After the Columbia disaster, NASA was required to ensure the continuation of manned flights. The question is where and what is the goal that justifies the means - risking human life
Excerpts from Bruce Murray's article
24.2.2003
Within hours of Columbia's fiery and smoky end, NASA leaders and politicians in Washington declared that there was no doubt that space exploration and manned missions must continue. NASA was a center of patriotism and pride as well as a scientific center.
NASA is the only federal agency whose mandate is to launch missions into space that involve daring, imagination, risk and dramatic successes, both manned and robotic missions. Now, in light of the Columbia disaster, manned flights are coming under scrutiny. Does NASA's goal in promoting manned flights not risk human lives in vain? Are the manned missions almost worth their budget - half of NASA's budget of 15 billion dollars per year?
Such questions were not at the center of the debate when the race to the moon was decided by President Kennedy in 1961. At the height of the Cold War, the order of priorities was completely different. Kennedy excited the nation and outlined a plan with a clear political goal - to gain supremacy over Russia after it put the first man in orbit. America did reach the moon first, and proved to the world and especially to the heads of the Soviet Union its technological superiority and economic resources.
Today's uncertainty stems from the fact that in the early XNUMXs, when the Apollo missions achieved their political goal, America did not set any new goals for its manned missions. At the time, America was reeling from the Vietnam War and President Nixon did not have the courage to excite the public imagination by setting a new goal for space exploration.
In order to survive, NASA started in 1972 with an idea that sounds like a technological fantasy: safe and cheap access to space via a shuttle that would eventually lead to the construction of a space station. The shuttle is intended to be a tool that will assist in the construction and maintenance of the station, when revolutionary production processes will allow America to compete economically and produce new and powerful medicines there. The program enjoyed the legacy of public trust, enthusiasm and goodwill from the Apollo era.
The bitter reality slapped everyone in the face in January 1986, on the 25th flight of the space shuttles. The live explosion of Challenger slapped those who thought spaceflight was safe in the face. The inevitable conclusion was that humans would only go into space for purposes worth dying for.
Another damage caused by the Challenger disaster was the naive expectations that the shuttle would allow the launch of satellites into space at a cost of 200 dollars per kg. The cost is still around 20 thousand dollars per kg. To achieve the cheap cost per flight, NASA tried to speed up the shuttle launch rate. This is the natural way to ignore warnings when fixated on a target. The root cause of the Challenger explosion was really the lack of awareness and self-confidence and the denial that the risk of flight stems from the doctrine of economy. Cold O-rings were just the tip of the iceberg.
In response to the Challenger disaster, the US government decided to take several steps. First, it stopped the unnecessary risk to shuttle crews and went back to producing disposable rockets for launching satellites. It also scrapped the idea of building a launch facility on the West Coast and slowed the rate of ferry launches from 12-24 per year to just 6. It also canceled plans to fly passengers such as politicians, journalists and teachers into space.
Unfortunately, however, the basic design of the shuttles and the space station itself never received the necessary scrutiny from the standpoint of cost, safety, and purpose. The shuttle itself remained a target for NASA and even became the centerpiece of NASA's new logo.
President Reagan said in a memorial to the Challenger survivors, "Ron, we will miss your saxophone and we will build your space station." He referred to one of the victims, Ron McNair who hoped to play the saxophone on the planned space station.
Delays in the schedule and underestimation of the costs, in particular of the International Space Station, led to financial pressures on all of NASA's space missions.
Have these pressures harmed Colombia's safety? The investigative committees will look into this matter. In any case, there are some practical limits to how safe the shuttle can be. Although it is designed so that you can ignore a certain level of malfunctions in maintenance and preparations for launch. It uses the power of a rocket to reach orbit and to begin landing, but when it enters the atmosphere it flies like a fast plane. Normally, an effort to develop such a tool would include launching a prototype and other intermediate stages, but NASA, desperate to sell the multibillion-dollar development, promised to go from the early flights straight to the operational stage. The philosophy was to use the humans for as many tasks as possible, and not to minimize the number of crew members, their risk and the cost.
In contrast, the Russian space program was more conservative, less dramatic. It rested on the reliable and humble Soyuz, which had no malfunctions in 75 launches since 1971. The Soyuz's capability had been built up gradually since Yuri Gagarin's first flight in 1961. The Russians wisely chose to separate the cargo flights from the manned flights by developing the unmanned Progress systems that served for Two decades their space station - Mir.
It will be many years before manned flights are safe enough to prevent Americans from having the kind of disasters that happened on February 1st more than once in a lifetime. It should be a goal worth risking your life for, especially when science experiments in zero gravity is such a goal.
balance between science and the risk of life
Fatal accidents are not unknown to science. In 1973, biologist Wolf Wisniak fell to his death in a hole in Antarctica while studying bacteria there in conditions similar to those of Mars in preparation for the robotic Viking flight to search for life on Mars. A close investigation of dangerous volcanoes on the planet also claimed victims among the scientists.
Scientists and society began to see such human tragedies as the accepted price for scientific discoveries. Did the eighty experiments on Columbia that ranged from growing miniature plants to the effect of the lack of gravity on heart rate justify the risk of seven astronauts? As far as the scientific community is concerned, there is a debate as to whether these experiments herald potential breakthroughs and new and unique knowledge worth risking one's life for.
The emotional and subjective aspect also characterizes the space station. A consensus has developed among scientists inside and outside NASA that scientific research on the International Space Station should initially focus on an in-depth and controlled study of the biological effects of long-duration spaceflight on humans. In fact, NASA's new budget proposal includes human studies to restore some of the budgets for these studies on the space station that were cut in previous years in NASA's attempt to meet the station's construction schedule. Such studies will help to understand how the body of astronauts will behave in long journeys such as those expected to Mars.
A goal worth the risk
There are interesting targets for manned exploration beyond Earth orbit, but the tragic end of Columbia starkly illustrates that NASA's aging shuttle fleet is reaching the end of its useful life. Replacement systems are in an advanced design phase, and should reflect the needs of deep space flight as well as the space station.
Where will the explorers of the next space generation go? What will be the long-term goal of the manned flights?
Should we build a giant telescope in deep space, away from the interference of Earth's light to search for Earth-like planets orbiting nearby suns? Or maybe in order for us to send an expedition to an asteroid that crosses the Earth's orbit and one day may threaten the existence of life on Earth? There are those who wish to return to the moon and reach Mars - our planetary neighbor with the potential for manned research, a logical long-term goal.
America needs big enough destinations to justify the risk of human space exploration and expand our vision and our world.
Bruce Murray is Professor Emeritus of Planetary Sciences and Geology at the California Institute of Technology and one of the founders of the Planetary Society. He served as director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory shared with NASA and Caltech between 1976 and 1982.
