Slashdot Mirror
Remembering NASA Disasters With an Eye Toward the Future
mattnyc99 writes "This next week marks the anniversary of three sad days in NASA's history: three astronauts died in a capsule fire testing for Apollo 1 exactly 42 years ago today, then the Challenger went down 23 years ago tomorrow, followed by the Columbia disaster six years ago this Super Bowl Sunday. Amidst all this sadness, though, too many average Americans take our space program for granted. Amidst reconsiderations of NASA priorities from the Obama camp as the Shuttle nears retirement, then, the brilliant writer Chris Jones offers a great first-hand account in the new issue of Esquire — an impassioned argument against the impending end of our manned space program. In which camp do you fall: mourner or rocketeer?"
... is a bad month to be an astronaut.
I am not your blowing wind, I am the lightning.
Ok, so we've lost a few people in space exploration. You know what, that's what happens, that's what they signed up for, and... that's healthy. What's not healty is how oversensitive the Public seems to be to these losses. Yes, the shuttle is aging, yes we need a new syste, but we shouldn't abandon manned space flight. Without manned space flight, how will we ever escape the Earth? And sooner or later, the Earth is going to want to be rid of us. Or the sun will, and Earth won't have much choice in the matter.
That which is done from love exists beyond good and evil
Coincidently I've been watchin' the "When We Left Earth" DVD's recently. One of the astronauts that discussed the Columbia accident said that they know the risk and do it anyway.
How many more people have died in the Iraq conflict than the entire history of the space program? It's pretty twisted that the majority have done comparatively little to end that, but are ready to grab their pitch forks and torches when it comes to the space program.
No sig for you!!
Those little Mars rovers seem to be going strong. Lets put our money where it seems to be providing the best ROI.
Have gnu, will travel.
Get my drift folks? Astronauts do not become Astronauts because they want a safe job. If I were capable, I'd risk my life to be in Space.
Considering the greatest impact manned space travel has had on my life is probably freeze dried fruit in my morning cereal, that's a pretty lousy cost-to-benefit ratio. Until there's something better than a rocket for propulsion, I don't think manned space flight makes sense. However, the rovers and robots are definitely worth it. I think it makes a whole more sense than trying to shoot people into space.
This. I work in space science, think manned spaceflight is a wonderful thing, and look forward to it becoming increasingly a commercially available thing... but it's an extremely expensive way to accomplish most tasks, especially when it comes to accomplishing anything in the way of science.
I also work around environmental policy, and strongly feel we'd be better off working on surviving on this planet, instead of ruining it, then going off looking for others to ruin. Put a few of those "best and brightest" brains to work on finding ways to meet the Millennium Development Goals, wouldja?
Village idiot in some extremely smart villages.
I mean, it's great, but ultimately we will have to be sending people up there anyway. There is no way around it.
We HAVE TO improve the technology for lifting people from this rock. Until such day as we can make a machine that is as individually intelligent, dexterous, decisive, and bold as a human being, we have no real alternative.
And even if we do make such a machine, it would not necessarily be a good day.
Don't fly around January-February.
Pardon my cynicism, but what the hell does the super bowl have to do with anything?
If I had a nickel for every time I had a nickel, I'd be richcursive!
Freeze-dried fruit? Hah. How about titanium tools and magnesium suitcases? Do you use any drill bits or blades with titanium or nitride cutters?
Materials science is just one area that has been improved dramatically by the space program.
Do you use anything with teflon in it? Wait... let me rephrase that: do you use much of anything that does NOT have teflon in it? As a coating or a slider or a bearing...
This is barely the tip of the iceberg. If you think all the space program has brought you is freeze-dried fruit, then I respectfully suggest you pick up a book now and then and look into it a bit more deeply.
Shed not a single tear for one who has lived the Dream.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
The problem isn't that space exploration is dangerous - everyone knows that. The problem is that space exploration requires a lot of money for no return other than glory and prestige.
