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Long before the Columbia disaster Saturday morning, even before the Challenger tragedy in 1986, the space shuttle was a scientific and technical failure -- it couldn't do the job it was designed to do.
That's one way to look at it. There's another vantage, of course: the shuttle was designed for other purposes, and on those terms, it was a success.
The shuttle started in the early 1970s as a pork-barrel project for the aerospace industry. The lunar missions were drawing to an end, Congress had refused to fund the super-sonic transport, and then as now, the aerospace centers of Florida, Texas and California held a pile of electoral votes.
As a government-funded make-work program for important states, the shuttle doubtless performed well -- there were plenty of powerful representatives and senators to keep money flowing to NASA and from there into their districts and states.
It was also a public-relations show, continuing a tradition that goes back to the dawn of the space age. For some reason, our leaders think we're so stupid and selfish that we wouldn't support space exploration unless they create some celebrities and put them atop the rockets.
The Soviet Union launched Sputnik, the first artificial satellite, in 195X. It was a great propaganda triumph. Then the Soviets started putting dogs and people into orbit, something beyond our capability at the time because their missiles were bigger than ours.
What we know now is that the Soviets needed bigger missiles on account of their inferior technology. We had miniaturized solid-state electronics; they were still using vacuum tubes. Their primitive warheads were immense; our sophisticated H-bombs packed more destructive force in a smaller and lighter package.
But there was a world-wide propaganda war under way
then, and when it came to exploring outer space, our side
had a tough sales job. Capitalism is superior to
communism because capitalists don't build big rockets when
they don't need them
may be true, but it's not nearly
as impressive as a cosmonaut grinning after a successful
mission.
So after yet another Soviet space success in 1961, President John F. Kennedy asked his advisers for something spectacular that the United States could do before the Soviets. The consensus was that the United States could pass the Soviet Union in time to get men to the moon and back, and do it within the decade. This wasn't science; it was Cold War propaganda.
And thus it came to pass. The NASA public-relations machine built astronauts into celebrities, so that Americans would support the space program. The space program put tax money into the right places, and the great American pork machine rolled on and eventually brought forth the shuttle.
The shuttle was sold as a cheap and reliable space vehicle, and it has been neither.
We have, of course, gained many benefits from the space program. I have read, though I have no way to know whether it is true, that just the benefits from improvements in weather forecasting, made possible by satellite pictures, have more than covered the costs of the space program.
Satellites deliver our television pictures and transmit our data. Satellite observation gives us a much better idea of what's really happening in the world -- be it the temperature of the North Pacific or a military build-up somewhere. Much of the research that made microprocessors possible -- and thus the immense personal computer industry -- was inspired and financed by the space program.
Doubtless there will be many more benefits in the future. Even though the Cold War that inspired the Space Race of 40 years ago is long over, this isn't the time to abandon space exploration.
But it is a good time to abandon the shuttle. There is very little that it does, in a scientific or technical way, that can't be done by unmanned craft. When people are required for a mission, there are safer and cheaper ways to get them into orbit and back.
NASA gave that some serious thought with a program called the Space Launch Initiative, which was supposed to produce something cheaper and more reliable than the shuttle. But a few weeks ago, NASA canceled that program and announced that the shuttle fleet would continue in use until 2020 -- when Columbia's airframe would be 40 years old.
We always try to look for that ray of sunshine in the gloom, some evidence that people didn't die in vain. And some good could come of this tragedy if it means that the U.S. will retire the other three shuttles and go about space exploration in a more sensible way.
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