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Challenger and the Shuttle
This is the 20th anniversary of the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger. It may be hard for young people today to understand how big an effect the event had on geeks of my generation.
As a teenager, I actually still believed a lot of the NASA PR about the Shuttle, which was that it was the backbone of a sustainable space program that would finally take the US into an era of large-scale human space exploration and settlement. The story went something like this: Apollo, for all its glory, had been a one-off program to beat the USSR to the Moon. With its throwaway spacecraft and concentration on the prize, it wasn't suited to re-use for other purposes in a sustainable way (Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz being mere stopgaps). For that, we needed reusable launchers, which would save huge amounts of money and make it possible to launch a mission every couple of weeks. Even better, even the satellite-launch missions would have people on them: a huge body of experience working in space would result. Space travel would become routine, and eventually be opened up to the masses. In its own way, it was as big a bid for national prestige as the Moon program.
Intellectually, I and other people probably knew that even if that did happen, there were going to be fatal accidents sooner or later (there are, after all, fatal plane crashes all the time). Viscerally, actually losing a shuttle was a huge blow, and it perhaps exposed a basic flaw in the concept: given that rockets are known to blow up pretty frequently, if it's that big a deal to lose one spacecraft, maybe there's something wrong with basing the whole manned and unmanned space program on this fleet of approximately four orbiters. Of course, once NASA was committed to this, every plan ended up rewritten to depend on the Shuttle, so a tremendous number of projects were scuttled, delayed or scaled back in the wake of Challenger. It became clear before long, in any event, that the dream of the Shuttle turning into an economically solvent space transportation system (it was once actually claimed that it would pay for itself) was not going to happen.
About the later history of the project itself, I have no better comment than![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
james_nicoll's: "Despite the cost, the unworkable complexity, the proven inability to meet program targets and the unreliablity of the Space Shuttle, NASA would continue to use shuttles into the early 21st century."
When the shuttle Columbia disintegrated on re-entry three years minus a few days ago, I was struck by how much less it affected the national psyche, despite the equally large loss of life. For one thing, it happened to a country still reeling from (and heading toward) larger disasters; as much as I despised Ronald Reagan, I have to admit that early 1986 happened to be an unusually placid moment in United States history, whereas early 2003 definitely was not.
For another, more than a few people (me included) felt as if it were the other shoe dropping, the fall NASA had been riding for for some time. The shuttle program was a 1970s/80s relic, and its eventual ending was probably overdue. The big question was just whether the United States is going to have a human spaceflight program going forward, and what form it will take. The more recent return-to-flight mission proved to be a false revival of sorts, since the foam problems on the external tank that doomed Columbia proved not to have been completely solved, and the fleet was grounded again.
It sounds as if they're determined to fly the Shuttle several more times, to fulfill commitments on the equally questionable International Space Station, and maybe, just maybe (though I doubt it) to service the Hubble Space Telescope again. Personally, I'd prefer it if they just shut the program down now, though losing the Hubble would be a painful consequence.
And: The Planetary Society expresses similar sentiments. Personally, I'm less gung-ho on the administration's Apollo-redux "Vision for Space Exploration" than the Planetary Society has been; I see no signs of the funding commitments that would be needed to make it work. But the Vision makes more sense than keeping the shuttle program going any longer.
As a teenager, I actually still believed a lot of the NASA PR about the Shuttle, which was that it was the backbone of a sustainable space program that would finally take the US into an era of large-scale human space exploration and settlement. The story went something like this: Apollo, for all its glory, had been a one-off program to beat the USSR to the Moon. With its throwaway spacecraft and concentration on the prize, it wasn't suited to re-use for other purposes in a sustainable way (Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz being mere stopgaps). For that, we needed reusable launchers, which would save huge amounts of money and make it possible to launch a mission every couple of weeks. Even better, even the satellite-launch missions would have people on them: a huge body of experience working in space would result. Space travel would become routine, and eventually be opened up to the masses. In its own way, it was as big a bid for national prestige as the Moon program.
Intellectually, I and other people probably knew that even if that did happen, there were going to be fatal accidents sooner or later (there are, after all, fatal plane crashes all the time). Viscerally, actually losing a shuttle was a huge blow, and it perhaps exposed a basic flaw in the concept: given that rockets are known to blow up pretty frequently, if it's that big a deal to lose one spacecraft, maybe there's something wrong with basing the whole manned and unmanned space program on this fleet of approximately four orbiters. Of course, once NASA was committed to this, every plan ended up rewritten to depend on the Shuttle, so a tremendous number of projects were scuttled, delayed or scaled back in the wake of Challenger. It became clear before long, in any event, that the dream of the Shuttle turning into an economically solvent space transportation system (it was once actually claimed that it would pay for itself) was not going to happen.
About the later history of the project itself, I have no better comment than
james_nicoll's: "Despite the cost, the unworkable complexity, the proven inability to meet program targets and the unreliablity of the Space Shuttle, NASA would continue to use shuttles into the early 21st century."When the shuttle Columbia disintegrated on re-entry three years minus a few days ago, I was struck by how much less it affected the national psyche, despite the equally large loss of life. For one thing, it happened to a country still reeling from (and heading toward) larger disasters; as much as I despised Ronald Reagan, I have to admit that early 1986 happened to be an unusually placid moment in United States history, whereas early 2003 definitely was not.
For another, more than a few people (me included) felt as if it were the other shoe dropping, the fall NASA had been riding for for some time. The shuttle program was a 1970s/80s relic, and its eventual ending was probably overdue. The big question was just whether the United States is going to have a human spaceflight program going forward, and what form it will take. The more recent return-to-flight mission proved to be a false revival of sorts, since the foam problems on the external tank that doomed Columbia proved not to have been completely solved, and the fleet was grounded again.
It sounds as if they're determined to fly the Shuttle several more times, to fulfill commitments on the equally questionable International Space Station, and maybe, just maybe (though I doubt it) to service the Hubble Space Telescope again. Personally, I'd prefer it if they just shut the program down now, though losing the Hubble would be a painful consequence.
And: The Planetary Society expresses similar sentiments. Personally, I'm less gung-ho on the administration's Apollo-redux "Vision for Space Exploration" than the Planetary Society has been; I see no signs of the funding commitments that would be needed to make it work. But the Vision makes more sense than keeping the shuttle program going any longer.
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I'd had premonitions of disaster before the launch, for the reason that back then I was emotionally invested enough in the space program to have premonitions of disaster before every launch. I mentioned this later and made a lot of people go "whooooo", then explained to them about confirmation bias.
I was slightly perversely proud of the fact that when my classmates asked me the next day what I thought had happened, I guessed that an SRB had burned through and ignited the tank, at a time when the papers were still talking about SSME turbopump failure. My reasoning was just that I knew it had almost happened once or twice already.
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"...And now I can't remember exactly why it was that I was home from school that day.?"
I predict it'll drive you nuts until you can remember.
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