St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri) June 29, 2003
Find It, Fix It, Fly It? Or Forget It?
Nasa Should Set Its Sights Beyond Its Outmoded Mission And Technology
By Kevin Horrigan
SPACE SHUTTLE
An astounding fact emerged from a report made last week by the board investigating the Space Shuttle Columbia disaster: There are 750 separate "mission critical" parts on each shuttle. That means that every time the shuttle flies, there are 750 different things that can break and kill the crew.
Among them is the thermal protection system, the heat-resistant tiles and coatings that deflect the 3,000-degree heat of re-entry. The thermal protection system is so mission critical that NASA's original safety rules said no debris should ever strike the tiles or reinforced carbon coating on the wings' leading edges.
It turns out that NASA has been ignoring that rule for years. On at least seven occasions, foam insulation on the shuttle's external fuel tank broke away at launch and struck the thermal protection system in an average of 30 different places per flight. NASA got away with it six times. The seventh time was Jan. 16, when Columbia was launched.
The investigating board has now concluded that the most likely cause of Columbia's disintegration on re-entry 16 days later was a gash in the eighth panel of the orbiter's left wing, a gash caused by hardened foam that fell off a strut called a "bi-pod ramp" connecting the orbiter to the fuel tank.
The space agency, eager to resume flying the three remaining shuttles, has adopted a "find it, fix it and fly it" attitude toward the shuttle's problems. Last week, retired Admiral Hal Gehman, who heads the investigation panel, indicated that the board would recommend a series of engineering changes that would enable NASA to get back in the air early next year.
"We believe the next couple of dozen flights will be the safest in years," Gehman said, "because NASA will promptly make needed technical fixes."
A larger question, one that must be answered by the Bush administration and the nation as a whole, is whether that's good enough. Many people within the aerospace community consider the shuttle to be an outmoded technology, inherently unsafe and vastly uneconomical, not worth either the money or the lives that it has cost.
"The fundamental reality is that is was designed to do something other than what it is doing," says John E. Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a military and technology think tank.
When conceived in the 1970s, the shuttles were advertised as sturdy "space trucks," one of which would fly every other week with minimal ground support and lift cargo into orbit for $100 a pound. Instead, there are usually six or seven shuttle flights a year, supported by a vast bureaucracy, and cargo costs are about $20,000 a pound.
The basic mission has changed, too, from lifting and repairing satellites for the military and private industry to servicing the International Space Station. NASA ballyhooes the scientific purposes that can only be achieved in the zero-gravity of the space station, from growing protein crystals and tissues to handling fluids and testing combustion.
If you assume (and many people don't) that you need human beings to cond uct these experiments, then to build and service the space station, you need transportation to get crews there and back. For the foreseeable future, that means the space shuttle. NASA has dismissed the suggestion that it rely on cheaper disposable vehicles, as the Russians do, and the shuttle has absorbed so much of its $15 billion a year budget that development of the next generation "space plane" has lagged far behind.
Is it worth it? Consider: Would Queen Isabella have funded Christopher Columbus if he'd told her he was just going to sail around the coast of Spain and study fish? Would Columbus even have wanted to go? Maybe NASA should park the shuttles and set its sights a little higher.
Design and build the space plane as part of a mission of science and exploration that can truly fire the imagination of mankind. Great risks should serve great achievements. You can do a lot of science on the way to Mars.
Copyright © 2003, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Inc.
