You've seen them before, in some movie or news hour or NASA broadcast - the massive crawler-transporters at Kennedy Space Center, originally built to move Apollo Program rockets from one spot to another at a staggering ONE mile per hour, and the Vehicle Assembly Building where the rockets were assembled and, later, where the shuttles had their tanks and boosters attached. This shot was taken in February 2005, during the long gap in launches that followed the destruction of Columbia.
I, the copyright holder of this work, hereby release it under the Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.
This means that you are free to Share (to copy, distribute and transmit the work) and to Remix (to adapt the work) under the following conditions: Attribution (you must attribute the work in the manner specified by the author or licensor, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work), Noncommercial (you may not use this work for commercial purposes), and Share Alike (if you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same or similar license to this one).
Almost four hours ago the Mars Science Laboratory, including the car-sized Curiosity rover, successfully launched from Cape Canaveral and is now on its way to Mars. With the Russians still struggling to salvage the Phobos-Grunt mission, which has been trapped in Earth orbit for weeks now after its engines refused to fire, one can only hope that the hunger of the Great Galactic Ghoul has been sated for now and that MSL and Curiosity will make it to the Red Planet. If all goes according to plan, this time next year the largest Mars rover in history will be driving around Gale Crater and vaporizing rocks with its laser, because it's about damn time we sent out a rover with a laser. So it can blast annoying Martians and, through the wonders of spectroscopic examination, gain new awareness of their material composition. ("We are v-r-r-iends! Ouch!")
It's a welcome step forward for Mars research, particularly since there's now no longer any threat of the probe being cancelled because of economic factors. What I'm not looking forward to is the possibility that Curiosity will be more grist for the mill of the unmanned-boosters' peanut gallery. That is, the people who almost seem to be offended by the idea of human space exploration, or who think that calling spaceships "canned monkeys" is an endearing habit that totally makes people want to come over to their point of view.
The history of robotic Mars exploration has been incredible, all right. It's incredible that we've got as much out of robots as we have, and the ultimate cost of all their scientific insights would probably be incredible as well. There's one thing I'm curious about that, unfortunately, Curiosity won't be able to help me with; it's the question of whether all the science done by all the probes that have ever been landed on Mars over the last forty years could have been replicated by an astronaut actually on Mars in one week, or if it would be more like two weeks.
That rock had it coming. Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
I'm not saying this to denigrate the people behind the actual Mars probes. Mars is a forbidding environment full of challenges alien to Earth, and it's hard enough to build a machine that works properly - let alone a machine that's rugged enough to keep on trucking in an environment that no human has any direct experience with. Yet, the limitations imposed upon past probes as a consequence of building them to endure the Martian environment had a definite effect on what they could actually do there. Remember Sojourner, the first successful Mars lander after the original Viking probes? It was a technical triumph - but that triumph wasn't free. Sojourner was not that much bigger than an Xbox 360, had a maximum speed of 0.036 kilometers per hour, and could operate as much as five hundred meters away from its lander. Over the eighty-three sols - that is, Martian solar days - it was in operation, Sojourner took five hundred and fifty photographs and analyzed sixteen locations.
It was a technical triumph, yes. But it also sounds like the sort of work that a lone astronaut, operating from a fixed base on Mars, could literally do in about an hour and get back to base in time for lunch. I expect that Curiosity will do good science, and will help pave the way for future human exploration, but it's inherently limited by the fact that it's a robotic rover at least partially dependent on a mission control which could be anywhere from three to twenty-two light-minutes away.
I'm not sure what the unmanneders - though there's got to be a better word for those people who support robotic missions and denigrate human ones - want me to take away from their arguments. What I usually end up taking from them is that they are willing to accept the return of a limited scientific payload in exchange for the expense of sending humans to do all this science themselves. Personally, though, I can't see myself coming around to that point of view - I can't yet accept the notion that, for a given amount of scientific returns, it would be cheaper to use robots than astronauts. Robots leave humans out of potentially dangerous situations, yes, but we pay through the nose for the privilege.
Nor do any of them, from my perspective at least, have the sort of psychological weight as the idea of boots on Mars.
I was high in the sky when I first heard about NASA's new rocket, flipping through the channels on WestJet's seatback satellite television to see if anything good was on or if I should just go back to Coyote Rising. Still, after the floundering that came after President Obama's cancellation of the Constellation program in 2010, which was supposed to have returned people to the moon in 2018, it's refreshing to see that in the Space Launch System, NASA once again has a direction, something to strive for.
