It is almost certain that NASA will not build a shuttle that will be a replacement for Columbia. This will leave the agency with at least three ferries for the next ten years
The next generation of reusable launch vehicles is expected to enter service in 10 or even 15 years, says Donald Amaro, who served as the shuttle's chief engineer from 1989-1993.
Until a few years ago, NASA tested several models that were designed to replace the shuttle, but the new director general of NASA, Sean O'Keefe, shelved these plans and ordered to operate the shuttle fleet for the next ten years. At least to mainly serve the space station the international.
Discovery, which is now the oldest ship has been in service for 18 years. Endeavour, which was built at a cost of 2 billion dollars to replace the Challenger after it exploded in 1986, also serves about a full decade. Atlantis, the third shuttle, already has 17 years of service.
"The shuttle fleet has been grounded for three years following the Challenger disaster, in order to first assess what happened to the Challenger and cause the death of seven astronauts, and then also to repair the malfunction. In the hours after the accident, few could guess that it was the O-rings.
At the time, NASA had enough spare parts to assemble Endeavor as a replacement for Challenger, but today the agency does not have this capability. According to them, the investigation regarding the accident that happened on Saturday may take a similar amount of time.
Meanwhile, the shuttle program manager at NASA said that the shuttles are grounded until further notice. The next mission was planned for March 1st - an Atlantis flight to the space station, intended to replace the crew.
During the nineties, NASA spent billions of dollars to research innovative designs such as the X-33. However, engineering problems led NASA to abandon this tool in 2001.
The ferry disaster will renew criticism of the project
by Tamara Traubman
The space program / review focused on the scientific benefit versus the risks
The explosion of the space shuttle "Challenger" in January 1986, with seven crew members on board, was until now seen as an exceptional disaster, as a one-time tragedy. However, yesterday's disaster of the shuttle "Columbia" disproves this assumption and makes it possible to begin to assess in a more tangible way the risk of manned flights into space. This risk is actually not small: one out of about 55 shuttle flights ended in total loss - of human life and of the shuttle itself.
The current disaster is expected to reignite the debates that arose after the Challenger disaster, regarding the continuation of the American space agency (NASA). It is also expected that the controversy will arise regarding the scientific benefit in the face of the risks of sending humans into space, and the necessity of the financial funding dedicated annually to the agency. Sharp criticism was directed after the disaster towards NASA, because out of an urge to launch more and more shuttles, in order to justify the huge budgets the agency received, it failed to ensure the safety of the astronauts.
Today it is still not possible to know what NASA's conclusions from the disaster investigation will be, but it is possible to speculate what some of the possible consequences will be, according to its response to the Challenger disaster. The entire NASA shuttle fleet then grounded for about two years, until the cause of the failure was determined (eventually it turned out to be a fuel leak). NASA already announced yesterday that it has temporarily suspended the continuation of shuttle flights.
"Unlike 1986, now there is a problem," said Ilan Manolis from the Israeli Astronomical Society. According to him, "Today we have the International Space Station, with four people staying in it now. The only way to rescue them is with the space shuttle. They can also be returned with the help of the space capsules launched by the Russians, which bring equipment to the station, but so far this has not been attempted at the International Space Station."
"The astronauts on the station have enough food and means of subsistence for at least two to four months," Manolis added, "but no one will decide to keep them there for a year, until all the tests are finished. "Therefore", he added, "they may now have to rescue and abandon the space station, which until now was intended not to abandon it and to leave it always manned."
One of the consequences of the disaster for the agency may be a demand by the American public to cut NASA's budget, which is already being cut. The American journalist Thomas Andrew Olson calculated and found that in the seventies, at the height of the Apollo project, in which the Americans landed on the moon for the first time, NASA's budget was 1.9% of the US federal expenditure. In 1987, a year after the Challenger disaster, the budget's share of federal spending dropped by a third and reached only 0.7%.
According to Manolis, the catastrophic failure of the Challenger at the time also sparked sharp criticism of the agency's goal setting. "Following the Challenger," says Manolis, "the astronomer Carl Sagan began to argue that there is no need for the shuttle at all, that it is unnecessary and wasteful, and that most of the experiments carried out on it can be done with the help of satellites that do not require the risk of humans and the enormous costs of sending humans into space" . According to some estimates, on a global basis, about 12 billion dollars have been spent so far on each person sent into space.
According to him, "Engineers claimed at the time that a space shuttle is such a complex and complicated vehicle, and that it has thousands of systems that must function simultaneously, mainly during launch but also later, so it is simply a miracle that a shuttle manages to take off and land safely. Today, no one will build another ferry, the budgets that were in the sixties and eighties have run out.
NASA will be left with three shuttles. There is also no justification for building a ferry - the technology of the vessel, in terms of the instrumentation, is technology of the sixties and seventies."
The most heated debate, which has been going on for decades and is likely to intensify after the Columbia disaster, is between scientists and managers at NASA. The scientists say they don't need astronauts to go on research missions. They prefer satellites and unmanned spacecraft. However, the public for the most part is not interested in devices that test physical phenomena, which no one understands anyway. NASA managers recognize that without the astronauts going on missions to conquer space there is no public glory, and without such glory Congress does not approve budgets.
