The Detroit News February 01, 2004
Crash shifts NASA's mission
Bush stirs debate on goals by urging flight to Mars
By Lisa Zagaroli
When the shuttle Columbia shattered across the Southern skies a year ago today, it was a reminder of the risks of space flight.
In the words of NASA chief Sean O'Keefe, it was "a searing event." The death of seven astronauts helped to force the space agency to intensify its evaluation of what it was hoping to accomplish in orbit and its commitment to space exploration.
The result was President George Bush's proposal last month eventually to end the shuttle program, build a space station on the moon and try to send astronauts to Mars. It has stirred a debate about how far Americans will go and how much they will pay to explore space.
Tony Greco of Livonia, a business analyst at Ford Motor Co., seems like the kind of person who would embrace Bush's plan. He has a space book on his coffee table, has gazed at Mars through a friend's telescope in the last several months and, like many kids, wanted to be an astronaut for a time.
"I'm very excited about going to Mars," says Greco, 30. "But to be talking about this now, when we are funding a war in Iraq, as well as cutting taxes ? to be blunt, it's fiscally and financially irresponsible for the administration to bring that up.
"It takes your eye off what is really important."
A former shuttle astronaut says the proposal made him pause. "I was actually torn when I heard the announcement, between 'oh yeah' and 'oh no,' " says Tony England, who flew on the Challenger in 1985, the mission before the shuttle exploded 18 years ago. "People are so concerned about the deficit."
England, now a professor of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Michigan, says he's not surprised that Bush wants to end the shuttle program because manned space flight had lost its focus.
"NASA in my opinion had been drifting, really pretty much since the end of Apollo (visits to the moon)," says England, who worked on the Apollo project but never flew on it.
England says regardless of whether the new goals set by Bush are right, "It was time, and it was very important to give the human space flight activity a goal."
The proposal to build a new space vehicle to carry astronauts back to the moon and to Mars is being debated in Washington. Critics worry about a vague deadline for getting to Mars and a minor commitment to increasing the space budget.
You can reach Washington correspondent Lisa Zagaroli at (202) 906-8206 or lzagaroli@detnews.com
"We need a renewed vision and serious plan for space, especially as our shuttle fleet continues to age and as we complete the International Space Station," says Neil Lane, professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University.
"But that vision must be more than a dream. The president has provided a part of a vision, but he has not provided the architecture or the means."
Bush's plan also has renewed talk of turning over some of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's work to private companies.
Sen. Sam Brownback, R-Kansas, told the administrator of NASA at a Senate committee hearing Wednesday that he ought to consider working with the commercial sector because "bigger pots of funds" would be available.
O'Keefe says as NASA moves outward in the solar system it will look for ideas from the private sector and academia.
"For the past three decades, NASA has continued to pursue government-centered space exploration and development, and as a result, the costs have not come down and in a sense, space has become the stillborn revolution," says Edward L. Hudgins, editor of the Cato Institute-published book, "Space: The Free Market Frontier."
Hudgins advocates letting companies make shuttle flights and run the Space Station, while NASA offers prizes to those companies or individuals who meet particular goals the space agency wants to meet.
Regaining NASA's popularity
So much has changed since school children across the nation were glued to television sets watching astronauts take "a giant step for mankind" in the 1960s.
Hollywood science fiction and video games have taken Americans to worlds that seem far more exciting than dusty rocks on the moon, and countless TV channels have scattered public interests in dozens of different directions, says Robert Thompson, professor of popular culture at Syracuse University.
"Everyone fed from the same cultural trough" until cable television hit its stride in the early 1980s, Thompson says. "The Apollo project was the greatest television show anywhere. It was grainy, black and white. ... You could really grip the nation in a national drama."
That fascination with worlds unknown was fueled by political incentives, too. But it's a bit of a stretch to imagine that trying to beat China back to the moon in the next few years could ever come close to replicating the excitement of the initial space race with the Soviet Sputnik during the Cold War, says John Pike, director of Globalsecurity.org, a nonprofit think tank that focuses on space and defense issues.
