From: LARRY KLAES (ljk4_at_msn.com)
Date: Wed Feb 05 2003 - 06:25:33 PST
----- Original Message -----
From: daviddarling123
Sent: Wednesday, February 05, 2003 9:08 AM
To: DarlingsSpace_at_yahoogroups.com
Subject: [DarlingsSpace] David Darling's Newsletter #8
DAVID DARLING'S NEWSLETTER
----------------------------------------
Issue #8
February 5, 2003
e-mail: darling_at_uslink.net
website www.daviddarling.info
----------------------------------------
In this issue:
(1) Meanderings
(2) Attack of the Clones
(3) Bookends
----------------------------------------
(1) Meanderings
It was one of those "you'll always remember where you were" moments.
I'd just been checking out a few news sites on the Web and was about
to click off the BBC front page when the ticker caught my eye: "NASA
reports having lost contact with the Space Shuttle." I got the
sinking feeling in my stomach -- you don't lose contact with the
Shuttle unless you lose the Shuttle. And there it was on the TV,
hurtling to Earth, a dazzling meteor with a horribly wrong
collection of smaller bright blobs around it. What makes this, and
the earlier Challenger disaster, so poignant is that these missions,
and their crews, carried some of our highest aspirations. Every
astronaut is a hero and every flight above the atmosphere is a
triumph of the human spirit. To see Columbia incandescent and
breaking apart was to be brutally reminded how fragile we and our
dreams really are.
Well, I was going to write about Extraterrestrial Probes in this
edition, but I think, in view of events, I'll postpone that for a
while and give you some more thoughts on the Shuttle, the Space
Station, and where NASA might go from here.
-----------------------------------------
(2) Where Next?
NASA faces two major problems that it didn't have after Challenger
blew up. The first, and most pressing, is that there is an enormous,
vastly expensive, partly finished, and (for the moment) inhabited
piece of hardware circling the Earth every hour and a half that
depends critically on the Shuttle. Not only does the Shuttle ferry
people, equipment, and supplies back and forth but it regularly (in
fact, every time it visits) boosts the Space Station into a higher
orbit. Every day the ISS loses about 100 meters in altitude -- 3 km
a month -- because of drag from the outermost reaches of the
atmosphere. Leave it too long and it'll do a Mir, only a very much
more spectacular and potentially hazardous version of the Russian
station's reentry. The little Progress ships that Russia sends up
can carry about one tenth of the Shuttle's cargo and a crew of
three, but they can't do anything to help keep the ISS aloft. So,
obviously, to keep the Station in orbit, let alone keep it active,
in good repair, and crewed, the Shuttle fleet needs to be back on-
line much quicker than the 30-odd months it took to return to flight
after Challenger.
The next problem is that NASA is down to three Shuttles and was
already pretty hard-pressed with four to turn them around, refurbish
them, and keep on top of the demands of the ISS and other manned
science missions (the latter having been Columbia's main task). A
replacement for Columbia is essential if the program is to continue
on its present course. But here's the rub. In the wake of
Challenger, there were enough spare parts around, including an
almost complete test vehicle, to build a new Shuttle more or less
exactly like the others. That option no longer exists. There are no
Shuttle wings or fuselages or most of the other pieces needed to
quickly assemble a stand-in. And the production line shut down long
ago; even the tooling may no longer exist. So what to do? That
depends on how NASA's mission and vision is changed when the verdict
is in on what happened to Columbia and when the politicians have
decided how much the agency will have to spend over the next few
years.
What is almost certain is that there won't be another Shuttle in the
present form. NASA had already intended to replace the current
vehicles, which have fallen well short of expectations in terms of
economy, ease-of-use, and turnaround time, with a new spaceplane due
to come online no sooner than 2010. Can that schedule be brought
forward? Unlikely, without a massive injection of new cash. And,
even then, there's a limit to how quickly research and development
can move forward. The alternative is to rely on the three remaining
Shuttles into the next decade and to pump money into the Russian
program so that it can launch more Soyuz ferries and pick up the
slack. I'm guessing this is what will happen.
But the future of the ISS now hangs in the balance. If one more
Shuttle is lost -- and I'm afraid the chances of that are not
remote -- the ISS would be doomed. My personal view, and I say this
reluctantly because I'm a great fan of space exploration in all its
forms, is that the ISS is one of the greatest white elephants in
human history. It's a fantastic, awesome accomplishment in
engineering terms. It's a triumph of human courage, determination,
and ingenuity. But as a scientific investment, it's a disaster. When
you think of the breakthroughs that have come from robotic missions,
such as Voyager, Galileo, Mars Global Surveyor, the Mariners, the
Hubble Space Telescope, and hundreds of other unmanned deep space
and Earth orbiting spacecraft, at a fraction of what the ISS has
cost to date, it makes you wonder why we went down that route. And
the answer, of course, is that it really had very little to do with
science or pushing back the frontiers of human exploration, and a
great deal to do with Cold War military and political aspirations.
Can you name one significant science result that has come from the
ISS, after tens of billions of dollars of investment? And there is
no prospect of anything much being achieved over the next few years
either with only a skeleton staff of three aboard who spend most of
their time housekeeping and troubleshooting instead of doing
research.
So, what should happen next? That depends on whether we choose to
persist with the ISS. If we do, NASA's funding should be increased
so that it can do a proper job of building the Station with the
additional modules, as originally planned, that would allow a full-
time staff of seven or so astronauts to carry out a worthwhile
research program. We would have to hope to God that no accident
befell any of the three remaining Shuttles before the new space
plane came into service. Frankly, I can't see this extra money
becoming available, in which case the ISS becomes almost
scientifically worthless and a waste of funds that could be put to
far more profitable use elsewhere in the space program.
Let me be blunt. I think there's strong case for abandoning the ISS
and using the many billions still needed to build and maintain it
for other purposes in space, including more robotic missions to the
planets, more unmanned space observatories, and an accelerated
program to build the next generation of space planes. The ISS,
astonishing achievement that it is, has become a millstone around
NASA's neck which is slowing down our progress at the high frontier.
We need to admit our mistakes and move on. In the long run, this
might be a bolder and better tribute to the Columbia 7 than a
program that is only one more loose tile away from disaster.
Please send me your comments and opinions on this and I'll be happy
to post them in the next issue. I'm also looking into setting up a
multi-thread forum on my website whereby everyone can get involved
in ongoing controversial discussions of this kind. If you have
experience of setting up or running such forums, I'd be grateful for
your insights.
--------------------------------------------
(3) Bookends
I'm very much in encyclopedia mode at the moment. "The Complete Book
of Spaceflight" is already on the shelves, "The Universal Book of
Astronomy" (a companion volume) is in the early phase of production
heading for a pre-Christmas release, and the third encyclopedia in
the series, on recreational mathematics, is just about at the
finished manuscript stage. Then I'll be free to start the next
project, which I won't tell you about yet, except to say that it
involves a form of transportation that may some day make Shuttles,
space planes, and every other mode of traveling through space
completely obsolete!
Until next time,
Best wishes,
David Darling
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.6 : Wed Feb 05 2003 - 06:45:49 PST