Can the US Still Lead In Space Despite Shuttle's End?

Hugh Pickens writes "NASA Administrator Charles F. Bolden says that the future is bright and promises that one day humans will land on Mars. 'American leadership in space will continue for at least the next half-century because we've laid the foundation for success,' the nation's space chief said in a speech at the National Press Club. 'When I hear people say that the final shuttle flight marks the end of U.S. human space flight, you all must be living on another planet. We are not ending human space flight. We are recommitting ourselves to it.' Bolden says within a year private companies can take over the process of sending cargo shipments into orbit and by 2015 industry can take over astronaut transport, freeing NASA to focus on the long-term goals of reaching beyond Earth's shadow. 'Do we want to keep repeating ourselves or do we want to look at the big horizon?' says Bolden. 'My generation touched the moon today, NASA, and the nation, wants to touch an asteroid, and eventually send a human to Mars.' A group of former astronauts and other critics have blasted the agency and the Obama administration for ending the 30-year-old shuttle program, once the cornerstone of NASA. 'NASA's human spaceflight program is in substantial disarray with no clear-cut mission in the offing. We will have no rockets to carry humans to low-Earth orbit and beyond for an indeterminate number of years,' write Neil Armstrong, Jim Lovell and Gene Cernan. 'After a half-century of remarkable progress, a coherent plan for maintaining America's leadership in space exploration is no longer apparent.'"

Comments

Re:I'm not a nationalist, so I really don't care.

[Lanteran]

I do believe that the majority of americans, myself included, support space travel and exploration. If you don't like your tax money funding that, move to another nation that doesn't do research (as that's what you seem to be against). Good luck. Also, you'll have to check all your nasa created technology at the gate.

Re:I'm not a nationalist, so I really don't care.

[nospam007]

"Why does 'our nation' have to put a gun to my head and force me to fund the intellectual curiosity of others?"

You pay already more than the complete NASA budget just for the fuel to run the AC in the tents in Afghanistan.

One Era Ends To Make Way For Another

[TooMuchToDo]

SpaceX's Dragon Capsule is going to be on display until July 10th at the Kennedy Space Center Air Force air/space museum, right down the street from the last shuttle launch (disclaimer: I'm going to see the last shuttle launch, and to see the Dragon capsule that has been to space and back). This is no accident.

The shuttle has been NASA's workhorse for the last 30 years, but its time for it to make way for the next generation of orbital launch vehicles. Goodbye Shuttle, and thanks for all the hard work.

Re:One Era Ends To Make Way For Another

[impaledsunset]

They are asking the wrong question. The question is "Can the US lead in space thanks to shuttle's end?" The Shuttle program was too expensive for what it actually brought on the table, and it was already too old. Replacing it with something like the Dragon capsule (and the other lifting capabilities in development by private companies) would only be an improvement. It's going to be more efficient, it will allow for more space project to be done with the money that would be saved, it will fund the private industry to develop space-faring technologies. The end of the shuttle will be good for the US space program and the human space program in general. Will the US lead? I doubt it, my bet is on China, but the shuttle going away is the biggest improvement.

Re:One Era Ends To Make Way For Another

[Artifice_Eternity]

Yep. SpaceX and Dragon are clearly the emerging future of American human spaceflight. This video is a pretty cool demonstration of how the system is evolving.

Armstrong, Lovell, and Cernan are -- knowingly or unknowingly -- lobbying for an old, failed model of government contracting, not for the continuation of the American space program.

The program continues -- it's just being done in a different (and from everything I can see, better) way.

Re:One Era Ends To Make Way For Another

[queazocotal]

The shuttle was not a shining example of the US doing well.
It was a shining example of how much pork you can pack into one project and have it stumble along and achieve a bare fraction of the aims at huge cost.

For example.
Do you know why the shuttle has large wings?
It's largely so that it can take off, launch a military satellite into a polar orbit, and land back in the continental united states, without overflying russian territory.

Needless to say, it's never actually needed to do this.
But the requirement to do so meant the need for SRBs, and the complex thermal protection system. This was so that the DOD would kick in some funding into the project early on.

A shuttle launch costs a really, really large slice of a billion dollars.

