starship-design: Sailing With Columbus Was Never Safe (Part 1)

["L. Clayton Parker" <lparker@cacaphony.net>]

Sailing With Columbus Was Never Safe

by Bruce Moomaw
Sacramento - Apr 23, 2003

The ability to resume building and operating the Space Station is absolutely
crucial to the future of NASA writes Bruce Moomaw. For NASA Administrator
Sean O'Keefe this means the Agency must return the Shuttle to flight
operations as quickly and safely as possible. And by following a baseline
that involves making only minor risk-reduction measures it's possible that
shuttle flights could resume by early next year.

Former ASAP Chairman Richard Blomberg recommended the same thing in his
testimony before the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, saying that
installation of a crew escape system in the existing Shuttles -- if possible
at all -- would likely take as much as a decade.

He recommended instead that NASA simply continue flying Shuttles for as long
as the Space Station is operated, considerably increase spending on the
manned space program to further raise their safety as much as it can be
raised (which, he emphasized, is not much), building one or two additional
Shuttle Orbiters, "...and when those come on line, maybe retire the oldest
of the current ones." Adding in observation that it might be possible to
incorporate a crew escape system into these new Shuttles, built from
scratch.

"We're never going to have a perfectly safe vehicle...[The Shuttle] is a
design... that the folks can manage well enough to keep the risk as low as
is humanly possible for that environment.

"I think that's all you can ask for when you're dealing with a dangerous
situation...If you ask me would the country be better served by not having
human space flight until a Shuttle replacement is produced, I would
vehemently say no.

"I mean that human space flight is important, we are learning a great deal
from it, we are accomplishing things in space, and the Shuttle is fully
capable of supporting that at an acceptable, albeit not perfect, level of
risk.

"Now, would we have been better if we [already] had Shuttle 2 now or some
other vehicle. Probably. But we didn't make that decision. So right now we
have to play the cards that we're dealt...The only human-rated vehicles that
we know of on this planet are Soyuz and Shuttle, and Soyuz can't do the job.
So it's going to be Shuttle."

Blomberg elaborated on his belief that more Shuttle disasters are both
inevitable and, on the whole, acceptable: "Whenever you have a human
vehicle...[which] gets more and more complex, it is absolutely impossible to
check out every interaction and every type of failure and every situation
that the vehicle will encounter...

"Unfortunately, part of our operational experience in any vehicle is
accidents. We hope it never gets to that, but it is part of the reality of
operating, particularly in a high-risk environment."

Neither O'Keefe nor Blomberg have actually given any reason why manned
spaceflight has such supposedly big benefits -- but they may very well get
their wish anyway. As the Feb. 14 "Science" noted, "O'Keefe has powerful
advocates on his side.

Three of his former bosses are now in influential positions": Vice President
Cheney, OMB Director Mitchell Daniels, and Senate Appropriations Commitee
chairman Ted Stevens -- all of whom enthusiastically support a continued
major manned spaceflight program "carried out by a new generation of brave
explorers".

And to underscore that 'commitment' the Bush Administration has announced
its intention of actually increasing NASA's total spending level from $15
billion to $18 billion a year within three years.

However, that plan for an increase in NASA's spending hinges upon the
Administration's and Congress' continued willingness to blithely continue
expanding the federal deficit indefinitely -- if that bubble bursts, NASA's
spending is not only likely to be limited to its present level but may
actually drop somewhat.

Moreover, "Science" reports that Congress is already seriously skeptical
about O'Keefe's desire to fund development of the Orbital Space Plane over
the next decade at the same time that NASA continues to fund the Shuttle
fleet:

"The idea [of the OSP] has won little support from many aerospace
contractors, who fear it could replace the Shuttles -- and their lucrative
contracts -- or from legislators, who question its feasibility and its price
tag... 'You won't get a multibillion-dollar appropriation for this', a House
aide says. 'It's not going to happen.' NASA declines to estimate the [OSP's]
cost, but one industry official says that development costs could exceed $35
billion."

Thus, NASA may continue to fly Shuttles, four or five times per year, as
America's only manned spacecraft through at least 2020 -- and simply accept
as inevitable the destruction of one or two more Shuttles and their crews.