Nevertheless, I've heard rumbles. Rumbles that it's too expensive, that it's a waste of money that would be better spent on Earth - it is a little-known secret that the liquid fuel of rockets is actually a superchilled slurry of $100 bills, and the electronics packages of satellites are just wads of old fives - that with millions of Americans unemployed and the world staring down the barrel of a renewed depression, space is something that we just can't afford. That it's time to hunker down, close the shutters, and nail down what we can while we wait for the storm to pass - and then once the skies clear, we can see what's still standing, and only then figure out whether the winds are good for throwing ourselves back into space... until the next storm comes, that is.
I disagree.
While I think that NASA would be better off getting out of the space truck business sooner rather than later, using launchers built to spec by private industry now that there is such a thing as a private space industry rather than doing that grunt work itself, for the moment new NASA projects are valuable. Whether it's a new rocket, a cutting-edge space telescope, or just another perspective on our place in the universe, the things that NASA provides have a vitality that no other government program can hope to match. NASA gives us things that are uplifting, that take us away from the dirt beneath our feet and allow us to feel the solar wind in our hair.
I don't buy the argument that the United States can't afford to maintain its space program. For me, arguments like that lost all potency when the government shoveled hundreds of billions of dollars into the drooling maws of bankers who shattered the world economy through their high-stakes gambling and came snivelling for cash when their bets went bust. Compared to that, compared to pretty much everything else the government does, NASA is pocket change. At no point in my lifetime has NASA's budget ever represented more than 1.05% of the United States federal budget. For 2011, it's getting $18.7 billion, which sounds like a lot... but not in the context of the largest economy on Earth.
Investment in systems such as this are investments in the future.
"Projects that are future-oriented, that, despite their political difficulties, can be completed only in some distant decade are continuing reminders that there will be a future. Winning a foothold on other worlds whispers in our ears that we're more than Picts or Serbs or Tongans: We're humans." - Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot
The future is in danger these days. I can understand why, but it's still disturbing. People don't give much thought to the future when the present is uncertain, but that lack of thought undermines the foundation of the future. We owe it to ourselves to look ahead, to lift our eyes from the ground and force ourselves to look ahead, to step out of the shadows of discontent and fear we've been living in for years - to remind ourselves that one day things will be better. Things will be better, and if we take action along those lines today, that better time may not be too long after tomorrow.
Carl Sagan is right in that NASA's projects have not produced a lot of things that have "bread on the table" practical value compared to other major government projects like, say, the construction programs of the New Deal. But what's easy to overlook is that people can't live on bread alone. We need something more, a reason to move forward, something that tells us to look up and envision a better time - something that reminds us that there will be a better time. In these days, when pessimism is rampant and society is pulling the blinds tight, that sort of hope is valuable in a way that can't be demoninated in dollar signs. An optimistic society is a dynamic society, capable of great deeds. A pessimistic society, a society that believes the highest virtues are austerity and quiet desperation, is on a course to despair and irrelevancy.
Days like this, we need the future. The Space Launch System may yet help bring it here.
Today, the weather held. I watched the Space Shuttle Atlantis launch this morning. For the last time. Ever. At 11:29 AM Eastern Daylight Time, 8:29 AM Pacific, she surged away from Kennedy Space Center on a tower of fire and smoke. In ten minutes, Atlantis went from the Space Coast to space - from motionlessness to fifteen thousand miles per hour. It will be a while yet before she returns - the planned landing is set for July 20, which in itself is notable; forty-two years after Apollo 11's landing on the moon.
Even watching it in the form of a choppy webcast couldn't detract from the majesty of it. In the minutes between the separation of the Solid Rocket Boosters and External Fuel Tank, the feed carried an unearthly silence; Atlantis, though soaring orbitward at thousands of miles per hour, seemed frozen - enough so that until Houston started talking, I was worried I had lost my connection to NASA TV.
Atlantis is en route to a rendezvous with the International Space Station on Sunday. Launch Pad 39A is empty now, and it will remain that way for some time to come. No shuttle will ever again sit on the pad at Cape Canaveral. It begs the question - where are we going? What are we going to do now? Maintaining the space program was difficult enough in a time of plenty like the 1990s, when there were no endless wars for the United States to pay for. In a world where the United States remains mired in recession after nearly four years of misery, when the entire global financial system feels as stable as a house on a pogo stick, what have we to do next? I've been noticing quite a few people expressing uncertainty, wondering if this is the end of the road for manned spaceflight.