The only good quote from that Esquire article:
Space demands sack. In a country that couldn't figure out how to mortgage a suburban family home, Mars suddenly seemed a long way off.
There's no cold war driving the shuttle program anymore, so it's over. And after the moon landing, and robotic probes sent to other planets, we all realized something - space is really fucking huge. It tales a long time to get anywhere, and costs a huge amount of money to send even a tiny amount of stuff out of this atmosphere. People hear about crazy plans to send people to Mars and ask "Why bother?" I tend to agree with them.
On the other hand, the space station project is something that makes sense. It's a baby step, it's something that (ideally) allows all interested countries with space agencies and some cash to participate and could someday evolve into a shipyard where exploration probes - and even manned craft - could be built and launched without having to burn a lot of rocket fuel escaping earth's gravity. Yeah, I've probably been watching too much Star Trek. But if the public could be made to understand the value of this program maybe interest would revive in space again.
The age of Asimovian idealism is over. It's the Pragmatic Age. If people can see the value of investing in space, they'll do it. But no one is buying dreams anymore.
This planet, any planet, has finite resources. No matter what we do, no matter how many alternatives we go through or how well we conserve, sooner or later we'll exhaust them. It's merely a question of how long it'll take to do so. Which means in the long term there are exactly two paths: get off this single planet, or perish. Personally I don't like option #2, and I'd like to get option #1 underway while we have the luxuries of time and resources, not wait until it's a crash program under a short deadline with limited resources.
From a practical standpoint, two things. First, opening new frontiers has never been unprofitable. It's expensive opening them up, but every one we've opened up has yielded an ROI any businessman would give up several major organs for. It's rarely immediately obvious what the rewards will be, looking back at history no major exploration ever turned up what they were looking for, but consistently the rewards are more than high enough to justify the cost. I doubt space will be different, and the spoils will go to he who's there first with the most. Second, high ground. Any military man will tell you that he who controls the high ground controls the battlefield. In ancient days the high ground was a hill so your archers could shoot down at the enemy. Today it's the airspace over the battlefield, so your aircraft can bomb the enemy without being distracted by enemy fighters. Orbit's a pretty serious high ground. Want an example? Take a look at Meteor Crater in Arizona. That was a chunk of rock coming in ballistic. Now, imagine that crater overlaid on Los Angeles, or Chicago, or Washington DC. Or all of them. Rocks are plentiful, getting them onto the right path is fairly straightforward and cheap. And shooting back up the gravity well is hideously expensive.
Teflon was invented by accident in 1938. The space program had nothing to do with it.
I don't know if you said that sarcastically, but if you think about it, focusing on robotic spacecraft that can do more than just take readings might very well contribute to the advancement of robotic sciences. History shows us that progress in scientific fields comes about faster when there is a specific purpose, time pressure and money involved.
I don't have a problem with manned spaceflight, on the contrary. But this might be a good side effect of trying to go all-automata. Not to mention cheaper/easier, since moving carbon-based sentient chimpanzees (also known as humans) through the voids of space requires ungodly amounts of resources.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Wow. I remember it like it was yesterday since I was in high school in NH at the time. I was at a boarding school and was in my dorm room waiting for the cafeteria to open for lunch when a friend came in and told me he'd heard about it on the radio. We turned on my radio and listened for a while before heading down to lunch. I guess I looked really shocked because one of the women in the serving line asked me if I was ok. I said that the shuttle had just blown up and she just laughed and said something like "oh, very funny". I snapped back at her to turn on a radio if they had one in the kitchen then went out to find a place to eat. I came back about 15 minutes later for seconds and the same woman was extremely apologetic. My friend and I then went to the student center where there was a projection tv and it seemed like 90% of the students were standing around silently watching the news coverage.
Wait a minute. The Falcon 1 has not, yet, delivered humans anywhere.
http://www.dieblinkenlights.com
I also work around environmental policy, and strongly feel we'd be better off working on surviving on this planet, instead of ruining it, then going off looking for others to ruin.
