perfidy

Murdoc has a post up on the possible fate of the Shuttle. He links to a Jeffrey Bell article that argues that after the CAIB, there is really no way that the shuttle can return to service, given the high (40%, according to Bell) likelihood that we'd lose another shuttle just doing the limited ISS-maintenance flights that are currently imagined.

The shuttle has long been everything but what NASA has claimed it to be. It is expensive, inefficient, has impossibly long turn around times, and most important, it's lethal to its crews. The fact that we will almost certainly lose Hubble due to the problems with the shuttle is an unfortunate, though predictable fact. We have not been even remotely sensible about space travel in almost a half century. (And yes, I am aware of how old the space age is.)

It's a sad fact that China and Russia - using forty year old technology - have a more robust and capable manned space flight capability than we do with our thirty year old technology. There have been no significant advances in space transportation since the shuttle flew back in '81, and that wasn't much of an advance, as Murdoc has pointed out. There are three things we need for a decent space transportation infrastructure, and we have only one of them.

We have disposable launchers that can reliably put satellites and other moderate sized, unmanned payloads into orbit, for a fairly reasonable price. The other two things are a safe and reasonably priced manned vehicle, and a heavy lift vehicle. We have known almost from the beginning of the shuttle era that despite the smoke NASA's been blowing, the shuttle is none of these things.

I simply can't believe that with all we (and the Russkies) have learned since 1961, Lockheed or Boeing could not design a simple manned capsule, even one that could do a glider reentry - in a weekend. The design studies have been done. We have better computers, materials, and everything you need to design and build space vehicles than when we did it the first time over forty years ago. A minishuttle/X24 lookalike should not take half a decade to build. And once built, there is no reason that we couldn't launch it on one of our disposable rockets.

Similarly, for a heavy lift vehicle, we already have everything we need. If you consider that the entire mass of the shuttle orbiter is in fact payload reaching orbit, why not just get rid of the orbiter and replace it with a cargo shell with shuttle main engines at the bottom? All the components have been tested, and again the design studies already completed. If we really wanted to, we could have a full-fledged, reliable, flexible and robust space transportation system in little more than a year. And we could easily save Hubble, as we could easily have saved Skylab back in '79 had we not foolishly thrown all our eggs into the shuttle basket.

And despite much thinking about it, I really have no idea why it isn't being done - aside from a few more or less paranoid conspiracy theories I'm not confortable with. It seems impossible to me that NASA could be so completely lacking even the dimmest vision of how we can get into space, especially as all the pieces are right out in full view.

More and more, I think the only answer is an end to civilian government sponsored spaceflight. Let the military develop what they need - they have a far better track record than NASA. And let private industry meet all the other needs. If we are moderately careful about how we do it, we could have an amazing change in space travel in a very short time. To be sure, government provides money that has given us what we have so far, but I think the stultifying effects of bureaucracy and central planning has done far more harm than good. Imagine what kind of computers we'd have now if NASA had been designing them.