SpaceX's Falcon Heavy is currently selling twice the amount of payload to low earth orbit, for well under a quarter of the price.

Yes, it's not quite as nice, as you need a few percent of that to be able to push it around a bit to match orbits you can reach with the shuttle.

And you need a bit more payload sacrificed if you actually want anything of significant weight recovered.
But the shuttle has only done that task perhaps half a dozen times, for payloads where in many cases it was debatable as to the value of doing so.

The shuttle has basically been the shining light akin to the caver that finds his way by periodically lighting his hair on fire.

Re:One Era Ends To Make Way For Another

[TooMuchToDo]

Why the shuttle has wings at all:

http://history.nasa.gov/sts1/pages/scot.html

Re:One Era Ends To Make Way For Another

[Anonymous Coward]

The shuttle is in it's current form because:

  SRBs are used because the fly-back booster (think bigger shuttle to carry little shuttle to altitude and Mach 6) cost too much.

    The large delta-wings are to give the shuttle the 1500 mile cross range it needed to land at it's point of launch from a single polar orbit, from Vandenburgh (KSC is only suitable for conventional orbits as these launch over water).

    The 60 foot long cargo bay was to accommodate military satellites - think HST looking down. The shuttle was to take all of the military payloads in order to get sufficient payloads to reduce the cost-per-flight.

  The space shuttle concept existed as a low cost shuttle to and from orbit. It's mission was to service a couple of 50 man space stations in low orbit, interplanetary vehicles and a space tug, servicing geosynchronous and the moon space station and colony. With the cancellation of these missions (inc. Saturn & Skylab), it fell back on delivering all other payloads. This also mandated the 15 foot diameter payload bay to accommodate space station sections sufficiently large to be habitable.

The shuttle's main failures were:
    The turnaround time for an orbiter was supposed to be 14 weeks. Unable to do that, costs skyrocketed.
        To illustrate, the original mission rate would have meant more missions that have ever flown in the past 30 years would have been flown in the first three years.
    Its original mission came late - the space station. Rather than appearing towards the end of the shuttle's life, it should have been at the beginning.

The programme's main failures were:
    Its requirements were skewed just so that the US would have something for manned spaceflight. This compromised the overall vehicle.
    The space shuttle was only to be small, although necessary, part of the manned space programme. It didn't make sense to be all of it.
    Not enough active development was done, Arguably the shuttles should have been developed and replaced with better concepts as experience was gained. This was done to some extent with upgrades and newer shuttles.
    The major, major failing was with the shuttle operations. The shuttle should not be operated when it is too cold, and it should have been grounded when it was behaving in ways that weren't tested. i.e. foam shedding was something the TPS was never designed to cope with. They should have redesigned and tested.

  The Space Shuttle is a spectacularly impressive piece of engineering, it will be missed. To be properly replaced there have to be missions that the US is willing to commit to seriously, with the appropriate levels of funding. Without the appropriate missions, and hence requirements, there is the risk of producing another compromised vehicle.

To conclude, we shouldn't focus on the vehicles, it is the missions that are important.
   

Re:One Era Ends To Make Way For Another

[Truth is life]

There are a few reasons for that. First, the entire Shuttle paradigm--a big vehicle that carries humans and a pretty good amount of cargo, and is reusable--has been pretty well discredited by Shuttle's poor performance. Carrying cargo and humans together has been shown to be inefficient, since the safety standards for each are so different, and cargo just doesn't need people around to manage it, high-profile failures like Skylab, Hubble, or Palapa 2/Westar 6 notwithstanding. People would be (rightly) very skeptical that a follow-on vehicle with the same design could perform much better, even with better technology. That means that any follow-on would probably be much smaller, just a crew transport, IOW similar to the vehicles proposed during the Orbital Space Plane project back before Columbia, or Orion and the other proposed crew transport vehicles.

Second, many of the details of the Shuttle design have proven unsafe. Any follow-on vehicle, for example, would have to be a series-staged vehicle, like most rockets, as opposed to the Shuttle's parallel-staged design in order to avoid damage from foam shedding, as with the Columbia accident, or booster failure, as with the Challenger disaster. Along with the above point, this means that any new vehicle would basically be a completely new design, rather than just a copy of the Shuttle aeroframe.

