It’s unlikely any community anywhere has a more positive impression of the space shuttle program than the Huntsville area. Marshall Space Flight Center is here, as is the U.S. Space and Rocket Center. Spaceflight is in the water. Indeed, I work in an old NASA building, and it’s certain some giants of the program have been in my hallways sometime in the past. I know scores of people who work, or worked, on the shuttle. Everyone does.
I drive right by where Wernher von Braun worked daily. (This post isn’t particularly about von Braun, but I wanted to include 
this photo because I think it’s one of the baddest-ass photos of anyone ever. This sumbitch is in charge of this shit, right here.)
Anyway, I do love the shuttle, even if von Braun didn’t. (Isn’t it interesting that our next program is so much closer to his original vision of where things should go?) Whenever possible, I shuffle my calendar so that I can watch launches and landings live. I get chills every single time.
Nevertheless, the downsides are easy to quantify. Based on its operational history, you have a base 2% chance of dying when you strap yourself into the thing, and that beats the hell out of most anything else you can do. From the beginning of the program to the present day, each mission averages about $12 billion. How much of the program’s benefit could we have realized without the risk and cost of sending human beings?
Inevitably in these conversations, someone trots out “we built the shuttle because we fell in love with the idea of a reusable spaceplane, and then we had to build the space station to give it something to do” (or some close variation). I sometimes wonder whether there would be a space station if it was all up to private industry, considering the positives and negatives of such a thing to a board trying to write a good annual report every year.
Not that I think NASA’s going anywhere. We have military interests in orbit, for one thing, and such interests shall always terminate at a federal office and not SpaceCo, even if SpaceCo gets a lot of business making it happen. But I am pleased that I’m around at a time to see the era of private spaceflight blossoming. As much as I wish I’d seen the Apollo missions live, I think this new chapter has the potential to be even more exciting.
A lot—not all—of what we’ve done with manned spaceflight utterly fails a truly rational analysis. Machines are considerably less fragile, and we don’t mourn them when they stop working. The lander that splattered all over Mars a few years ago wasn’t anyone’s father, Little League coach, or deacon.
But we send people because dammit, it’s cool to send people. And what is that coolness? It’s really nothing more than that human drive to explore and discover, right? Good luck squelching that. Good luck sticking it in a cost analysis.
I cried when Challenger exploded. I cried—considerably more angrily—when Columbia burned. I was all set to blame some chronically short-sighted paperwork-bound government drone for it—and depending on your reading of the findings, you can certainly blame that guy if you want to.
But you know what? That guy’s in Research Park, too. That’s not government, or everything-but-profit-be-damned, or anything else so easily demonized. It’s just human.
We have astronauts because we are awed. It doesn’t have to make the regular kind of sense. It’s space.
It’s one of the very few issues for which I answer “just because.”
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I grew up reading space operas, and thought about the far reaches of the universe.
I think the entire Space Shuttle program has been a boondoggle. Sending up senators and teachers for publicity (or, phrased another way, to try to keep the public interested so funding doesn’t dry up) points up, to me, that this is a pseudo-scientific venture. I am completely at a loss as to what the space station is for.
Unmanned space flight? I’m for it.
I wish I were more enthusiastic about the whole space thing, but I’m not. Don’t get me wrong, I know if the government didn’t waste money on this they’d waste it on something else. I think we are a few scientific steps away from making space flight practical and useful, and there is no guarantee mankind will ever take those steps, or that they are within the realm of engineering possibility.
Well, sheesh, nothing is “within the realm of engineering possibility”…until it is.
I think reaching for the stars is as natural and unstoppable as reaching across the ocean was 500 years ago. And now that we have a (young, but unambiguously thriving) private sector space industry, I expect it to snowball in my lifetime.
I guess I meant regarding “engineering possiblity” the old question of travel faster than the speed of light. I suppose I shoulda been more clear, and perhaps said “physical possiblity.”