Unless and until an OSP is funded, NASA will have to continue paying Russia
to provide Soyuz' as emergency rescue vehicles -- and unless it is willing
to maintain the Station crew at three, thus allowing virtually no useful
scientific research to be done on the Station, it will have to pay Russia to
keep not one but two Soyuz' attached to the Station at all times to allow a
full 6-man crew to evacuate the Station in case of an emergency.

This, of course, is assuming that we decide to retain the Station at all.
During the same recent interview by "Space.com" in which he expressed his
strong desire to start flying Shuttles again before the end of 2003, O'Keefe
pooh-poohed the idea of aiming at any time in the near future for manned
flights to the Moon or Mars:

"There are only two or three things, the space agency head contends, that
motivate big goals as a national imperative: national security, economics,
or expressions of sovereignty. Nothing on the space horizon is apparent in
this regard...that might foster a big destination goal.

"So rather than sit, sweat, fret, and argue about which one of those
destination objectives everybody could get around...focus all that
attention, time and effort into all the enabling technologies that would
make any of those goals feasible in the future. That's the logic.' "

The irony is that the Station itself is totally unjustifiable on any of
those grounds. I have already expressed my belief -- which is also the
belief of a landslide majority of space scientists. -- that maintaining the
Space Station is totally unjustified on any rational grounds, even now that
it's been partially completed. Nothing I've seen since my last article on
this subject has persuaded me otherwise.

In March 1991, the National Research Council concluded that the Space
Station "does not meet the basic research requirements of the two principal
scientific disciplines for which it is intended: (1) life sciences research
necessary to support the national objective of long-term human exploration
of space, and (2) microgravity research and applications." Since then, its
scientific usefulness has not grown one bit.

With one exception, every type of scientific experiment it can possibly
carry out can be done vastly more cheaply -- and in many cases more
scientifically effectively as well -- on much smaller unmanned satellites
(including recoverable ones).

Any advantage from having a human technician immediately on hand near the
orbiting experimental equipment is vastly outweighed by the fact that an
experiment, if need be, can be rerun dozens of times on unmanned spacecraft
for the cost of running it once on a manned mission, since the overwhelming
share of the expense of any manned spaceflight is that of simply launching
the crew safely into orbit, keeping them alive there, and returning them
safely to Earth.

And the scientific usefulness of microgravity experiments is highly limited
in any case. Zero-G does not provide much additional knowledge about the
biology of living things; and the demand for crystals and other materials
manufactured in 0-G is extremely limited and perhaps nonexistent, since
virtually all substances manufactured in weightlessness can now be
manufactured more cheaply in other ways back on Earth.

The only possible use for the Station is to study the health effects of
prolonged weightlessness on humans themselves. But the only use for such
information is for future long-duration deep-space manned flights. And --
thanks mostly to the Russians -- we already know with absolute certainty
that prolonged 0-G has a multitude of seriously harmful effects, and that
artificial gravity will be an absolute necessity for all manned deep-space
flights. The Station can provide us with almost no additional useful
information on this subject.

As then-Senator Dale Bumpers bitterly remarked in 1998: "A vast majority of
scientists know the Station will be the most expensive and least efficient
scientific laboratory in history. Each hour of Space Station research will
cost an astounding $155,000.

"Instead of spending $1.3 billion a year to keep four U.S. astronauts in
orbit, we could fund more than 5000 grants for research at universities and
laboratories here on Earth."

Since then, the yearly cost of the Station by itself has increased to $1.7
billion -- and the cost of the Shuttle program now devoted almost entirely
to maintaining it (a cost Bumpers didn't include in his calculation) is
another $4 billion.

And the Station's crew, until its full crew rescue capability is available,
has dropped from 6 or 7 to only three people -- reducing the number of
man-hours per week currently devoted to American research down to only 11,
at a staggering real cost of about $10 million per man-hour of research!

Moreover, until the Shuttle resumes flights and the Station can be returned
to a three-man crew from its current emergency two-man crew, the number of
man-hours of American research per week will be only 6 hours.

This is the sum total benefit we have gotten from a project which -- as the
journal "The Scientist" points out -- has cost "almost 10 times as much as
it would take to build the Panama Canal today."