Game over, start again?

[Perun]

Here's an interesting opinion posted on english.aljazeera.net:

Atlantis: Even an albatross can be beautiful

By Stephen Witt at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida

A thunderous sonic boom marked the end of NASA’s space shuttle programme on Thursday, as the orbital spacecraft Atlantis descended through the atmosphere to land at the Kennedy Space Center on the Atlantic coast of Florida.

The Atlantis touched down at 5:57am under clear pre-dawn skies, marking the end of the final space shuttle mission. At Mission Control in Houston, NASA staffers applauded and shook hands.

The overall mood, however, was less celebratory. With no replacement vehicle planned for years, and thousands of job layoffs looming, the future of US space flight is unmistakably cloudy.

For the first time in decades, the US has no capacity to put a human being in space. Private-sector providers are supposed to fill that gap, but manned commercial spaceflight is still several years away.

The US must now turn to Russia, its former rival, to buy tickets for its astronauts on the Soyuz space capsule at $63m a head.

Back home, NASA’s highly skilled engineers and support staff suddenly face the terrifying prospect of private-sector employment. Here, on the Space Coast of Florida, more than 7,000 NASA workers and contractors have already been laid off, with further cuts yet to come.

Economic problems

Less than one-third are expected to remain working in Florida, compounding problems for a local economy already feeling the effects of the economic downturn.

Just west of the Space Center, the inland highway is scattered with derelict malls, abandoned houses and thriving bail bonds businesses.

And what’s to blame? Critics point to the shuttle programme itself, as well as the sprawling federal bureaucracy that created it.

As conceived towards the end of the Apollo programme in the 1970s, the space shuttle mission promised horizontal take-off capacity with reduced cost and increased safety.

Instead, after much internal wrangling among different factions of NASA engineers, the programme ended up with an orbiter strapped horizontally to three massive fuel tanks.

The design cost $500m per launch and eventually claimed the lives of 14 astronauts.

The shuttle didn’t reach for the stars; it was a transport vehicle, ferrying low-orbit infrastructure for the Space Station and Hubble.

As a result, the viewing public tended to remember the programme’s spectacular failures more than its understated successes. The Hubble repair mission was a feel-good event, but the explosion of Challenger and the disintegration of Columbia are images seared on the brain.

Suffocating bureaucracy

NASA boosters spoke publicly of the agency’s legacy of successes. Privately, they talked of suffocating bureaucracy and a lack of vision.

The shuttle was more a product of the latter than the former, a massive, space-faring compromise.

After watching the Atlantis touch down on its final mission, its similarity to a gigantic albatross hung around America’s neck was hard to miss.

For all that, the final touchdown at the Kennedy Space Center landing strip was a nice moment.

As the Atlantis descended, the International Space Station cut across the sky in a single piercing dot of yellow.

In the twilight gloom, the Atlantis touched down, its vapour contrails from the upper atmosphere illuminated from below by 16 massive xenon lights.

The brakes hit, the chute deployed, and this 30-year experiment in manned spaceflight finally rolled to a screeching halt.

Sometimes, even an albatross can be beautiful.

While there are a few factual errors and some questionable opinions in the article, I think the author is right in stating that space exploration has essentially been crippled by a lack of vision. Virtually everybody these days says that we need to put this on hold or cancel it completely, because problems on Earth need to be solved first. The vision once was that going into space is a part of this solution. I still think that's true. A space industry that goes beyond sending sattelites to space so people on Fiji can watch the bloody Super Bowl would provide endless possibilities for employment and economic growth. If we seriously pushed it, future technologies could be developed that would effectively combat hunger and energy problems. But no, instead, the space program was crippled and crushed, and if the west actually still wants a piece of the pie, we'd have to re-view the vision and start from the scratch.

 

[LooseCannon]

I feel fucking passionately about this subject.

The space shuttle was not a perfect machine, but it was a machine that got a great job done. It extended our presence in space, and the three surviving orbiters will be valued artifacts of our early era of manned space exploration. But the job is not done. There is a lot of space out there, and this planet is very small and fragile.

We must go, boldly, where humans have not gone before. Why are we still here? Mars is there, waiting for us. We could put a colony on the moon. It'd cost money, oh yes, but the people that would be put to work as result would balance. Think about the leaps forward for the Apollo program in computing, engineering, communications, and energy production?

Microprocessors. Superconductors. Global communication satellites. Fuel cells.

The space shuttle has hosted thousands of experiments that have increased our quality of life. We have learned more about this planet. Yet it was a limited machine. It was like having an expensive dirtbike you can only use in your own backyard. We have to leave the gravitational influence of this pale blue dot and expand our presence in the universe.

Money? What is money...

 

[Wästed The Great]

I recall reading an article that stated (paraphrase) "the only two times in human history are great technological advances made are during (a) a war, and (b) space exploration".

Sounds like a reasonable reason to keep heading into space.

 

[mckindog]

Life has to move or grow and our planet has about as much of us as it can handle.
I say it's time to launch.