A view of Atlantis from the External Fuel Tank during the ascent to orbit, after SRB separation. Frame courtesy NASA TV.
We used to know where we were going - up until last year, when President Obama cancelled the Constellation program out from under us. For the first time in years, perhaps decades, NASA had a comprehensive, concrete plan for the future that involved something greater than flights to the International Space Station - and we couldn't afford it. Of course not. We can afford bailouts to parasite corporations demand we make restitution for their losses so that they can keep all the profits if good times come again, but we couldn't afford this.
But this isn't the end of the road. There's still, thankfully, the International Space Station to consider - something to focus our attention on. There's the burgeoning private space sector; ten years ago SpaceX didn't exist, and ten years from now it may well be sending people into space on top if its own rockets. There's Virgin Galactic, Blue Origin, Bigelow Aerospace - and there's the Chinese space program, with its plan to have the space station Tiangong complete and in orbit for 2020.
Sure, these estimates may change, and some may never get off the ground at all. But we have to remember that nothing is ever a sure thing, and not even the Space Shuttle itself was a sure thing once; our view of it is distorted by the scope of the mostly-successful thirty-year program.
"If it survives the political onslaught," Jerry Pournelle wrote in the April 1977 issue of Galaxy, "the Shuttle will put 65,000 pounds in near-Earth orbit for a cost of between $10 and $20 million per mission... at the moment the turn-around time from re-entry to next mission is planned at 160 hours; but a great deal of that is checkout and elaborate tests, and if the ships fly as well as we think they will, it can be cut."
The Space Shuttle didn't live up to the optimistic forecasts of launch costs that you'll find in 1970s sources - if it had, there would likely be a real orbital infrastructure by now, not just the ISS - but it brought space to a new generation - my generation, a generation that grew up always knowing that spaceflight was something that was done, which was done regularly, and which was a normal part of the world. Today, that world feels as if it's missing something.
"The Shuttle's always going to be a reflection of what a great nation can do," Atlantis commander Chris Ferguson in the final minutes before launch this morning. He's right, because the Shuttle is about something greater. It's something that isn't just about profit. Something that isn't just about the everyday. Something that is about going beyond... about the future.
As for myself, I was never too deeply affected by the loss of the space shuttle Challenger - only because for me, it had always happened. January 26, 1986 was less than a month after my third birthday, a time when my life was almost exclusively focused around television and getting excited about trucks. I may not have even recognized the existence of space as a thing in and of itself. When I learned about Challenger, even though I was in the world on that day I learned it as history.
Not so with the space shuttle Columbia. Eight years and one day ago, I was in the middle of my second year at Trent University, and space launches had become routine. They ere even making good progress on a space station up there. So when the news reached me of the disaster, of the shuttle coming apart on reentry, I was hit by the punch of history repeating - and being in a position to directly experience it for the first time.
I'll say that I cried. I mourned. It wasn't just the seven astronauts who would never come home - it was everything that Columbia represented, that grand future whose eventual arrival I'd always taken for granted, and which was now really in the balance for the first time I could remember.
We've come back from that - but in fits and starts. That future is still in the balance even today. There's no certainty anymore, just drifting speculation that can never latch on to anything long enough to be real. But we can't forget. To knuckle under, to abandon that intrepidity that takes us beyond the sky, it wouldn't just be a loss for us; it would be a betrayal to all those who come after.
In February 2003, I was a regular contributor to Absynthe Magazine, a student publication on the Trent campus. In recognition of the day, I'm reproducing an article I wrote that appeared in the first edition after Columbia's destruction - and while it's plain to see that I had a hell of a lot to learn about writing back then, as a window into that time I think it's still worthwhile.
After Columbia, we must press on By Andrew Barton
Many of us are too young to remember the destruction of the space shuttle Challenger. On January 28th, 1986, the world watched as the shuttle and its seven crew members dissolved in a cloud of fire, a disaster from which the American space program took years to recover. On February 1st, this disaster was echoed in a high-altitude whisper as the space shuttle Columbia, active since 1981, broke apart on re-entry 200,000 feet above Texas. While NASA will undoubtedly scale back shuttle missions in the near future, it would be a grave disservice to the memories of the seven astronauts aboard Columbia to scale back the scope of the space program. We must not be cowed by this disaster and cower within the atmosphere, but be inspired to go faster and farther in spite of the dangers.
