Present at the Future by Ira Flatow

Author:Ira Flatow
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9780061750137
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2014-01-15T22:40:22+00:00

PART VI

LEAVING THE EARTH

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

THERE’S NO BUSINESS LIKE SPACE BUSINESS

Our goal is to solve, or help solve, what I consider to be, by far and away, the great problem of space, which is the cost of getting there.

—ELON MUSK

In 2004, President George W. Bush announced a new goal for the U.S. space program: return to the moon, and after that, aim for Mars. NASA administrator Michael Griffin said that the current space shuttle program and International Space Station (ISS) were “not the right path” for the space agency after the highly successful Apollo moon missions of the ’70s.

So after costing billions of dollars and two deadly accidents, the space shuttle will be put to rest by 2010. Its successor, the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle dubbed Apollo on steroids, is now in the planning stages. It appears that we’re picking up where we left off in 1975—we’re going back to the future.

“We’re now in a very uncertain transition that NASA and the country hasn’t faced in decades, trying to design a new space vehicle while recovering from an accident with the old one, at the same time trying to draw plans that will credibly get us out to places we’ve never touched before,” says Tom Jones, a planetary scientist and a NASA astronaut from 1990 to 2001. He flew four shuttle missions and led three space walks during the construction of the ISS.

The two shuttle disasters have convinced NASA that the shuttle’s design had been faulty from the very beginning. “The shuttle was built in the early ’70s, designed in the early ’70s as part of a compromise in cost and capability with the government and its budgeters, and so its very design was made fragile and vulnerable three decades ago. And now we’re still paying the price for that.”

We were told back then that the shuttle would be so safe that even civilians would be welcomed aboard, journalists and schoolteachers. The space shuttle was the first rocket ship in the history of the space program—American or Soviet—that did not provide an adequate means of escaping a disaster during launch like the kind that killed the Challenger astronauts on January 28, 1986. In that tragedy, the vehicle broke up 73 seconds into the launch.

“It had been envisioned that it would be a very safe, almost indestructible or infallible vehicle, and of course, our confidence in conquering the hazards of spaceflight was oversold, and so now the shuttle, as we realize, is a somewhat fragile and now aging vehicle that needs to be replaced,” says Jones. “We want the crew of this new vehicle to have a much better chance of escaping any problem with their launch vehicle and coming back to the Earth with an almost bulletproof heat shield and recovery system, and that would have gone a long way toward preventing the Columbia tragedy from ever happening.”

So NASA engineers are bringing back the tried-and-true design of the early days of the 1960s space race: The crew capsule sits atop the

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