American journalist Robert McFadden, who has been covering aviation issues for thirty years, claimed yesterday that NASA's shuttle program was "full of problems from the very beginning." He mentioned that the program, which costs about 25 billion dollars, began in the seventies following the Apollo project. The shuttles, designed for multiple use, were promoted by the Nixon administration to advance scientific and military goals and to support the aerospace industry (eg, missile manufacturers such as the Lockheed-Martin arms company). Supporters of the program marketed it to Congress through the promise that the program would pay off financially, thanks to commercial businesses that would be built around it, launching private satellites and selling other space services.
The program was supposed to make space flights an inexpensive business, and they claimed to launch up to sixty flights every year, a goal that seems completely unrealistic today. "Almost from the beginning, the Space Shuttle suffered from design failures, budget overruns, delays, fraud and mismanagement between NASA and its subcontractors," McFadden wrote. In 1981, when the first shuttle, Columbia, took off from the Kennedy Space Center, it was already clear that there was no point in talking about economic efficiency. Launching a shuttle costs about 250 million dollars.
After Challenger exploded a few minutes after launch, it turned out that long before the launch, NASA had information that one of the shuttle's boosters was damaged and prone to disaster, especially in the cold weather that prevailed on the morning of the launch. Engineers came back and warned me of the possibility of such a malfunction occurring a few hours before launch.
According to estimates heard last night on the CNN network, the malfunction in the Columbia shuttle may have happened because of a block of ice that hit its wing already during launch. The news agencies reported that information about malfunctions in the shuttle was received by NASA about an hour and a half before landing.
The space shuttle fleet is no longer seen as a revolutionary innovation, but as a relic of another era
by Nathan Gutman
Houston. The disaster in the shuttle "Columbia" on Saturday brought to the surface a debate that has been going on for some time in the American space community, regarding the future of the US space shuttle program. The program, which was founded 20 years ago, was once considered a breakthrough - instead of bulky and expensive spaceships, a space vehicle similar to an airplane is being developed, which can be used for many and varied space missions. The "Columbia" and its companions were indeed seen as shuttles - a multipurpose vehicle, a kind of space bus.
But over the years, new technological possibilities have emerged. The space shuttle fleet is no longer seen as a revolutionary innovation, but as a relic of another era. Placing the shuttle on the launch pad takes many days; The preparation for each launch, even if it is an emergency, takes weeks. The shuttle moves at a rate of 1.6 kilometers per hour on its way, so the launch is after all other preparations have already been completed. It is clear to everyone that this is no longer an efficient "bus" to space.
The magazine "Time" chose to raise the question of the relevance of the ferries in its cover story, which was published after the crash. The editors of the magazine called for the ferry project to be stopped, due to it being "expensive and dangerous". The heads of NASA also said that it is time to develop a replacement for the shuttle and start using a space vehicle that is easier to move and has more flexibility in operation. This is a "space plane", whose development cost is estimated at 10 billion dollars.
The US space shuttle fleet has completed 115 missions so far. Two of them ended in disaster. Supporters of the program claim that this is a relatively low rate of failures, opponents claim that in any other field this rate of fatal accidents would be considered one that makes the program clearly unsafe.
But NASA currently has no real option to withdraw from the shuttle program. When the Challenger crashed in 1986, the former president, Ronald Reagan, made two decisions - one was to freeze all shuttle launches until the circumstances of the disaster were fully clarified, and the second was to build a new shuttle in place of the Challenger that was lost. Today it is not possible to make such decisions. Two and a half years have passed since the Challenger disaster until the next launch. But then the International Space Station did not exist and humans were not permanently stationed in space, humans who needed food, equipment, replacement and rescue.
The International Space Station project requires NASA to maintain an active shuttle fleet. Even if the Russian supply spacecraft and the space station's rescue unit can suffice as a solution for a few months, if the US wants to continue to maintain a permanent human presence in space, it needs shuttles. Beyond that, since the space station project also belongs to Russia, Japan and Canada, the US cannot decide on its own to abandon it.
It is doubtful whether NASA will now make a decision on building a new shuttle. The American space experts believe that it is a shame to invest billions in building a new shuttle, which will be based on outdated technology. But then NASA is left with a fleet of only three shuttles - "Discovery", "Atlantis" and "Endeavour". The burden on such a limited fleet will be great and the meaning of reducing the number of shuttles will be to devote them almost exclusively to the needs of maintaining the International Space Station.
The STS-107 space mission that came to its tragic end on Saturday, was the first mission in three years that was intended for scientific purposes only and not for building the space station or repairing telescopes and satellites. Now it will be even more difficult to dedicate a space mission to the needs of science and experiments, and the dream of using space to advance science and human knowledge will go further and further away.
In the coming days, Washington will also enter the picture. Members of Congress, who have to approve NASA's budget, have already started grumbling about NASA's costs compared to the quality of performance. The heads of the space agency will be forced to present to Capitol Hill a new plan for reform, which will ensure that American taxpayer money goes to projects that are both safe and beneficial.