In his address to the nation in the wake of the disaster, President George W. Bush spoke on the dangers of considering space flight to be routine, and offered words indicative of a strong support of the space program. In a political climate where NASA has been routinely starved of funds to fund inefficient Medicare or corporate welfare programs, Bush's words and actions suggest a President willing to re-establish the United States as a spacefaring superpower.
"The cause in which they died will continue," Bush said. "Mankind is led into the darkness beyond our world by the inspiration of discovery and the longing to understand. Our journey to space will go on."
Though it is said that nothing worth doing is, or for that matter could possibly be, completely safe, the immediate aftermath of the Columbia's destruction saw a litany of voices rise up to challenge what they saw as billions upon billions of dollars sacrificed for no real return. Extreme proponents of this position have as of late begun to latch onto the disaster as a fulcrum for making their views known, claiming that the space program itself is a waste of resources that could be better spent solving Earth's problems. While the underlying motivations for this course of action are commendable, the fact remains that to cancel the space program would confine the human race to a single world, vulnerable to the capricious whims of nature.
One hundred years ago, Konstantin Tsiolkovsky expounded on the theories that made the modern shape of space exploration possible. Of his quotes, among the most widely known is, "Earth is the cradle of humanity, but one cannot remain in the cradle forever." To give up on the adventure of space would be to act as an ostrich burying its head in the sand when predators draw near. Certainly, the exploration of space is dangerous, but space itself is dangerous. Beyond the thousands upon thousands of asteroids that cross Earth's orbit, with many more yet to be detected, there are the dangers of supernovae, interstellar molecular clouds, rogue black holes, and a host of other potential disasters that could scour life from this planet as if it had never been.
Space may appear quiet and tranquil, but the truth is very much the opposite. It is quite possibly the most dangerous frontier humanity has ever faced, while simultaneously the most bountiful. All we must do is take up its challenges, for otherwise, we will have doomed ourselves within reach of the final frontier.
The Augustine Commission, set up to review NASA's spaceflight goals and provide potential alternatives if necessary, presented its conclusions last week, and while it will likely be some time before President Obama makes a final decision on it, the implications are still percolating across the internet. The document is about a hundred and seventy pages, so it'll take me some time to go through it, but at least they didn't hide the general thrust of their argument. Human spaceflight isn't dead - far from it - but the Commission believes that NASA's current goal of a renewed lunar exploration program is ill-founded, and prefers a "flexible path" that would take astronauts to near-Earth asteroids or the moons of Mars - visits to Luna and Mars themselves would, for the foreseeable future, be confined to orbital missions only, to spare the expense of fuel necessary for landing and takeoff.
I do have my disagreements with the Commission's findings as I currently understand them, as I believe a lunar facility would be advantageous: both in terms of low-g research impossible to conduct on Earth or the International Space Station, as well as resource gathering that could support future space endeavors with materials that does not have to be hefted out of Earth's gravity well. Fortunately, the situation today is not the same as it was in the 1970s - when it comes to the potential of activity beyond low Earth orbit, NASA is no longer the only game in town for the foreseeable future.
Take China. I know that China has made statements about how it would like to be involved in the International Space Station project, but at this point I don't think it's very likely that Beijing would be let in. Beyond that, I don't think defusing that sort of international competition in space development would be a good long-term thing. China has plans to orbit a space station of its own as Project 921-2, with the first element potentially launching as early as next year. A Chinese lunar mission is a natural follow-up, and if the Augustine Commission's report gains traction in Washington, the next boots on the moon likely will be Chinese ones.
I do wholeheartedly agree with the Commission on its view toward low Earth orbit transport. Its conclusion is that NASA should get out of the space trucking business entirely, and leave LEO crew and cargo flights to commercial providers. SpaceX, after its successful Falcon 1 launches in 2008 and 2009 and with the heavy-lift Falcon 9 set to light off from Cape Canaveral at the end of November, seems almost ready to take over this responsibility. Really, at this point it's the most sensible thing. Until now, NASA has been the workhorse because only NASA had the capability to do it, and there are those in Washington and elsewhere who do not particularly relish having to rely on the Russian Federation to maintain the American manned spaceflight program.
NASA blazed the trail, and now other organizations can carry the load. It's high time that NASA pass the torch to the companies and focus its time, money, and effort on what it was always meant to do - extend the horizon further and further.
