Short Sightedness

I was thinking recently about how short sighted political decisions are. Specifically, I’m talking here about NASA. The shuttle program, after 30years of flying the first reusable vehicle, ended this year. There were a few screw ups (Challenger, Columbia), but that was 2 out of 135. That’s a 1.5% failure rate. Not great, but considering the dangers of what they were doing, not bad.

But okay, shuttle is 30years old. They were designed for 100 launches, each, but whatever. Cancel the program and try something new. Except there is nothing new. America has no capability for manned spaceflight. And Russia just had an accident that is grounding Soyuz for a time. So we have 6 people on the ISS. They can come down, but we can’t send anyone back up.

Currently NASA is spending a lot of money helping commercial launch vehicles come to life. That’s great. In a few years SpaceX or Boeing will have a home built vehicle that could potentially start delivering astronauts. And Soyuz has been operating for 30yrs, this one set back isn’t going to keep the grounded for long.

But even after Soyuz is up and running again, what if something breaks on the ISS? Some parts of the station have been up there for 10years already, and only had a 10year design life. They’ll probably be fine, but sometimes things break. Maybe a piece of space debris collides with part of the station and a compartment has to be abandoned. If any of the major components needs to be replaced, there is nothing that can deliver it. The station was designed to be constructed by the shuttle. Now there’s no shuttle to deliver replacement parts.

In eight years, the world went from never having put a human in orbit, to walking on the moon. Four years later, Skylab became the first rudimentary space station. Eight years later, the first reusable space craft was up and running. Then after another five, the Russians put Mir up.

And then it stopped. Mir lasted for 15years, and that’s about the time that the ISS started being constructed. The shuttle program did a lot of cool things (Hubble for example) but the drive to push the boundaries died. If we could make it to the moon in less than a decade, why has it been twenty-five since the last major milestone?

Why is there not serious work being done on building an off world habitat? Or developing a reusable intra-system ship? Or serious work into interstellar travel (even on the space probe scale)? We’ve started to discover worlds in other star systems that orbit in the potential habitable zone. The chances of another planet capable of life, or at least supporting life, have risen from more than just speculation.

There are a lot of arguments that money should be focused on Earth based problems, and debt issues, etc etc. But that’s all a bunch of BS. You don’t spend money on space travel because you expect to make a direct profit. You spend money on space travel to try and accomplish something that hasn’t been done before.

The push in helping get commercial space flight off the ground is one thing they are doing right. Space flight needs to become as common as airplanes. But you also have to keep pushing the boundaries. And not just with probes. In order for commercial space flight to be cool, there has to something to strive for beyond that.