made by NASA in the early 1980s about what the shuttle would bring (cheap, reliable, routine access to space) are about to come true. There’s the last irony: just as the shuttle heads off to become a museum curiosity, the technological and political conditions for its existence have finally come to pass. Instead of too little, too late it was more like too much, too soon. 

(Sidebar: If things had gone as planned, Apollo 20 may have landed on the dark side of the moon in the same year Pink Floyd recorded the classic album. Damn, Nixon. You harshed my buzz again.)

(Small sidebar: Nixon actually liked what happened on the near-disaster of Apollo 13 because it produced what he thought was the most important product of the space program: conservative American heroes.)