We know how to survive on Earth, whether we chose to do so is a different story. For example, the Millennium Development Goals only exist because irresponsible countries have failed to implement those goals long before. Successful ways to run societies and countries have been known for centuries. Second, as someone who claims to work in space science, you surely must be aware that there's some locations in space that simply cannot be ruined, for example, the Moon.
There really isn't any reason not to do both. Few would argue that it is and either / or situation, although the specifics about who gets what and when can lead to some heated debates. Unfortunately because money is the limiting resource.
The US is a huge economy, even when it's tanking. There really isn't any reason not to fund NASA on a reasonable, sustained budget. That would go a long way to being able to make rational choices as to how to apportion money to the various aspects of space exploration. And it isn't even a matter of diverting funds to / from environmental issues. Who put most of the satellites that we're using to measure the planet up? NASA. How do you improve planet wide models of heat distribution (and hundreds of other issues) - you go somewhere else and explore other environments. Who does that? NASA.
Sure, they're bureaucratic, inefficient, wasteful and slow - but it is a complex human endeavor so what do you expect.
A better piece in Esquire and one linked to TFA is a short, humanistic blurb by Buzz Aldrin. Says it better.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Consider that most of what NASA builds is done by US workers it is a great way to inject money into the economy. Buy a US car and you find 47% of it is made overseas. Buy a one of a kind satellite and 99% of the cost is for American products and workers.
Consider also these engineers etc. typically work at slightly less than competitive salaries in other sectors you are getting a lot for the dollar.
TODO: create/find/steal funny sig.
I also work around environmental policy, and strongly feel we'd be better off working on surviving on this planet, instead of ruining it, then going off looking for others to ruin.
Nobody said anything about "ruining" earth. Destruction of earth's biosphere is not a necessary condition for space colonization--in fact, environmental preservation and space expansion can complement each other. The technologies you use to achieve the first can feed back into the second, and vice-versa.
Those of us who support pushing out into space in terms of survival aren't talking about "let's strip-mine the earth" or "oh, it's too ruined now, let's go trash something else". We're talking about off-site backups from global threats like large asteroids, virulent pandemics, biological warfare, etc., as well as providing room for expansion.
The meek may inherit the earth, but the strong shall take the stars.
Then, when both inevitably explode on some mission, we start sending four. One of THOSE is definitely bound to make it.
Life would be easier if I had the source code.
RAES - Redundant array of expensive spacecraft
This is pseudo-philosophical nonsense. The only thing that steps out at me from this article is that we could avoid a lot of mourning if NASA took January off.
The problem with having a "space program", just like any other endeavor, requires an assessment of its value, both long-term and short-term. If these assessments of value indicate worth, we will continue to do it. If they do not, they will be shelved until we can find some previously hidden value.
Rocketeer, schmocketeer. We'd do ourselves well to put that "go where no one's gone before" mentality behind us with its promise of larger-than-life frontier exploration. The only reason an American footprint exists on the moon was because we didn't want our Cold War rivals to leave us behind in technology which might be needed in military applications against them. I love how that's been romanticized into some kind of philosophical manifest destiny.
Only when we stop looking at space travel as something heroic we do once in a while with the pomp and circumstance accorded to the victors in fierce battle will we actually find the reasons for continuing in this endeavor.
The future value of space exploration will come only from a statement of permanence and an eye toward practical concerns.
Space travel must produce scientific and engineering knowledge which increases its own capability, repetition, and safety such that space flight IS something we do every day, and not just every once in a while. Moreover, it comes from having a "next step" always on the must do list, which means that just circling the Earth, something we've known how to do for the entirety of the space program, must soon give way to actual destinations. Permanence. Furthermore, both with science/engineering benefit and possible commercial concerns (profit!), space travel must find a way to pay for itself without relying completely upon a tithe from governments. It will probably ALWAYS need to be funded by governments, big science always does, but it needs to find a way to chip in.
