Returned to Flight
After a too-long hiatus, the Shuttle returned to flight trailing its signature plume of smoke and fire. All the false starts, the investigations, the endless reports and failure testing, the finger-pointing, the hand-wringing over budgets and expectations — all of it was left behind, if only for a little while, when the engines fired and that glorious beast lept off the pad. Everything appeared nominal, though the new camera on the tank caught a few pieces of debris during booster separation. None of the debris appears to have hit any part of the shuttle, at least according to the reports out of NASA, and nobody’s sure if this is anomalous, given that we’ve never had this view of launch before. This is exactly why the agency wanted daylight launches for the next few take-offs.
Of course, there’s nothing like a Shuttle launch to bring the armchair rocket scientists out of the woodwork to declare how useless manned flight is, or how primitive and appallingly gauche the Shuttle is, or how we should turn space flight over to corporate interests if we ever want it to go anywhere. The whole array of chatter is fairly predictable at this point. Of course, the vast majority of those holding forth said opinions wouldn’t know their ass from an SRB, but that’s hardly going to stop them. I mean, of course the DeVry-graduate sysadmin knows best about how we should expend our space exploration efforts — he’s seen the Discovery specials on space flight, and he’s been reading science fiction all his life…who could be more qualified? I actually read a statement online today that talked about how stupid it was to be talking about Mars vehicles unless we started building them in orbit, since that’s what Star Trek shows us is the best way to build these things. None of these “build it in orbit” arguments ever really address the inefficiency of having to boost all the materials to orbit in the first place, construct a full-on space vehicle fabrication facility in zero-g, and be totally unable to test any of the spaceflight hardware prior to launch. But that’s how they built the Enterprise dammit, and the Federation obviously knows best.
Morons.
Corporate space flight is another favorite talking point, and it makes me want to roll my eyes so hard they fall backwards out of their sockets to rattle around loose in the base of my skull somewhere. Corporations, which have brought us such classic achievements as lawsuits to recoup medical expenses due to cancer, massive pollution problems, and of course unaccountability for any wrongdoing when their employees or the general public get screwed by their lack of ethics. I can’t say as I’m overjoyed at the thought of something like Enron or Halliburton being in control of our future in space exploration. I would also wager that you’d have a hard time rounding up astronauts willing to trust their lives to safety systems and failsafes that may or may not have actually made it into the final spacecraft because of narrow profit margins. Radiation shielding? Who needs it? That stuff is expensive, and the marketing department has studies that suggeset public opinion losses in the event of tumor-ridden astronauts will be more than offset by the IMAX release over the Labor Day weekend.
Half-wits.
Do I have solid answers on how to make NASA better? Oh, hell no. Well, short of actually giving the agency a big enough budget to meet the mandates that keep getting thrown around, which I don’t expect to actually happen. Of course, if all these varied folks that want to badmouth the slow pace of progress towards manned missions to Mars and beyond would cheerfully agree to pay the additional tax burden to give NASA a budget that outstripped, oh, any other major Federal agency, then we’d have a solid shot at putting folks on Mars in the next decade. Not that I expect that to happen, either.
The real drag about this sort of second-guessing and complaining is that, for those of us still possessed of a sense of wonder and a belief in space exploration as a valuable goal, it distracts and detracts from that singular moment of awe when the candle is lit and the smoke billows from the base of the launchpad. Listening to mission control count off the miles as the orbiter clears Mach numbers at a pace that defies comprehension gives me a little charge, and I’m not ashamed to admit it. When final separation occurs from the tank, and the shuttle is lost to any Earth-bound camera, all that remains is that neutral voice from Kennedy, informing you that the orbiter is now moving at 17,000 mph, 75 miles above the surface of the Earth and several hundred miles downrange from the launch site. And by the gods, there are people in that thing, hurtling themselves into the starry blackness for the simple purpose of seeing what’s out there.
Just as there should be.