After Columbia: NASA ought to have clear and sensible purposes

National Review, Feb 24, 2003 by John Derbyshire

But I, remembering, pitied well

And loved them, who, with lonely light,

In empty infinite spaces dwell,

Disconsolate. For, all the night,

I heard the thin gnat-voices cry,

Star to faint star, across the sky.

Rupert Brooke was speaking of the stars themselves, as seen from a country lane in Cambridgeshire on a crisp fall evening 95 years ago. It is hard not to feel, though, that he had some premonition of there one day being real human voices squeaking disconsolately to one another, "star to faint star," across the lonely sky. At any rate, whenever I catch a TV news clip showing astronauts on board an orbiting shuttle, and hear their distorted voices, it is Brooke's lines that come to my mind.

Those news clips are few and far between nowadays. Other than as brief "filler" items in a slow news season, manned space travel is not interesting to the TV-watching public, except when something ghastly happens. The heroic days of the Apollo program are an entire generation behind us. In all likelihood, NASA prefers things this way. The nation's manned space effort is a quiet program, chugging away behind the scenes, doing . . . what? Best not to inquire.

I did inquire. To be precise, I went to the Internet and pulled off the NASA press kit for Shuttle Mission STS-107-the one that ended so horribly on February 1. Let us see. In the shuttle's payload bay we have: an experiment that will "examine bone formation . . . and bacterial and yeast cell responses to the stresses of spaceflight" . . . a German project to measure "the development of the gravity-sensing organs of fish in the absence of gravity" . . . the "Mediterranean Israeli Dust Experiment" . . . "the Critical Viscosity of Xenon-2" . . .

I do not doubt that these are very worthy experiments. But unfortunately, everything in this world must be paid for, and the price of carrying out these investigations aboard the shuttle is extraordinarily high-around $10,000 per pound of payload. Presumably the scientists looking into the critical viscosity of xenon-2 are happy to have their experiment aboard the shuttle. My guess, though, is that if they were told that no more shuttle flights were available, and that they would have to find some other way to spend their $10,000 per pound, they would not be inconsolable.

Contrariwise, there are many scientists whom the shuttle program makes very unhappy indeed. Take those involved with the Pluto-Kuiper Express mission, for instance. This was a proposal to send a small, unmanned spacecraft to fly by the planet Pluto, at the outermost edge of the solar system. Pluto is the only planet not yet visited by a spacecraft. Its importance lies in the fact that it is not, strictly speaking, a planet at all, but just the largest member of the Kuiper Belt, a zone of billions of icy objects left over from the solar system's formation. It is thought that these objects are occasionally dislodged from their orbits by tiny gravitational changes arising from their mutual interactions, and from the sun's passage among the stars. They then fall in to the inner solar system, adding to the chances of a civilization-destroying impact with our own planet. It would be nice to understand more about the Kuiper Belt, and about Pluto, which at present is known to us only as a fuzzy blob. Unfortunately, the PKE mission was canceled in September 2000 due to cost overruns. A scaled- down version has since been approved, with an absolute cost cap of $500 million, but it has been a long and hard-fought struggle.

By way of comparison, three years ago the General Accounting Office estimated the cost of a single shuttle launch at $512 million. The shuttle budget is a cuckoo in the nest of the space budget as a whole, grabbing all funds for itself from the limited amount Congress is willing to appropriate for non-military space flight. For less than the cost of putting seven people into orbit for two weeks and acquiring some incremental understanding of things like "yeast cell responses to the stresses of spaceflight," we could map Pluto and get a better fix on our odds for survival as a species.

These are the tradeoffs that space scientists are forced to engage in on account of the shuttle, and the political pressures to keep it flying. The situation has been made worse by the promotion of the International Space Station, a techno-diplomatic extravaganza of no practical value whose cost, name notwithstanding, falls mainly on the U.S. taxpayer.

As well as being expensive, the shuttle fleet is old. NASA should be spending much more than it does on planning a replacement. Over the past few years, Congress has in fact appropriated nearly $5 billion to such a replacement, but nothing has come of it. Everyone who knows the realities of the shuttle program-everyone, that is, other than the big aerospace contractors who milk it-is bitter and angry about these things. Here, for example, is spaceflight journalist Carlton Meyer, writing on the "Spacedaily" website late last year:

Perhaps NASA should build a "Sea Station" 1000 feet below the sea and use submarines to take foreigners and other salaried government tourists on "missions" to conduct "experiments" and set "endurance records" while "improving international relations." This idea may seem crazy, but it would be much cheaper than the shuttle program and accomplish just as much.