Third, we've had advances in materials science and aerospace engineering that mean we could do better now in terms of the details of the Shuttle's design that they could back then, many of them gained due to Shuttle experience. We've flown a winged vehicle through high-Mach regimes at very high altitudes in the Shuttle program, something that hadn't been done before. So, by using a new design, we could produce a vehicle that did better than Shuttle. Again, a reason to simply not copy Shuttle with better internals.

Fourth, doing so would be very expensive. Since, as noted above, the Shuttles have not been particularly successful, there's no reason to spend a lot of money copying them. Instead, people are spending money on copying Shuttle's big unique capability--ie., crew transport--while cutting out all the irrelevancies that cost a lot of money. Even then it's expensive, but you skip the need to design a lot of stuff and it works out to be cheaper than trying to also build the carrier rocket, a big payload bay, etc.

keep dreaming

[roman_mir]

'American leadership in space will continue for at least the next half-century because we

- aha, keep dreaming.

The US bond crisis is coming, followed immediately by the currency crisis. I bet there will be more pressing needs, like more weapons to start resource wars against multiple countries much before the US will once again be able to go far into space in its new ships, never mind having humans on board there....

Re:keep dreaming

[ColdWetDog]

'American leadership in space will continue for at least the next half-century because we

- aha, keep dreaming.

The US bond crisis is coming, followed immediately by the currency crisis. I bet there will be more pressing needs, like more weapons to start resource wars against multiple countries much before the US will once again be able to go far into space in its new ships, never mind having humans on board there....

While you may well be correct, remember that the percentage of the GDP that the US expends for space exploration is pretty much a rounding error. We can afford it.

Yes it is the end ...

[MacTO]

Space exploration may be a technological feat, but it is also a wonder of human intellect. By abandoning the shuttle, that human intellect is being dumped on the streets with nothing but promises for the future. Promises to the nation, though there will be very few promised to the people who will be pursuing other careers.

Even if things did start up again: within a year, most of those people would need to refresh their training. Within a decade, you would be training most of the workforce from scratch. Within 50 years, even most of the documentation would be lost or incomprehensible.

Don't believe me, just look at Apollo.

If you're a Canuck and don't believe me, look at the Avro Arrow.

Nations loose technical capabilities because those capabilities depend upon the people behind them.

Re:Yes it is the end ...

[Kjella]

We're not quitting space exploration, last I checked there was plenty probes and rovers and telescopes on the drawing board that'd go into space or observe space. The question is the cost/benefit of sending humans out there to do the exploring. To make an analogy, does submarines bring us any closer to building underwater cities? Or are we just really travelling around in a big tin can burning resources to make the submerged life like surface life? In the same way I don't think we'll get any closer to a Mars colony just doing more loops in a shuttle. Obviously a manned mission to Mars can do more than the rovers we have there today, but for the cost we could probably send a hundred more with various instruments.

Most the hard tech challenges are the same for improving robot exploration.as they are for manned exploration, we want better instruments, better communication, better solar panels, reliable rockets, lighter spacecraft, better propulsion and so on. The challenges of adding a crew section with low g-force launch/entry, radiation shielding, breathable air composition and pressure, livable temperature, food and water is not fundamentally different from the Apollo days and won't change in the foreseeable future. What we will miss is the technology that'll eventually result in a colonization of space, but there we lack a lot of earth-based research. We need to learn how to make an ecosystem in a can, a small self-sustained system that'll function over time.

Once we have that, once we can say "if only we had the technology to place this on the Martian surface, we'd have an extraterrestrial colony" then we should pick up that thread again. Right now my impression is not that the humans would enhance the robots, but rather that pretty much the whole mission would exist to sustain the humans. I guess there's a point to doing it to prove that we can, but we've sort of already proved that. If the conditions on the inside are right, it doesn't matter if it's on a submarine or a research base in the Antarctic or on the Moon, people will survive and so they will on Mars too. It's just a matter of how strong the shielding must be.

