[BLOG-LIKE POSTING] Why I'm glad the space shuttle is now of the past

[rfmcdonald]

Wikipedia's article on the space shuttle program now uses the term "was", as in "NASA's Space Shuttle program, officially called Space Transportation System (STS), was the United States government's manned launch vehicle program from 1981 to 2011." The Space Shuttle Atlantis has landed, and an era has ended. alexpgp is to be thanked for pointing his readers to the below stunning image of the Orbiter's reentry, taken from the International Space Station.



It's a bit sad that the space shuttle is no more, I suppose, insofar as the idea of the space shuttle as a rapid-turnaround bus into space is appealing. It's just doesn't strike me as important, certainly nothing to justify the "end to manned spaceflight, forever" that seems to be sweeping the Internet. Wired Science's David Axe makes points I quite agree with.

Listening to some critics, you’d think America had just retreated from space, forever. “We’re basically decimating the NASA human spaceflight program,” former astronaut Jerry Ross told Reuters. “The only thing we’re going to have left in town is the station and it’s a totally different animal from the shuttle.”

Today many observers consider the Shuttle the ultimate expression of American technological prowess, and see its demise as a signal of America’s decline. In one sense, they’re right: With its huge size, distinctive shape and fiery launches, the shuttle has always been an impressive symbol. But as a practical space vehicle, it has long been an overpriced, dangerous compromise.

There’s a reason the Soviets canceled their space shuttle, and that the Chinese have never attempted one. Even without their own shuttles, both nations are now nipping at America’s heels in space. Russia has increasingly reliable rockets and capsules; China began manned spaceflights back in 2003 and is mulling a space station and a moon mission. Both countries are working hard to expand their satellite fleets, though they remain far behind the United States with its roughly 400 spacecraft.

In truth, the shuttle’s retirement could actually make the U.S. space program stronger, by finally allowing the shuttle’s two users — NASA and the Pentagon — to go their separate ways in space, each adopting space vehicles best suited to their respective missions.

“When I hear people say, or listen to media reports, that the final shuttle flight marks the end of U.S. human space flight, I have to say … these folks must be living on another planet,” NASA administrator Charlie Bolden said in a July 1 speech at the National Press Club in Washington.

For NASA, future manned missions will ride in upgraded 1960s-style manned capsules: first Russian models, then potentially American-built ones. Missions that don’t require a human passenger will fall to rockets of various sizes. The military will use many of the same rockets, and could also expand its brand-new fleet of small, robotic space planes.

Together, these vehicles will make space flight cheaper, safer and more flexible than was ever possible with the shuttle.

Maintaining a primitive space vehicle that isn't especially economic doesn't strike me as the sort of thing that would support a manned presence in space, or a substantial presence in space. Rather, it's the sort of thing that would make either rather more difficult. It's hardly, as Douglas Muir wrote earlier this month, that interest in space has been dropping off since the supposed halcyon 1970s of the Apollo mission. He points out that not only has the global space budget almost doubled between 1975 and 2011 (in constant 2007 dollars), with NASA's spending going up nearly by half and the European Union and China and Brazil and India and Japan all appearing as new spacefaring powers, but exploration is really taking off. Space is no longer an exclusive preserve of the two Cold War superpowers.

We’re living in a golden age of space exploration. We’re bombing the Moon for water, mapping methane lakes on Titan, and watching solar flares in realtime in 3-D. We’re getting ready to fly by Pluto and drop an SUV on Mars. We’re mapping the inner solar system down to a few meters of resolution and doing sample returns from comets. We’ve got the International Space Station (ISS), now into its second decade of operation and approved at least a decade more. In terms of technology, we’ve got fully functional ion drives, a working prototype solar sail, and the ISS solar panel systems producing enough electricity to light up a small subdivision.

We’ve put landers on Titan and the polar regions of Mars. We’ve watched geysers erupt on Enceladus, lightning strikes on Venus, and found a frickin’ hexagon on the north pole of Saturn.

So: the global space budget has grown steadily for nearly two generations now, roughly doubling over 35 years, with the number of active countries rising from two to around a dozen. As a result, we are currently in a glorious Magellanic age of space discovery.

And it’s a global age. Here’s a thing you’ll notice, if you hang around space enthusiasts for long: there’ll be a conversation about “space exploration”, and after a bit you realize that half the people in the room are taking that to mean MANNED space exploration BY AMERICANS, with any other sort being at best a bit disreputable and at worst vaguely threatening, and the “failure” of manned US space travel seen as some sort of failure of will.

[. . . T]he fact that the rest of the world is going into space is, and that its no longer a simple binary US/USSR competition… well, how is this a bad thing? India, China and Brazil are becoming rich enough to afford serious space programs, and they are choosing to spend some of their new wealth in space: why is this not a cause for celebration? (Incidentally, China is planning to build its own manned space station over the next few years. If you think that’s a bad thing, you need to explain why Americans in space are a victory for the future of humanity, while Chinese in space are kinda creepy somehow. Please do. I’ll watch with interest.)

Points, all good points. Better and cheaper technologies makes space more accessible for everyone. It's a virtuous circle, I suppose, the cheaper space travel letting more people get into space and making space travel cheaper, et cetera. Keeping an archaic expensive technology in use isn't going to make things better, somehow. If anything, it keeps space more exclusive.

The space shuttle is gone, long did it live. Now, let's wait for the next, the better, the more accessible to appear!