MarsBlog.net

Are NASA’s Human Shuttle Flights Worth the Risk?

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – There’s little doubt that NASA (news – web sites) can get its space shuttles flying again, but seven months after the deadly Columbia accident, there are plenty of doubts about whether it should.

True, and those doubts were expressed even before the Columbia accident. The reality is that we are stuck with Shuttle in the near term, unless we plan to mothball or abandon ISS and put human spaceflight on the promise of OSP (or something else) becoming available soon.

With no clear vision for why the United States is pursuing human space flight, a tight national budget and a scathing critique of the U.S. space agency’s “broken safety culture” coloring the debate, some in Congress wonder if sending humans into space at this point is worth the risk.

The first sentence answers the the question in the last. No, it isn’t worth the risks to send humans into space if there is no clear vision for sending them there. Hence the calls for a new goal for NASA (namely, Mars).

“We’re putting American men and women at great risk for their lives, flying orbiters that are 30 years old that cannot be made safe,” Rep. Joe Barton, a Texas Republican, told NASA chief Sean O’Keefe at a congressional hearing. “My proposal is … to use these orbiters in an unmanned capacity, build a new space plane or space orbiter that’s just for people.”

Yeah, right, Joe. It’s going to take 3-5 years for OSP to get to its first test flight, if it makes it that far. Are you and your pals in Congress willing to pony up the cash for the Russians to launch our astronauts to ISS in the meantime?

Another Texan, Democratic Rep. Ralph Hall, pushed O’Keefe to commit to developing an escape vessel for shuttle crews.

Stupid idea, if he’s thinking of a jettisonable cabin, ejection seats, or the host of other retrofits which have been proposed over the years. By the time you tear apart the three remaining Orbiters and retrofit them with some no-doubt hideously expensive escape system, you might just as well build all new vehicles.

But perhaps Sen. Sam Brownback, a Kansas Republican, put the question most starkly at an earlier hearing: “Are we throwing good money after bad?”

Yes. But the time to have asked that question was back in 1986. Or 1972. But since your colleagues and predecessors didn’t, we’re stuck with Shuttle for now, and it’s going to cost a good bit of money to fix the problems. If, that is, we intend to keep sending humans into space through the near term.

So far, recovery from the Feb. 1 Columbia disaster has cost nearly $400 million, about the price of one shuttle launch. This does not include changes to the shuttle program recommended by the independent Columbia Accident Investigation Board in its highly critical report released on Aug. 26.

As is so often the case in government, they can find the money to pick up the pieces and fix the problems after something catastrophic happens, but can’t be bothered beforehand.

Yet even as the board flayed the U.S. space agency for its skimpy budgets, uneven safety record and habit of turning a deaf ear to engineers’ concerns, the final report presumed that “the United States wants to retain a continuing capability to send people into space, whether to Earth orbit or beyond.”

That’s the general assumption, yes. But as noted above, there is no clear vision for why we should want to do so.