Quite frankly in my opinion the most interesting part of space exploration happening right now is something we haven't got a snowflake's chance in hell of exploring with current technology, manned or not. By finding exoplanets we're really mapping unexplored territory, getting closer and closer to finding planets like Earth. The only thing that'd come close in this solar system is if we found traces of life (extinct or otherwise) on Mars. Don't get me wrong, the rovers are really cool but the planet is still just a big barren, lifeless rock until proven otherwise. Or until we learn terraforming, but that's a long ways off.

Re:Not the end of HUMAN spaceflight...just AMERICA

[Artifice_Eternity]

SpaceX has already sent an unmanned Dragon capsule into orbit around the Earth. They have a contract with NASA for cargo flights to the ISS, and are developing the manned version of the Dragon with an integrated abort system (see this video for a demonstration).

American spaceflight is NOT coming to an end. It's just not going to be a NASA monopoly any more.

Not having a Nasa rocket != not having a US rocket

[phayes]

How is the coming hiatus any different that that between the end of Saturn V & the first Shuttle or for that matter the multi-year launch stoppage after Columbia? Why MUST it be a NASA developped rocket? Is it because parts NASA have turned into the aerospace work assurance administration?

I'm a manned space exploration fan but I have come to the conclusion that it would be better off for Manned space explorattion were Nasa to get out of the development of it's own launchers & buy from SpaceX or whoever else develops a reliable launcher without falling into the trap of growing a self justifying administration.

Human space flight is one part of space exploratio

[Vellmont]

The US is changing its HUMAN space exploration program, but the space exploration program is returning far more knowledge than it ever has. We've sent robots to almost every planet. We've been to Mars many many times. That may not be as inspirational as landing on the moon, but it's produced a hell of a lot more knowledge than did putting people on the moon.

we have more probes on mars then any other

[Joe_Dragon]

we have more probes on mars then any other nation.

And look at mars rover that lasted for YEARS longer then planned.

Re:Science is good but we need more research.

[bmo]

>I'm not anti-science

One thing is for damn sure...

You're a loonie and a quack. Anyone who purports to cure cancer, colic, asthma, etc, with spinal manipulation is a fraud. And chelation therapy does not cure autism, no matter how many chemicals you pump through a kid. It just doesn't fucking work, you fraud. It's child abuse and defrauding the parents. And to suggest that it works either says you are a cynical liar, or you're "friggin retahdid" as we say here in the Northeast.

I don't know what psychoactive drugs you're taking, but increase or decrease the dosage, because whatever it is you're taking, it's incorrect.

--
BMO

Joyriding astronauts != space exploration

[yesterdaystomorrow]

*Real* space exploration these days is performed by robots. Humans have the wrong senses, the wrong body form, and needs that are very difficult to satisfy in space. But we're very good at building and directing robots, and getting better very fast.

The shuttle? Absolute garbage engineering. Sold as the cheapest way to get to space, it wound up the most expensive of all time. It was supposed to be as safe and easy to operate as an airliner, but it proved extremely dangerous. It proved the capability of the USA only in the sense that no other entity could possibly have thrown enough resources at it to make it work at all. NASA has finally come to its collective senses and decided to quit "throwing good money after bad", a decision that's about 35 years too late.

Human beings will have a future in space when the resources and infrastructure to support them can be gathered, constructed, and maintained by robots. But we have proven beyond any reasonable argument that using human beings as "space laborers" is hyper-expensive and counterproductive.

Re:Wait a minute

[murdocj]

Riiiiiiiiiggggggggggggggggggggghhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhtt,the Chinese are way ahead. After all, they have rovers on Mars, orbiters at Mercury & Saturn, a probe heading to Pluto. and two probes entering interstellar space.

Oh wait, whups,sorry about that

Ending the Shuttle program is a good thing

[drgould]

The Shuttle and ISS are black holes in NASA's budget sucking all the money away from almost every other project. Everything at NASA has been secondary to maintaining the Shuttle and ISS.

The best thing that could happen is that shutting down the Shuttle program will free up budget money to develop better, cheaper, faster manned and unmanned space programs.

The worst thing that could happen is that NASA decides to create another white elephant space program simply to keep the massive army of NASA employees and contractors who worked on the Shuttle program employed.

