The space agency is moving from despair to hope after a year of mourning
When the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated over Texas, an amateur photographer took a picture of a flash of light on the shuttle's fuselage.
When the space shuttle Columbia disintegrated over Texas exactly one year ago, NASA quickly faced more than the deaths of seven astronauts. In the midst of mourning, NASA suffered a series of failures that had been building up for years but became urgent in the minutes between 8:53 a.m. and 9:00 a.m. EST on February 1, 2003. Columbia was lost, and to a certain extent, so was NASA.
The International Space Station was on the verge of completion. The shuttle fleet is nearing the end of its lifespan, and plans for the next generation of manned spacecraft were in their infancy. By and large, the goal of setting up a manned space program has become a series of repeated upgrades, patches, and renovations to the shuttles until something better comes along.
"Given all that, you have to do something brave," says Art Zygielbaum, an engineer and former senior manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. "You need to divert public attention from the money-sucking space station and the fragile shuttles. So, less than a year after grounding the fleet of spacecraft and searching the fields for the remains of Columbia, the space agency is looking to the sky again - and this time it intends to reach the moon and beyond.
On January 14, President George W. Bush on his vision for NASA, which included sending humans to the moon again in 2020 and eventually reaching Mars. Some said that the vision could not have been realized, or at least not so quickly without the accident. Dave Weldon, a Republican congressman from Florida, is the administration's space advocate and has pushed for years to retool NASA's manned space program.
He is among those who are broken because it was necessary to leave NASA in shock and push the government into action. "I'm sure it took all the pieces of the puzzle to come together," Weldon said.
Keith Cowing, a former NASA engineer and editor of the online watch publication nasawatch.com, says Bush often discusses updating the goals of NASA's manned program. After the disaster, King reported, Bush told NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe. "Tell me what is needed to restore the agency." Within months, these discussions went from informal to formal.
As the Columbia Disaster Commission of Inquiry revealed new details about the crash, the process of rethinking NASA's future gathered momentum. In August 2003, the commission of inquiry concluded that a piece of insulating foam from Columbia's outer tank fell during takeoff and blew a hole in the left wing. The hole allowed extremely hot air to enter, where it melted the wing frame. The investigative committee blamed NASA's corporate culture as much to blame as the foam and recommended relicensing the shuttles before they could continue flying after 2010. By late summer, King said, the program was in full swing.
The seeds of the plan - the ideas that led to it - began to gain momentum in the decade before the Columbia disaster. "There was no shortage of ideas. You could walk through the corridors of NASA and hear the tape again and every 30 seconds you could hear 15 ideas, or directions where we should go," said King. However, until Columbia gave the wake-up call, the ideas remained stuck in the bureaucracy of studies and memos.
Ziegelbaum hopes that Bush's ambitious space program will bear fruit - even if he has doubts about whether NASA will receive enough funding and questions whether the president's announcement is intended to improve his image in an election year. He believes that Bush would not have announced far-reaching changes without the disaster.
"I believe that Colombia, with all the sadness, helped to refocus attention on space and helped us to recreate and think about the fact that there is a national priority that requires us to explore space." said.
Thanks to the organizational change at the space agency and the 248-page report of the investigative committee, NASA learned about the aging shuttle fleet and the huge budget it needs to maintain it until 2020. The future vision came into focus very quickly. The space station will be completed within 5-6 years and will not require a large cargo that can only be brought by shuttles. Apart from relying on the Russians, there is no alternative to getting to the space station. A winged space plane with a landing gear remains on the drawing board and is still many years away from being built.
"We need a new manned vehicle," Weldon said, "but if we're going to build a new vehicle with an investment of billions, we don't want it to just serve the space station," he said. Instead, NASA, with Bush's blessing, decided to build a rocket that, unlike the shuttle, would also be able to leave low orbit and be able to fly to the moon, and with adjustments, to Mars as well. The idea, in fact, was originally floated by President Nixon. He preferred the shuttle because it was cheap and could support the construction of a space station. The Challenger disaster, 17 years before the Columbia disaster, did not lead to the end of the fleet because the fleet was much younger, and there was still a lot of work on building a space station. It took the Columbia disaster to tip the plan back.
"Without the Columbia failure, the idea of getting to the moon and Mars would have been a harder sell," Weldon said.
Still, the Bush plan has many critics. There are concerns about the cost, the schedule, the scientific benefit and more. But even some critics understand how determined NASA is to send astronauts farther than ever before, so soon after the loss of a second shuttle crew. "Giving direction to NASA is very important both for the agency and for the nation," Ziegelbaum said. "Flying to the moon makes a lot of sense for many reasons. Science is just one of them, so I think it will be a wonderful adventure."