Still, Pike says, America has been surprisingly consistent in its support for space travel during the past few decades.
After President Bush announced his space plan, a poll conducted for the Associated Press by Ipsos-Public Affairs says Americans were evenly split at 48 percent.
Despite the romanticized view of America's fascination in the 1950s and 1960s, President John Kennedy's plans to go to the moon met with similarly mixed reactions in polls back then, the AP said.
When the same surveyed Americans were asked if they would rather spend money on domestic programs, their support for space consistently dropped a few points.
The failed Columbia mission's one-year anniversary has refocused the debate on the space shuttle program.
Hudgins questions what the country got in return for shuttle flights like the Columbia's.
"They were doing insect experiments for high school kids," says Hudgins, Washington director of the Objectivist Center. "Is that worth billions of dollars and losing the lives of seven heroic people? No."
England, the astronaut, agrees that the shuttle program didn't always hold itself to the highest scientific standards. He says it's part of a long-term problem the agency has had with ill-defined goals for astronauts.
"We started treating them as just pilots of a space vehicle," he says. "They really weren't part of the experiment."
"If you look at what's been achieved, it's been spotty. There are some nice things, and some really petty things, and some tremendous exaggerations along the way. It's a mixed legacy."
Shuttle experiments
On his own shuttle mission in 1985, England and his fellow astronauts flew a new instrument system and some solar telescopes for the first time, but they weren't fully operational until about the sixth day of the eight-day flight. The plan was to fly the equipment again, but when the Challenger blew up on take-off in 1986, those goals were never achieved.
"Shuttle flights tended to in many ways repeat themselves," England says. "There's a lot of cost and a lot of risk here, so you want to be sure you're going to get as much from it as you can."
Hudgins says NASA has allowed the hardware to drive the science, instead of the other way around. He adds, "I'm glad to see the president trying to focus the space program on science and space exploration instead of freight hauling and public housing in the sky."
Space program benefits
Many Americans are hard pressed to name many tangible benefits of space flight, beyond the value of exploration in general.
"Velcro is always the one that I hear," says Syracuse's Thompson of an oft-repeated myth.
NASA says the shuttle program has played a significant role in deploying satellites, telescopes and its main goal, building the International Space Station.
NASA says its other achievements include helping learn more about how cancer cells and bone cells form, and conducting a hydrogen experiment that produced flames 100 times weaker than a birthday candle, research the agency believes could lead to cleaner-burning cars one day.
Sen. Kay Hutchison, R-Texas, says NASA needs to do a better job of getting its medical experiments in the university hospital system for further development and application.
"Let's start seeing the results," she says.
Neil Karl, 61, an unemployed systems analyst from Livonia who has followed the space program since he was a kid, says he is interested in the science, but he sees great potential for the space program as a jobs program.
"There's so much to do when we get there," he says. "It's going to provide millions of new jobs. It's a new product, a new service, which has unlimited possibilities."
Those unlimited possibilities are still in the imaginations of school children, too.
Liz Larwa, a fourth grade teacher at Spencer Elementary School in Brighton, says she doesn't wheel in a television for her kids to watch space flights anymore. But she says in the 30 years she's been teaching kids about space, they've never lost their enthusiasm for it.
"If I could, I could allow them to ask questions for hours," says Larwa, who has been the Michigan elementary science teacher of the year and spent time at NASA on a program meant to inspire the next generation. "They really do want to know and they are fascinated to know. They love learning about this stuff."
A new plan for NASA
Scrap the space shuttle and Hubble telescope
Bush's plan would phase out the space shuttles. NASA separately is reviewing a decision not to fix or upgrade the Hubble Telescope, which gives scientists enhanced views of distant galaxies.
The failure of the Columbia space shuttle caused a re-evaluation of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
Establish a moon base / man on Mars
President Bush responded last month by proposing that the space agency return to the moon, create a base there and then try to send astronauts to Mars.
© Copyright 2004, The Detroit News
