End of an Era

Those who know me, know that I have been a space junkie since before space was cool. Which, to be fair, could mean last week. In truth, my earliest memory of the space program is Apollo 8. I was five years old and one of my classmates looked at a piece of paper sitting on the table and asked the teacher what it said. I looked down and read, "Blast off at noon." Since this was at a time when five year olds did not read, I was hauled off to the principal's office, where I was carefully examined for other obvious abnormalities. The next summer, I sat with my family to watch Neil and Buzz take their steps on the moon and before the next year was out, I can remember explaining to adults why rockets were multi-staged.

When Columbia made its first flight, I sat with a mass of other science geeks and we watched it together. Those of you who never saw a Saturn V launch can't imagine how terrifying that first shuttle flight was. Saturn rockets were an unstoppable force once the engines fired. They moved steadily and with profound dignity off the launch pad and into the sky. Shuttle launches are all together different. The shuttle's main engines fire and then take their time coming to full thrust. Then, once the main engines are at full throttle, the two solid rocket boosters are lit. Once they are at full thrust, explosive bolts fire and the whole combination of shuttle, external tank, and solid rocket boosters pops into the sky as if shot from a slingshot. The thing is, while the main engines are coming to full thrust, they're turning huge amounts of water to steam under the launch pad. The SRBs add to the steam when they fire, but the solid fuel also creates great quantities of smoke. That first launch, when the whole pad and rocket disappeared into a huge white cloud, it looked like a terrible explosion had taken place. As everyone in the room was holding their breath, out pops the shuttle, taking off toward the sky like a bat out of hell. After a moment, the entire room went completely crazy, as the whole crowd cheered and screamed and danced around like over-educated idiots.

When Columbia landed at White Sands, New Mexico in 1982, I traveled with three other technicians from the Fusion Research Center, driving overnight from Austin to catch the landing. Of course, it didn't land that day because of the worst sandstorm in the history of the region, and we had to return to Austin (or risk losing all of our jobs), so we missed the actual landing the next day.

When Challenger exploded, I was still at the University of Texas. I went home and watch replay after replay, with tears streaming down my cheeks. That day and 9/11 were probably the two most emotionally devastating in my life. I was a scientist, a physicist, and I had spent my life believing in technology. And there it was, scattered across the sky. I have read the accident review board's report and Feynmann's addendum many times since then and to this day I believe that PowerPoint killed seven people.

I've gotten up early and stayed up late and taken lunches at strange hours, all to watch the shuttle launch. I was even watching, by pure coincidence, the Challenger landing on NASA TV when it shattered into thousands of pieces across Texas. When Atlantis went up, I had the NASA feed running on my computer. Of course, my boss came in to talk just before launch and by the time I could shoo him out, I was I sure that I had missed the launch. Fortunately for me, there was a hold at T-31 seconds that lasted just long enough for me to catch the restart of the clock.

Here's the weird part: I've never liked the shuttle. It's the wrong spacecraft, built to go where no one needed to go, with capabilities that didn't contribute to science. It was built to satisfy the needs of the Air Force, who hardly used it before Columbia and never used it after. They built an entire billion-dollar launch facility at Vandenberg Air Force Base for the shuttle and it was never used. The wings that failed for Challenger were added for the Air Force, which had a need for what's called cross-range capability. Most things that fall from space, including spacecraft, fall in more or less a straight line. This means that you need to reenter the atmosphere at a time when you're lined up with where you want to land. The thing is, the Air Force wanted the ability to go up and either leave something up there or bring something down without anyone knowing about it. This pretty much means a once-around flight. The problem is that while you're making your orbit (in about ninety minutes), the Earth is busy spinning, so you're going to come down about fifteen hundred miles from where you took off.* Since this is rather inconvenient, the Air Force wanted the ability to "fly" the shuttle back to where it took off. In the end, the shuttle made very little use of this capability and the next result was large and fragile wings that cost huge amounts of energy to lift into orbit.

* The assumptions here are that you're launching into near-polar orbit, which is why they built the site at Vandenberg, and that your launch site is near the equator, which is not true for Vandenberg. At the latitude of Vandenberg, the cross-range need is only about 1200 statue miles, which is, remarkably enough, the exact cross-range capability of the space shuttle. In fact, one feature of every launch is the discussion of the AOA, or Abort-Once-Around. This is an option if there is a main engine failure on launch. Outside of the shuttle industry, it's not widely known that this capability is all but useless for a flight from the Kennedy Space Center. The window between a TAL (Trans-Atlantic-Abort) and an ATO (Abort-To-Orbit) is pretty much zero.

The part about being built to go where no one needs to go probably needs some explanation. After all, everyone has been talking about how we need to resupply the International Space Station now that the shuttle is no longer around to do the job. Once again, there is a story behind the story. The ISS was built to give the shuttle something to do. There is no real analogy to it except building a railroad into the middle of a desert and then deciding to build a city there, so that building the railroad seems like a good idea.

Here are the problems with a manned station in low orbit. The things that low Earth orbit (LEO) are good for tend to be things like Earth observation. Taking pictures of various types to observe clouds, oceans, and landforms or for map making. There are also some experiments like growing crystals of materials that can't mix in gravity. None of these require human intervention. In fact, having people around means that there is unexpected motion, as the people move around, as well as the need for air, heat, water, and food.

Where should people be in space? On the rocks and ice cubes all around the solar system. People are very good at pattern recognition and adaptability. While it's perfectly fine to have rovers wandering Mars (go Opportunity!), a person could cover more ground, faster. Also a trained person can spot things that look out of place. For example, from the transcript to Apollo 15:

145:41:19 Scott: Get that unusual one. (Pause) Here's some dense...And there's another unusual one; look at the little crater here, and the one that's facing us. There is a little white corner to the thing.

The unusual rock with a little white corner is the "Genesis Rock", the first piece of anorthosite to be found on the Moon. These rocks (more would be found by the Apollo 16 astronauts) date back nearly 4.5 billion years and solidified shortly after the Moon was formed when a Mars-sized planetoid hit the just-formed Earth. Developing algorithms that can spot slightly odd rocks on a field of more or less identical rocks is a difficult task. Fortunately for us, seeing something that looks out of place is a strong survival tool, so the evolutionary algorithm generator has been hard at work on this problem for a very long time.

So where should we go now that the last shuttle has launched? There are hints of a plan, if politics, greed, and stupidity don't screw it up too badly. Having commercial operations like SpaceX deliver supplies to the ISS sounds like a great idea. Let's face it, UPS and FedEx do a better job delivering packages than does the Post Office. The same will be true for crew transfers, too. Despite what some would have you believe, there is very little difference between delivering parts and people, at least on the way up. When returning to Earth, you want to be more careful with the goods when people are involved.

If there is a place for government involvement in manned space flight, it should be in the development of genuinely heavy lift rockets. These have been out of favor since Saturn, but a new rocket in that class would go a long way toward getting men and women onto the Moon.

As an old space cadet, I'll have more to say someday. I'll also put together some links where you can learn more about these topics from people who are far better qualified than I am. Until then, I say to the crew of Atlantis, best of luck and may the wind be at your back.