Re:Rockets are just too inefficient

[farble1670]

we can drop a bomb anywhere on the planet now, it's called an ICBM.

Re:I'm not a nationalist, so I really don't care.

[JohnRoss1968]

"Besides, what does NASA do for me anyway?"
Wow, I know they say there are no stupid questions but there sure seem to be a lot of inquisitive idiots.
You want to know what NASA and the space race has done for you....Look down at your keyboard, its attached to a computer.
Microprocessors were derived from the space race. As well as the satellite communications that you may use to connect with other idiots.
Not enough for you...heres some more things that were by-products of the space race and the space age.
Kidney dialysis machines
Computer-Aided Tomography (CAT) scan
Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI)
Freeze-dried food
Cordless power tools & appliances
Disposable diapers
Rotary blood pump
Fiber optics
Satellite dish
Bar codes
Ear thermometer
Fire-resistant fabrics
Smoke detector
Thermal gloves and boots
New techniques for machining and casting exotic metals like magnesium and titanium.
Carbon fiber epoxy, and all kinds of composite materials
CNC machining.
Microwave communications.
Huge improvements in photovoltaics (solar cells to generate electricty).
Solid state memory
Satellite photography
velcro.
And about 1,400 documented NASA inventions that have benefited U.S. industry.
Oh yeah did I mention TANG!!!!

I called you an idiot several times above. I may be wrong. You may just be an ungrateful, unimaginative Luddite. But I'm betting your both an an ungrateful, unimaginative Luddite and an idiot.
If you dont like it, you can always turn off your computer since NASA and the space race never did anything for you any damn way.

Re:USA: best science for the buck

[ColdWetDog]

i could care less if the US is seen as the "leader" in space exploration.

Why do you hate America?

Re:I'm not a nationalist, so I really don't care.

[anagama]

There's anti-science out there, but there's also budget constraints. For example, we have important work to do blowing up people in the middle east and we can't afford to use drones to blow up innocents and advance science. So science has to go.

Obama didn't cancel the Shuttle, Bush did

[The Bad Astronomer]

Oh for Pete's sake. Obama did NOT cancel the Shuttle program, George W Bush did! Obama canceled Constellation, the rocket program to followup on the Shuttle, but he did so because it was overbudget and behind schedule. I have a long-ish article about this in the New York Post today. NASA has some serious problems right now, mostly due to lack of a strong vision and the ridiculous turf wars between the White House and Congress. Most of these problems aren't hard to solve in theory, but in practice, with the rabid partisonship going on right now? Hmph.

Re:I'm not a nationalist, so I really don't care.

[queazocotal]

This list seems at best dubious in many aspects.
MRI, for example, was an outgrowth of magnetic resonance studies on chemicals that had been going on for a long time, which was invented in england in the university of Nottingham.

I'd like to know how NASA influenced velcro - which was patented in 1948 in switzerland.
Thermal gloves and boots - what? I think you'll find the Eskimo (inuit) got there first.

The incas did freeze drying naturally hundreds of years ago, and freeze dried coffee was available around WWII.
Disposable diapers have a long history, and were around well before the 60s.

Kidney dialysis was done in WWII.

These are just some examples that jumped out at me as unlikely.

Re:I'm not a nationalist, so I really don't care.

[melikamp]

The science is not going to say "There is no God" because that would be an untestable hypothesis. It could prove, however, that there is no major difference between various deities. That is, they could use statistics to show that believing in Jesus Christ over Mohammed or Buddha or Gandalf does not produce a detectable intrinsic benefit to a believer. A very long-term study could be conducted to show the same for entire nations. The end result will be much worse than any disproof of the existence of God: religions will be exposed as harmless superstitions at best, or deliberate scams at worst. And it is the biggest players who are also the biggest hustlers, so obviously they will not go quietly.

IMHO, there just got to be a better, more effective way to define ethics and morals than reading them out of a 2000 year old collection of letters written by a guy named Paul, or may be Saul. I will sound crazy, but we could reconsider norms which seem to produce effects opposite to the ones intended. We could start with that, I mean.

A specific part of a religious ritual may confer a benefit, but it's never the fairy tale part. It's usually something very simple, like "don't use toxic drugs". Mormons may be healthier than most Americans, but they can't blame Jesus for that. They are reaping the benefit of valid scientific reasoning: don't eat poison, and you will live longer.