The big gestures like going to the moon help in the marketing of space travel and NASA as a whole, but ultimately there has to be some foundational principle of pragmatism, even in the face of the utopianism of pure science, which ironically allows the utopia its existence. It would be a shame to lose what is a necessary part of our future as a species to a set of well-meaning, yet hopelessly impractical, purist ideals.
Jones makes an impassioned emotional argument for the space program, but fails to present any bald raw logical reasons why we can't stop and let it die. It's simple: the human race has NEVER before lacked a new frontier in which to expand its growing population.
Without a space program, we have no new frontiers to exploit (without further ecological backlash). The human race is not so disciplined and comfortable with itself that it can survive that absence of a frontier. We will grind civilization, if not the species entirely, into the dust if we stick our heads in the sand and try to stop expanding.
That's the simple logic of it that Jones fails to spell out.
A little over a decade ago I was working on a program that used LIDAR to measure the shuttle exhaust plume constituents during liftoff. The trailer housing the lasers and telescope was positioned next to the block house for the Apollo 1 launch pad (launch complex 34). The block house has been completely emptied and sits as just a thick dome of concrete about a hundred feet in diameter. The bathrooms still work - I know, I used them - though you frequently find frogs in the toilets. Past the block house, through a rusted chain link fence and up a half mile of one-lane road surfaced in cracked seashell concrete (the concrete uses seashells for structure instead of gravel) sits the launchpad itself. It's a massive concrete table, several small outbuildings, and an enormous steel blast diverter now crumbling and rusted. There's a bronze plaque mounted on one leg of the tripod http://www.wolverhamptonclc.co.uk/wp-content/images/Plaque%20to%20commorate%20the%20Apollo%201%20astronauts.JPG and that's it. I suspect I was the first person to have walked out there and looked at it in some time.
Jealously hoarding mod points since 2007.
...unmanned missions of exploration. Space probes and planetary probes.
They cost way less than manned missions, and return way more scientific information.
What I think is interesting about the deaths in NASA is none of them actually happened in space. Apollo 13 might have ended badly, but it didn't. No one died on the moon because the ascent stage rocket on the LEM failed to fire. No one has had a space suit spring a leak or spiraled away during an EVA.
Seems if you're an astronaut, the safest place for you is in space.
Buy a US car and you find 47% of it is made overseas. Buy a one of a kind satellite and 99% of the cost is for American products and workers.
Nice try, but you're forgetting about volume. Even if only 53% of a US car may actually be made in the US, there are 7+million made each year. Compare that to the twenty satellites made every year. Each one would have to cost a million times as much as a car to inject the same amount of money into the economy. There are few 30 billion dollar satellites. A communications satellite can be built and put in orbit for less than $100million.
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I bought a copy of the book Prescription for Disaster at a second-hand store. This book details the mistakes and mind-set that led to the Challenger Accident. This book should be required reading at NASA, since those who don't remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
GOOD NEWS: My copy had markings showing it had once belonged to the NASA library.
BAD NEWS: it had been discarded to a thrift store before the Columbia accident, where some of the same mistakes were repeated.
Computers obey me.
What "impending end of the manned space program"? Is anyone intending to end it? Have I missed something? They just want to switch to a different vehicle, with a few years of no manned flights in between. There were no manned US flights between the last Apollo mission (1975) and the first STS mission (1981) either, so it's not as if this would be something entirely new. So what exactly is the author arguing for/against here? Continuing the Shuttle program indefinitely? Or until Ares is available?
I think you hit the spot with that post.
We as a race stopped seeing the forest because all the trees are in the way. We have become a species obsessed with detail, a race of obsessive accountants and lawyers, we lost sight of the grander goal. Ants build anthills that way, by piling one grain of earth over another, but they cannot build any more complex structure because they lack a master plan.
It's very good to say "let's eradicate poverty", but is absolute equality all that mankind should aim for? There would exist no poverty if we lived in caves, sharing our stone axes equally among all.
We need something to strive for, something to work for. Religion tries to offer that, but only after death. Science and technology lets us work towards a better future while we are still living in this world. And manned space flight is one of the most difficult and worthwile goals in technology.