Two days ago, Hoosier Dr. David Wolf boarded the space shuttle Endeavour and began a journey with six other astronauts to the International Space Station. Endeavour's current crew along with six future crews have trained, planned, and sacrificed to ride to space and help finish the ISS. Shuttle missions to finish the International Space Station will, if on schedule, end next year.
NASA's plan is then to turn elsewhere for space flight and give the Discovery, the Atlantis, and the Endeavour a well-deserved retirement. Unfortunately, the six vehicle shuttle fleet (test vehicle Enterprise was first) is missing two shuttles with the Challenger and the Columbia gone but not forgotten. Twelve United States astronauts, one Israeli astronaut, and one American teacher have died in the pursuit of space exploration in the space shuttle. While the two shuttle disasters did not have anything to do with the actual construction of the International Space Station (Challenger exploded in 1986, and Columbia had no way to dock to the ISS) the two disasters have shown how dangerous and deadly spaceflight can be. Right now, the Endeavour orbits the Earth on its way to the ISS with, what NASA calls, minor damage due to foam that fell off the external fuel tank during launch.
Yesterday, "Friend of the Blog" Christopher Jackson told me in a casual Facebook chat that he was e-mailing NASA. Interested, I asked why. He then told me that NASA is planning to de-orbit the International Space Station in 2016. That means that in just seven years, this in-space laboratory will be allowed to fall into the Earth's atmosphere and purposefully be crash landed into the Pacific Ocean. The Washington Post published an article on the plan. Read more about it here.
Why are we continuing to put our astronauts' lives in danger and spending money to finish the station if we are just going to abandon it in seven years? I'm bewildered and surprised.
I have always been a big proponent of human spaceflight. I remember growing up with pictures of the Saturn V rocket and Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon posted on my walls. Human spaceflight has captured our imagination and enriched our culture for years. Consumer products such as Tang, freeze dried food, velcro, and other items have come from space exploration.
NASA now arrives at a crossroads for the program. Budget cuts and funding issues have drained its operational budget. The United States economic situation has not been good for NASA. So, my question now is that knowing we are just going to let the station die in seven years; why continue to build it? Why continue to put lives on the line to finish the space station if there's no commitment to it? We have come this far and spent this much to just let that money fall into the Pacific Ocean.
We know the ISS will not last forever, but, as the article says, it should operate without issue through the 2020's. There's not anything that we can use it for after the shuttle program is allowed to pass into the record books?
This story just makes no sense to me.
4 comments:
I think the Washington Post has two points that address what passes for logic in this case:
"NASA has a strategy built on President George W. Bush's Vision for Space Exploration, of which a return to the moon is the next great leap." (typical of Bush - how is doing what we already accomplished a 'next great leap'?)
and
"The rap on the space station has always been that it was built primarily to give the space shuttle somewhere to go. Now, with the shuttle being retired at the end of 2010, the station is on the spot. U.S. astronauts will be able to reach the station only by getting rides on Russia's Soyuz spacecraft."
I am not familiar with NASA's program goals, but I have not heard of any new version of the shuttle getting ready for launch. While I only posted the Bush reference for a giggle, we still need transportation to the station. With the decommissioning of the shuttles, how do we do that?
I'm not arguing in favor of this approach. But the shuttle is old technology and its time to move forward. One would think that the space station was not only a laboratory for learning how to live and work in space, it could continue to serve that purpose and be a stopping place for any human travel to the moon or mars. It need not die - but it must be visited to be maintained.
I do need to add computers and mylar to your list of the advances fostered by the space program. Just to share a short story -- In 5th grade I was living in California and we had a school assembly where we had a NASA representative (who remembers now who that was?) explaining about space travel and the US quest. They gave every one of use kids a swatch of mylar -- you can't rip it, its shiny, and its lightweight. It was considered an invention of huge value and possibility. A thing of beauty that turns out to make excellent birthday balloons to boot !
There are future uses for a way station in space that would argue for the continued operation of the station and therefore finding a means to get there. Just one is the potential of mining ore from asteroids passing nearby earth's orbit. I heard of this ambition over 20 years ago.
All said, I agree with Chris and you - we should not flame broil the station just yet.
Well, I am still waiting to receive an email back from them. We need to make sure that we protect the ISS, its vital to science and space exploration.
After $100,000,000,000 to build it, we can easily find the money to maintain it. Outer Space is the future of the human race and the ISS is going to be a part of this.
The space station, too, will have a lifespan of some utility before it is obsolete. It would be nice to see it survive long enough for a replacement to be constructed.
As for the money, much of the space station's value is not in its structure, its in the building of it and the living in it and the knowledge only hands on can bring.
Well, the ISS hasn't even started its true lifespan. MIR was supposed to be obsolete in the early 1990's but it lasted until 2000-sometime. The ISS is at least able to survive to almost 2030, and most likely even more because it is built much better than MIR was.
As for a shuttle replacement, the Orion system is supposed to come online in 2014-15 and it is basically a blending of designs from the Apollo missions and using some part ideas from the Shuttle system, aka boosters and fuel tanks. And it will be able to dock to the ISS. Check out more information on wikipedia if you would like, because it goes into details more than I can cover here.
And I agree with you, it isn't about the value of the structure, it is about the knowledge that it has brought us, and I hope will be able to bring to us for many more decades.
Post a Comment