May be what we need is an open-source approach to religion. A collection of moral, ritualistic, and scientific knowledge designed specifically to improve the life of every individual and of the humanity as a whole. Of course, what constitutes an improvement differs among people, so this amalgamated religion will contain a lot of contradictory material. But it will also contain a body of scientific evidence showing correlation (if any) between specific moral precepts and the observed results. Over time, a remarkable consensus may be achieved on what is "good". And I do believe that morals directly affect the way the society operates, so I do expect to see a lot of very interesting, and sometimes very surprising correlation.

No.

[hackus]

For the simple reason, human presence defines empires and civilization and freedom and tyranny.

You can't flee disaster whether it be man made or nature made with robots.

The single driving goal should be manned colonization of space, and building the science and technology to make it happen.

If you really are a proponent of man made global warming, you wouldn't be wasting time like Al Gore and his billionaire pals proclaiming we have to pay taxes to him and his pals or Man Made global warming will doom the planet.

You also wouldn't be meeting in secret places like Bill Gates does to discuss how we can kill off 2/3rd's of the "useless eaters" because it is just too hard to put 6 billion people under your thumb to rule them.

If anyone is serious about what are future is, what we are and actually believe in the future of humanity in a compassionate way, we would have given 27 trillion dollars to start a new era or Golden Age of space exploration to tap the limitless materials and energy which space holds.

Instead, we decided to give it to a bunch of bankers.

Humanity is running out of chances and missed opportunities. Time and time again throughout history, we have had civilizations rise to our level and beyond and we have squandered the chance to remove the tyranny and injustice which plague our world. Instead, a handful of people end up torching the entire surface of the globe into lifeless soot, or just end up burning libraries because the fire looks "glorious" as entire human lifetimes are wasted in pursuit of knowledge.

Only to end up getting burned and having to be "rediscovered" all over again.....well....in between centuries or eons dark ages at least.

I doubt the Universe or God or whatever you believe in is going to let this nonsense go on indefinitely. The next Dark Age may find us in a bit of a disadvantage when we sit around the fire in the grass hut village and the elders talk about a time when men flew in the skies and walked like Gods on the moon.

Or when Men hurled "thunderbolts charged with the energy of the universe" and obliterated whole countries in a single hour.

And what will children say when they look at the sky at night and point out to the elders the new star?

Will they know that the new star up in the sky that night they notice spells DOOM for the human species as a rock 23km in diameter heads for Asia and wipes out anything larger than a mouse on the surface.

Too bad too. Because we have had many attempts to get off and stay off this planet and they have all been squandered by a few very foolish people who always tend to get in the way.

-Hackus

I had lunch with an astronaut last week...

[Vandil X]

Astronaut John Blaha was available for a group lunch last week at KSC and I attended. When asked about the end of the Space Shuttle program, his disgust and frustration was clearly communicated in his response. He blamed politicians Washington. When asked about life in a post-STS world, he said: "We need another Kennedy to get us (humankind) further. It doesn't have to be a U.S. figure, just any Kennedy-like person somewhere who can get the ball rolling."

The US has to want to.

[glatiak]

Prior to the launch of Sputnik the US was still absorbed in licking its wounds from WW2 and Korea -- space exploration was the dream of a few. Then the Russians launched Sputnik and I came back from summer break to find that the wood shop had been transformed into a science lab. From then on it was just good old competition. I remember JFKs speach with particular fondness -- 'not because it was easy but because it was hard'. Our lives have been transformed by the things we have learned -- and yet our will to succeed has flagged. The US (and to a more limited extent Canada) prospered because of the challenge of new frontiers where one was constantly challenged and not continually fenced in by vested interests that made sure that 'the right people' made money and not just anybody. I doubt we could do the Manhatten project again or any other big project. We struggle to keep the water running and the bridges standing and argue vigorously in favor of the profits of the few. The largest frontier lies over our heads and is vast beyond comprehension. And it will be populated by some of us -- who understand the strategic value of owning the high ground. But as for the US and its leadership...we are legends in our own minds.