The Astronauts Only
Make It Look Easy
Observations on the eve of the Challenger's last launch.
BY ARLEN J. LARGE
Sunday, February 2, 2003 12:01 a.m. EST
URL:http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110003016
(Editor's note: This article appeared on the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 28, 1986. Later that day, the Challenger exploded on takeoff, killing its crew of seven.)
CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla.--Sometimes the U.S. space shuttle takes off on schedule, but mostly it's late, as with the most recent flights of the Columbia and Challenger. After five years and 24 flights, what was originally billed as a "routine space machine" hasn't yet become a push-button conveyance, to the frequent embarrassment of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.
And it's not just NASA. In November three Soviet cosmonauts on a long-endurance orbital mission had to be brought home when one of them fell ill with a nervous disorder, despite the best preflight medical screening. And Europe's crewless Ariane rocket, supposedly the world's most efficient satellite-launcher, blew up after leaving its pad last September; attempts to send another into space have suffered three awkward postponements so far.
Getting into space is still a hard thing for humans to do. They and their machines aren't yet a natural part of that environment. For people trying to expand their ecological niche beyond the protected surface of the third planet from the sun, it's all uphill.
So far, only governments have been able to assemble the money and talent needed to hurl men to the moon and send robots to Venus, Uranus or Halley's comet. Without taxing power, private organizations have yet to make much of a showing. From the 1960s onward, it has been the U.S. and Soviet governments that have poured the most resources into space. At the beginning those governments were quite eager to "race" each other in hopes of scoring propaganda points with superior space feats. The U.S. won that initial race to the moon mainly because American (and imported German) engineers mastered the task of building a heavy-lift rocket, and the Russians didn't.
Since then, the space programs of both governments have become less propagandistic, because the element of luck has shown space prowess to be a poor yardstick for comparing political systems. Instead of racing on a parallel track, the U.S. and Soviet efforts in manned space flight have taken different directions in the past 15 years. The Americans have specialized in transporting people and cargo while the Russians have worked on a rudimentary space station, losing at least four lives in the process. Each has achieved some goals, with some setbacks. Nobody can be said to be "ahead."
Useful as it was for the sprint to the moon, the Apollo program's space hardware proved to be a technological dead end; it flies no more. In the early 1970s, U.S. planners settled on a more open-ended strategy based on an Earth-orbiting manned space station and a flight vehicle to shuttle people and cargo up to it. The station could, someday, be a springboard to a more ambitious mission to Mars. But NASA got only enough money to start work on the cargo-shuttle link in that plan. Until the orbiting station is built in the 1990s, the space shuttle has the interim assignment of launching satellites and carrying up scientists and others for brief, week-long experiments in orbital weightlessness.
It cost the U.S. $10 billion to invent the first working model of the space shuttle, and even then it's something of a 1970s jalopy that must shed part of its structural launch weight to achieve orbit. It's so complex that it must be steered by onboard computers, which in turn have been so troublesome that they're earmarked for replacement starting next year.
Because people are aboard, NASA quite properly feels it must be supercautious about lighting the launch-pad fuse. Some launch delays have been due to faulty warning lights and nothing else, and it's remarkable that contractors that supply faulty parts have suffered no monetary punishment imposed by the purchaser.
The shuttle's flight hardware may not be descended from the Apollo moonships, but the main base at Cape Canaveral is a legacy that's becoming an unexpected problem. It seemed natural and cost-effective for NASA to leave for the moon near the old Air Force rocket range here, where eastward launches over the Atlantic could get an extra push from the Earth's rotation; the returning Apollo capsules could parachute into the Pacific without regard to the vagaries of Florida's weather. It also seemed natural and cost-effective for the shuttle to get ready for flight in the Cape's massive old moon rocket assembly building, and to use the two hand-me-down Apollo launch pads. But the winged shuttle does need clear weather at its landing spot, and unpredictable Florida skies are diverting too many landings to Southern California, spoiling NASA's hope of ending most missions where they start.
Moreover, the Cape is an unsuitable launch site for shuttle missions that must fly in pole-to-pole orbits, as some satellites require. A launch accident could imperil Savannah or Cleveland if the shuttle were aimed straight north, or Miami if aimed south. Thus the Air Force has been building a new pad at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California to put shuttle-launched spy satellites into polar orbit by firing them straight south over the Pacific.
But despite the extra expense, the Vandenberg pad is behind schedule, and the military is vexing NASA by booking fewer cargoes--polar or otherwise--than had been counted on to sustain a maximum flight rate for the four shuttle orbiters.
Still, despite all of the shuttle's troubles, it has flown 24 times without major mishap--proof that the reusable jalopy really works. It has launched more than 20 satellites into high Earth-stationary orbit, using an untidy two-step procedure that depends on an upper-stage rocket to propel the payload above the shuttle's own low orbit. Four times those upper stages have failed, but such is the shuttle's versatility that its space-walking crews were able to restart one rocket and retrieve two of the satellites that had been stranded in low orbit.
As the multipurpose U.S. shuttle evolved in the 1970s, the European Space Agency thought it saw a market niche for a high-technology expendable rocket that would do just one thing better: launch satellites, in one stroke from the ground up. After two early failures, the resulting Ariane rocket had a string of commercial launch successes, while the shuttle was visibly struggling with its two-step procedure. Then on its 15th launch, last September, the Ariane again failed. The next rocket may not be fired until late next month. Meanwhile, technicians try to fix a leak in its system for cooling a combustion chamber with high-tech water.
There have been many space successes in the past 30 years, and there will be many more as governments in China, Japan, India and elsewhere mobilize the requisite money and talent. But until human spacefarers get more experience--through many trials and some more errors--they're still going to need lots of luck.
Mr. Large, who died at 65 in 1996, was a reporter for The Wall Street Journal's Washington bureau until his retirement in 1986. |
