Why keep launching a dinosaur? The space shuttle needs to go

January 26, 2006 2:58 am

EIGHTY YEARS AGO, the U.S. Postal Service, watching the growth of the aviation industry, thought it was time to start delivering long-distance mail by air. They first asked the Army to do the job. Unfortunately, though, the Army, not set up to provide a commercial service, just didn't do that well at it. The Postal Service then tried carrying it themselves, and the U.S. Airmail Service came into being.

The Airmail Service lasted a few years, but it was expensive, and by the mid-1920s, many thought the time was right to turn this service over to the private sector. After prodding from Congress, the post office began awarding mail contracts to small aviation companies. The approach, innovative and untested at the time, was successful, and this collaboration between the private sector and government provided the impetus for the formation of what would become the modern airline industry.

A similar shift may be ready to occur when it comes to spaceflight. But instead of aircraft made of canvas and wood, the future is all about composites, new designs, new propulsion technologies, and most of all, a new entrant into the world of space flight, the private sector.

But first NASA, and the entire spaceflight establishment, needs to change the way it views the future. Right now, NASA considers its future to be a lot like its past with large heavy-duty space vehicles built by the large contractors it has worked with for years. Unfortunately, though, this model for the future of spaceflight is breaking down.

When I watched the shuttle Discovery lift off in May, I experienced a new emotion. Not the anticipation and excitement I had felt back in 1981 when the shuttle first lifted off, but rather a sense of dread. A feeling that the odds of something bad happening were a lot larger than they needed to be. Also, for the first time, I was beginning to believe that the risks simply didn't justify the costs.

The shuttle is a 30-year-old technology, and like the rest of our manned space program seems locked in a tiresome, wasteful, and even dangerous cycle. The shuttle, no longer reliable enough to carry satellites into orbit, has become a multibillion dollar moving van. It takes personnel to the international space station, picks up departing astronauts, and oh yes, in a rather sad irony, even takes home the trash. But its contribution to the future of space travel and science is marginal at best.

As for the Space Station, the other leg in NASA's manned spaceflight program, its mission has never been particularly clear. Save, as some on Capitol Hill like to joke, providing a place for the shuttle to go.

Unfortunately, when the shuttle Discovery came home, NASA, aware of increasing concern about the foam from the shuttles fuel tanks breaking off and damaging the spacecraft's wings, wisely decided they needed to ground the program one more time. In a way, this summed up the state of the manned space program: grounded and with no viable future plan or vision of where to go from here.

The recent announcement of a new 21st-century-style Apollo program is a clear example of what's wrong with the program. To anyone over 40, it still stirs the memories of Neil Armstrong taking that first step on the lunar surface. But, it doesn't do anything to address our immediate need to get material and manpower into orbit, and it doesn't show the creativity that you would expect out of a 21st-century space agency.

Besides, for the time being, the problem is a little closer to home. The biggest expenditure of energy in spaceflight isn't actually in space, but rather in crossing that first hundred miles or so that it takes to beat Earth's gravity. And that, right now, is NASA's principal obstacle. Forty years ago, only NASA and its Soviet counterparts had the money and the technology to put an object in Earth's orbit. But since then, technology has made some dramatic leaps.

Changes in computing technology, materials, and propulsion have radically impacted the aerospace industry and what it can do. What's more and perhaps most exciting, the private sector is just at the edge of being able to launch commercially viable manned spacecraft. The flight of Space Ship One in 2004, developed and launched for a modest $20 million, carried a man to the edge of space, not once, but twice in two weeks.

That's why America's manned spaceflight program, rather than pursuing an exclusive investment in heavy-duty, heavy-lift vehicles, made ever so conveniently by large and well-known contractors, needs to start pursuing more innovative alternatives, ones that ask this new and emerging sector of the aerospace industry: How would they propose putting people and material into space? And then, giving them the chance to try it.

At the very least, NASA needs to develop a vision of the future that's not locked in the glories of its past and most of all, not developed exclusively with a big-space, big-government mentality. For one thing, as we face some of the worst deficits in the past 20 years, the days of the 1960s-style space program, with unlimited budgets are long past. Anything from this point on is going to be spaceflight on a fiscal diet.

An alternative future for America's manned spaceflight program should leave plenty of room for private-sector involvement. This can be in the form of prizes, similar to the X-Prize that encouraged Space Ship One into orbit, and in the not-too-distant future, direct contracts to companies that can provide spaceflight services.

And who knows, with a little creativity and the right vision, we may, just like those early pilots who first carried the mail 80 years ago, be a part of the beginning of an entirely new approach to putting mankind into space. That is, if we can find the willingness to try something new.

DAVID KERR of Stafford is a congressional aide.