Atlantis launched today (allowing the MSM to put that as the lead story instead of the Dismal Jobs Report) in the last flight of the Shuttle program.
Kind of sad, but really, here’s a great example of how government can’t do much of anything right.
The Space Shuttle was originally supposed to be a low-cost reusable vehicle that could be used to launch and service satellites in orbit, as well as do some serious science.
Didn’t work out that way. After the Challenger exploded in 1986, NASA made the program so expensive that no one could afford the rates. Much cheaper to just put them on single use rockets.
But the Shuttle Program soldiered on, having lost its original point. And they kept on using it even though they were only supposed to serve until the mid-1990’s when a second generation shuttle was supposed to come on line (but never did).
So the shuttles will go into a museum, and you can tell your grandkids how America used to be the leaders in space when they bow down to their Chinese overlords.
Sure, the Shuttle program didn’t work nearly as well as it was supposed to. But since you’re pointing to this as an example of the government not doing anything right, do you have any examples of private enterprise doing any better in this field?
Yeah, actually, they have done something right in that most satellites are launched privately now, or subcontracted out to the ESA or Chinese space agency.
I think the bigger question is, was any of the space program really worth it? you had some technological advances, to be sure, and our scientific knowledge was advanced, but it seems we got to the moon and just kind of lost interest.
In order to go into space (e.g., to visit the International Space Station) Americans will now be dependent, not on “free enterprise”, but on the Russian Federal Space Agency, which is of course a government agency of the Russian Federation.
The Chinese space program is also a state-run enterprise.
And the ESA is an international organization of a whole bunch of governments. Arianespace is a private company–more or less. (The French government space agency owns a third of it.)
You mean how we used to leaders in space when we had a well-funded government space program?
The shuttle was an interesting experiment in creating a reusable spacecraft that didn’t pan out. The problem was that we should have started building a replacement 15 years ago. Unfortunately the “all guv’mint is teh suxor” crowd has been starving the beast since the 80’s.
Are you sure you’re a recovering Republican? Because saying things like “here’s a great example of how government can’t do much of anything right” makes it sound like you’re still drinking the Kool-aid.
People love the Big Bang! Gee Whiz! In Your Face! stuff when it come to space exploration. NASA was in to accomplishing goals and many were not that kind.
And if you think government can’t do anything correct, do you have any examples where private enterprise is now ready to jump in with its own money, own technology and a better way to do something on the order the federal government has at its disposal but chooses not go go there now?
So the U.S. government can’t do anything right, so we have to rely on the more efficient Russian and Chinese governments?
Are you sure this is the message you want to convey?
Well, yes and no. The companies operating the hardware may be largely private now, but they’re mostly still using government hardware, which was designed and built using government subsidies.
There are some significant flaws in the basic assumptions of the o.p. and some of the responses.
First of all, the Space Transportation System (consisting of the Orbiter Vehicle, External Tank, Solid Rocket Boosters, and all of the ground support equipment) was not really designed or intended to do much in the way of “serious science”, and in fact, it is unclear what anyone thought the mission of the Shuttle was really going to be. The Nixon administration mandated that it would be developed under a restrictive budget (which is part of the reason the semi-reusable SRBs were used instead of a liquid flyback stage); the Carter and Reagan administrations began to restrict the future manifest of expendable launch vehicles like the venerable Thor-Delta, Titan, and Atlas vehicles with the intent of driving payloaders toward use of the Shuttle to maximize distribution of fixed operating costs. Reagan reduced the original fleet size to four, while increasing the number of classified payload missions (surveillance satellites and provisional SDI-related payloads). Far from doing serious science, the restrictions provided by the Shuttle payload capacity and cargo bay dimensions placed restrictions on interplanetary spacecraft deployments, and the once around polar orbit trajectory required for satellite deployments from Vandenberg AFB mandated the broad delta wing to provide adequate cross-range, increasing complexity and reducing achievable structural margins and payload capacity. It should also be borne in mind that the Shuttle was a vehicle designed in committee to distribute work to all major congressional districts. One can levy this as a criticism of government-funded spaceflight, but in fact, it is an indightment of the pseudo-corruption of government oversight into the the inner workings of an ostensibly technical agency. The costs and progress of the Mercury and Gemini programs, for instance, were much more tightly controlled and focused on achieving technical objectives.
