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Jewish World Review August 12, 2005 / 7 Av, 5765 Lost in space By Rich Lowry
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
Now that the Space Shuttle Discovery is back safely, we can
breathe a sigh of relief, hail the pluck and bravery of its crew,
and ask: How did our space program become so invested in such a
clunker?
It's almost as if the shuttle exists so we can throw it into
orbit to see if its crew can manage to get it back down again. This
is not stuff to fire the imagination. Despite NASA's fluff about the
"wild success" of Discovery's flight, at this point about the only
people enthusiastic about the shuttle program are aerospace
contractors and the pork-barreling congressmen from those states
where NASA makes its home. For them, every half-a-billion-dollar
space-shuttle launch represents the wonderful majesty of cold, hard
cash.
Defenders of the embattled shuttle program say, among other
things, that it is needed to support the International Space
Station. Alas, it's true. The shuttle basically exists to go to the
space station, and the space station exists so the shuttle can have
someplace to go. They are mutually reinforcing boondoggles. Together
they represent the stunted dreams and the wasteful spending of the
space program 36 years after Neil Armstrong took "one small step."
The shuttle has a great future behind it. It was supposed to fly
every week — but now is lucky to go a handful of times a year and
is grounded again after NASA spent two years and $1 billion failing
to figure out how to stop foam from dangerously flaking off the fuel
tank. It was supposed to carry satellites into orbit for launching,
an impossibly costly way to get satellites into orbit. Now it's
creaky, dangerous and nearly purposeless.
Journalist Gregg Easterbrook, a devastatingly convincing scourge
of the shuttle program, writes: "The shuttle's main engines, first
tested in the late 1970s, use hundreds more moving parts than do new
rocket-motor designs. The fragile heat-dissipating tiles were
designed before breakthroughs in materials science. Until recently,
the flight-deck computers on the space shuttle used old 8086 chips
from the early 1980s, the sort of pre-Pentium electronics no
self-respecting teenager would dream of using for a video game."
A Federal Aviation Administration official estimates that if
commercial aviation had the same accident rate as the shuttle, more
than 500 flights would crash a day. The science projects conducted
aboard the shuttle have the musty whiff of make-work. The
experiments on the doomed shuttle Columbia included examining
"bacterial and yeast cell responses to the stresses of spaceflight"
and developing "the gravity-sensing organs of fish in the absence of
gravity."
Nothing doing. Now, one of its main functions is to serve as a
symbol of international cooperation. The U.S.-Russia joint work on
the station is a nice bookend to the Cold War, which had fueled the
space race between the two countries. But how much do you want to
pay for your nice bookends? The bottled water that astronauts drink
on the space station costs nearly half a million dollars a day,
according to Easterbrook's calculation. It has two astronauts on
board who are focused on routine maintenance and serve as guinea
pigs to test the effects of long-term weightlessness.
The shuttle is slated to be retired by 2010. It can't come too
soon. The space program is better focused on getting astronauts to a
destination: the moon, Mars, wherever. In the meantime, unmanned
probes are the space program's stars. They explore Mars and Saturn,
deliver beautiful images of the far reaches of the universe, and
shoot projectiles at comets. NASA is nonetheless considering cutting
funding for Voyager 1 and the data it's sending back from the edges
of the solar system so the space shuttle can be kept limping along.
Time to give the shuttle an honored place in the Smithsonian.
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© 2005 King Features Syndicate |
Mitch Albom | |||||||||||
