Breaking News?
Houston, Wire Reports
It is day 1,223 for astronaut Steve Bell on the International Space Station (ISS). Doctors at the Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston confirmed today that Bell had lost over 35 percent of his bone density and were “working the problem.” The doctors promised a new exercise protocol within days to stop the progression of the loss. Bell’s condition began to rapidly deteriorate when Russian officials declared parts of the ISS “off limits” to Bell which deprived him, a Japanese and two European Space Agency astronauts of the exercise equipment in the Russian modules.
Meanwhile final preparations were being made to test the hastily constructed Saturn 1B rocket in Florida. NASA engineers insisted on testing the launch system which ironically had not been used since the Apollo-Soyuz rendezvous in the seventies. A consortium of aerospace contractors continue to construct the actual Saturn rocket and Apollo capsule which will transport Bell and the rest of the non-Russian occupants of the ISS to earth later this year. The Saturn/Apollo system was selected back in December of last year because the time required to build the system was much less than the time required to refurbish any of the Shuttle fleet mothballed in 2011.
The other possibility for the transport of the non-Russian astronauts was further damaged today as the joint Russian/Iranian investigation of the nuclear facility bombing uncovered yet more evidence. In a news conference in Tehran, Ivan Spisnaski the lead investigator showed the media communiqués between the Russians and Americans telling U.S. officials were aware Russian nuclear scientists were present at the Iranian facility as the joint American/Israeli bombing mission was authorized. Upon hearing the latest from Tehran, an unidentified State Department official said Iran used the Russians as “human shields,” to protect their nuclear bomb program.
There have been times in the past when we did not have a manned space program but the difference is fictitiously dramatized in the above story. As you have probably discovered by now, no astronaut is marooned on the ISS and relations with Russia are as good as ever. Without the Shuttle however, we are reduced to paying transorbital cab fare to the Russians.
It is a little bit hard to focus on the final Space Shuttle flight and its implications as we enter the final days of the biggest budget battle to ever hit Washington but, maybe the two are more related than you think. After the final flight of the Shuttle program is completed and Atlantis lands on July 20th, our manned space program will effectively be over. It is ironic Atlantis’ planned landing will be exactly 42 years to the day after man landed on the moon.
The plight of the manned space program is a study in deficit politics. Red state Tea Party favorites like Senator Jeff Sessions are a great example of the hypocritical duality facing many non-defense discretionary programs like NASA. One of the reining kings of the “private good-government bad-starve the beast” crowd, Sessions, finds himself saying things like this about the Shuttle funding and President Obama’s plan to replace it:
Sessions doesn’t much sound like a privatizing-anything the government can do, a private company can do better, Senator. For a Senator who has stood in the well of the Senate for years ignoring the revenue side of the government deficit equation and telling us we had a spending problem, when it comes to bad ole government jobs in the space program for his state, he sounds like a liberal.
So here we are. As we watch the last Shuttle take off today (if weather permits), we are torn. We are torn just as we are on other expenditures which we can’t really justify in the face of a fourteen-trillion-dollar deficit. There are so many things we can’t really point to a benefit they provide. In the face of high-tech hitchhiking, the Shuttle is just one of those things which makes us, well, AMERICAN.
9 Responses to “Breaking News?”
NASA does some amazing R&D. While I also question the need to send people into orbit, I do believe in the value of NASA. Cutting manned orbit does not mean when need to cut NASA’s budget.
NASA has a long history, just not a particularly good one.
Sessions is engaging in the time honored tradition of making sure his state still gets the pork, which supersedes his commitment to fiscal responsibility or privatization.
NASA is in the “nice but not necessary” category and should face cuts right now.
So this is a “If you’re not a zealot who is unable to apply a bit of discretion to a general philosophy then you’re a hypocrite” thread. Again? Maybe he just likes rocketships?
NASA has a long history, just not a particularly good one.
J,
I am not minimizing the lives lost in the risky business of space, those guys and gals are heroes in my book. I however, count something like three failures in something like three hundred tries. I was always thrilled to get a 99 on a test.
If you refer to the money spent, we have a saying in engineering,
Good Cheap Fast-you can have two of them
E,
Applying discretion in my view would be something like,
In general we spend too much money and we should look first at cutting spending however, even though I am not a fan, I could allow some tax breaks for entities who obviously do not need them to go away. I would do this so that the United States could pay it’s debts.
Now that’s what I call discretion!
Come on man, everybody loves rockets.
Well, 2 of 5 space shuttles blew up, so how do you feel about 60%? Or you could compare the 135 missions that flew to the 78 that were cancelled, which gets you to 63% success. And then there are the lost probes and myopic space telescopes and other high-profile failures. I’m not saying any of this is easy or another organization would do dramatically better, just that track record is not much of a selling point.
So which two did we get?
J,
Ok, now I have looked it up. 3 accidents for 169 flights. 1.7 percent accident rate and not the earlier guess. I would love to have that success rate on almost any endeavor. After looking at your citation, the cancelled flight thing is a reach. Looks like a list of any flight ever contemplated. Counting orbiters lost to total constructed seems a little unfair since they flew so many times.
As far as the question on good cheap fast-I would say we got good and fast. When you consider the technological leaps required to solve the problem (integrated circuits, light solar panels…. Tang:) ) ten years for the moon seems like light speed.
As far as a private equivalent success rate goes, NASA has no private equal so it is a mute point. We will have to wait future results to answer that one.
I agree cancelled flights isn’t much of a success metric, but neither is “everyone didn’t die,” and it was one I could find quick data on. If you mean to credit NASA with integrated circuits, what about the dude at Texas Instruments who got a Nobel prize for inventing them?
Anyway, rocket ships are cool, but I’m not a big booster of NASA. And I used to work there.