Shuttle launches were already prohibitively expensive for most commercial payloads even before the Challenger disaster delayed flights and reduced the manifest. It was for this reason that Reagan signed the Commercial Space Launch Act in 1984, allowing private companies to provide launch vehicles and launch services to customers directly instead of through the US Air Force or NASA, although still on government-maintained space launch facilities, as FAA regulation permitting the development of privately-operated spaceports in the continental United States that are not part of the Easter and Western Range was only passed in 2004.
The Arianespace developed rockets are some of the most expensive rocket launch systems currently in operation. While less expensive per payload mass than the Shuttle, they are comparable to the egregiously expensive Delta IV and Atlas V rockets, and more expensive to operate than the Titan III and Titan IV vehicles. They are substantially more expensive and less reliabile than the ballistic missile heritage Delta and Atlas vehicles (which are related in name only to the current EELV Delta IV and Atlas V). The cheapest space launch vehicles currently in use are the ICBM derivatives built and launched by NPO Energia and Orbital Sciences Corportation. (OSC also provides the purely commercial air-launch Pegasus and ground launch Taurus vehicles, but these are not comparable in payload to the heavy lift class of space launch vehicles.) Space Exploration has promised order of magnitude reductions in space launch costs (as did the defunct Roton and Rocketplane Kistler) but so far has not demonstrated acceptable reliability and has consistently refused to have transparency in their finances and mission assurance activities.
So far, privately funded space launch providers have not demonstrated better reliability or dramatically lower launch costs compared to government-sponsored vehicles, although the potential certainly exists for the reduction in launch costs. Much of the cost in space transportation isn’t the vehicle itself, per se, but all of the processing, building and maintaining launch facilities, and hazard abatement. A truly production launch vehicle (which the Delta II and Titan III approached in quantity) would offer economies of scale, but the real savings is in developing processing methods and systems commonality that reduce the workflow for integrating and preparing a space launch vehicle to an activity more akin to preparing a jumbo jet than building a small skyscraper. Bob Truax’s Sea Dragon concept (successfully demonstrated on the subscale SeeBee) and Phillip Bono’s Rhombus and SASSTO concepts both offered this reduced processing effort and rapid turnaround as features of their operation. However, to date, no private company has really developed these for space launch capability. (Blue Origin is apparently developing the Delta Clipper derived New Sheppard for suborbital sounding rocket type applications but isn’t yet committing to an orbital launch vehicle development.)
The Russian Space Agency is really just a clearing house for a number of design bureaus (most notably NPO Energia mentioned above) that partily or completely privatized aver the collapse of the Soviet Union; however, the bulk of technology they use was developed from the Soviet-era government funded development. The NPO Energomash liquid engines like the RD-180 family are phenomenally performing engines that are probably the maximum one can get from a Laval-style nozzle and spherical combustion chamber (and a manufacturing work of art, to boot) but the basic design is over four decades old, developed during the Glushko era.
You seem to be making the (all too common mistake) with equating the United States manned space program with space exploration overall, and specifically the advances in scientific knowledge from the space program. In fact, the manned program is almost uniformly at odds with scientific research in general, save for that specifically related to human exploration in space, i.e. space physiology and psychology. Through the government funded NASA, the United States is the only nation to have actively explored every planet in the Solar System, landing on two extraterrestrial rocky worlds, exploring the moon systems of Jupiter and Saturn (landing a probe on Titan), and sending missions to explore a variety of asteroids, comets, and KBOs. Although other nations or collections of nations such as Japan, the European Space Agency, and the former Soviet Union have also explored extraterrestrial objects, they have not done so to the bredth and depth of the NASA missions.
NASA has also performed a long list of missions to study the characteristics of the Earth’s climate and magnetosphere, proved into the Sun and solar weather phenomena, and peered into the echoes of the Big Bang. Although the Hubble telescope is probably the most well-known and has provided the most popular images recognizable by public, the long lived Explorer and OSO programs have provided a great wealth of scientific knowledge, both for pure research and practical application. No other nation or agency can claim anywhere near the range of missions and knowledge that has been gained by these programs. It goes almost without saying that private industry would have little interest in these types of missions, insofar as they come without a near-term recompense even though the knowledge gained from these missions has spurred on multi-billion dollar industries and provided insights that are of as incalculable future value as flight was in the time of Leonardo De Vinci.
