The Final Frontier
By Jan Larson (08/01/05)
I was among the millions of baby boomers that grew up in the 60s and early 70s when the American astronauts were the real-life embodiments of Buck Rogers and NASA held the promise to lead mankind to the “final frontier” of Star Trek.
As with everyone that is old enough to remember July 20, 1969, the memories of the grainy black and white broadcast of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon is something I will never forget.
Most of my friends and I dreamed of being astronauts. We knew all of the details about the planets and solar system and were sure by the time we were grown-ups, people would be living on the moon and Mars. We wanted to live on the moon or Mars too.
Unfortunately, those heady days of yesteryear are long gone. After the final pair of astronauts blasted off from the moon’s surface in 1972, the nation’s fascination with the space program waned. Sure, the Voyager missions to the outer solar system, the Hubble Space Telescope and the Mars Pathfinder held the nation’s attention for a few minutes, but in the 24 years since the first Space Shuttle lifted off, America’s space program has, for the most part, drifted aimlessly.
The International Space Station sounded like a good idea at the time, but just what do they do on the space station? I know they made a pretty good IMAX film up there, but other than that; does it really serve any purpose other than providing a reason to keep the space program going?
The Space Shuttle was presented to the public as a vehicle that would be launched into space and return to Earth again and again, with a frequency much, much greater than four or five per year. The shuttle was supposed to be a lot more like a 737 than a Saturn V. However, the complexity of the vehicle and the enormous costs of each launch have prevented the shuttle from being your everyday space vehicle.
The shuttle program suffered a major blow with the Challenger disaster of 1986 and another with the tragic loss of the shuttle Columbia and its crew in 2003. After Columbia, NASA grounded the shuttle fleet (now consisting of just three spacecraft) and spent over two years analyzing and “fixing” the problem of the foam insulation breaking off the external fuel tank. The impact of foam pieces with the orbiter had been determined to be the cause of the breakup of the vehicle upon reentry.
Unfortunately, the two years of analysis and repairs don’t seem to have done much good as foam again broke off the external tank during the recent launch of the Discovery and the fleet has once again been grounded. Apparently making insulation adhere to a steel tank IS rocket science.
It is time to seriously reevaluate America’s manned space program. The shuttle is inherently flawed and expensive to operate. Worse, there seems to be no compelling reason to keep flying the shuttle at all. There are better ways to launch satellites and there are serious questions about the usefulness and benefits of the space station.
Much has been spent and 14 lives lost for so little benefit in the years since the moon landings.
In early 2004, the President announced an ambitious goal of returning men (and presumably women) to the moon by 2020 and a shift of NASA’s focus away from the shuttle and space station. That announcement didn’t exactly generate a surge in public enthusiasm for space flight although I believe it is the correct strategy if we are to continue manned exploration of space.
Maybe moon missions would again capture the nation’s attention, but the goals of manned space flight, whether performed with the Space Shuttle or other vehicle, must be more clearly defined and cannot continue to be little more than grand experiments with little apparent return.
Mankind has always had the need to explore and while there are ample problems to be dealt with here on terra firma, I believe it is the ultimate destiny of mankind to venture away from the Earth.
In July of 1969, few would have imagined that the U. S. space program would be languishing as it is today and that no one would have walked on the moon in over 30 years. The question now is whether man will walk on the moon in the next 30 years and if so, what will be the cost and will that cost be worth it.
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