It may be true that we’ve “lost interest” in manned space exploration, but the reasons for that are very clear: the onerous difficulty, inherent hazards, and limited value provided by human exploration just doing justify the extreme price tag of these missions. (One common estimate, borne out by looking at program costs, is that 98% of the cost of a manned mission is in keeping human beings alive during the mission; this does not even consider the compromises to scientific objectives in order to accommodate astronauts.) For the estimated cost of a single human mission to Mars with limited operating time we can literally send dozens or hundreds of probes that can cover more ground, carry more instrumentation, operate more reliably, and do not have to be returned at enormous cost for essentially no scientific value.
In fact, the only justification for manned space program is whatever inherent value you assign to developing the capability for keeping people alive in space. The Shuttle program and the ISS were not even much good for that, as they are limited to operating in a low orbit with little in the way of developing the technologies needed for logistical self-sufficiency. This objective, too, could be better paved by the use of developing unmanned capability for resource utilization and automated manufacturing prior to erecting the kind of large scale habitats that are suitable for indefinite human habitation in space.
shrug Your reply was more succinct, and nicely annotated with parenthetical links, providing more content with less verbiage; really, a better response overall.
I was at the STS-130 launch and, even 10 km away, it was one of the most amazing things ever. Night became day and the noise was great.
I’m not sure how useful they were or anything, buy sure it was great.
The problem is that after 1969, what has our goal been for space?
Permanently manned-space station? Oh you mean Skylab?
Permanently manned moon base?
Permanent moon colony?
Permanent space station colony?
Manned mission to Mars?
So by the time the Space Shuttle was being developed, what was its purpose? I think it did a remarkable job for what its ultimate objective was i.e. go into space and do things but with out a firm direction from NASA besides unmanned probes, why have a space shuttle?
Most Republicans support the manned space program. It was the Democrat Barack Obama who killed it including the planned manned Mars landing which George W Bush called for.
Once cynic remarked something to the effect of “the purpose of the Space Shuttle is to build the International Space Station and the purpose of the ISS is to have a place for the Space Shuttle to go”
Which is exactly what just happened. (As you can see, the retirement was actually delayed for a bit, from 2010 to now.)
As for “calling for” a manned Mars landing…why, yes! Yes he did!
But I’m going to do better than that: The United States of America should develop a spacefaring interplanetary civilization, made up of self-sufficient space habitats, at first at the LaGrangian points of the Earth-Moon system, then spreading from there to the Asteroid Belt, the Outer Solar System (the Rings of Saturn, Kuiper Belt, eventually the Oort Cloud) and from there our species should diffuse on out into interstellar space, spreading across the Galaxy and forming a mighty new Galactic Civilization! Yep–that’s what I’m calling for–you read it right here!
Whee! This is fun! Now, lemme see–I got a dime and two nickels in my pocket. Oh, and a penny! Let’s get this show on the road!
Seriously, the last President to “call for” a major manned spaceflight initiative of the non-spinning-our-wheels-in-LEO variety that actually resulted in something happening was John Kennedy. It actually happened under Lyndon Johnson–I mean, LBJ didn’t cancel it or anything–with all the interesting bits winding up happening during the presidency of Richard Nixon, who inherited it, but then killed it off once we had actually gotten to the Moon and everyone kind of lost interest. Since then, we’ve had the Shuttle/International Space Station but–while part of me still thinks they’re Really Cool–realistically they literally don’t go anywhere. Just around and around and around. Every so often some President or other ritualistically says “Let’s go to Mars!..I’m appointing the Vice President to head a committee” and that’s pretty much the end of it. IIRC Obama has suggested maybe we should send somebody to a Near Earth Asteroid.
And finally, the Obama Administration has called for much greater reliance on private industry to get to people into space. Isn’t that kind of a…Republican-sounding thing to say?
I don’t think Bush was ever serious about Mars or the space program, nor do I think NASA was particularly enthusiastic about it, knowing Bush was talking out his ass anyway.