Mark Whittington has a nice Columbia follow up in the Houston Chronicle.

Contrary to what I wrote in my Fox column (and this post), Petr’s drawing of the earth seen from the Moon was not destroyed in last weekend’s Shuttle disaster. Ramon didn’t take the original–it was a copy.

[Via Joe Katzman at Winds of Change, who also has links to tributes to Kalpana Chawla]

Tom over at the Alleywriter asks:

Why wasn?t the flight of the Columbia aborted immediately after that piece of foam struck the craft?s wing? There is, supposedly, always at least two locations set up for emergency landing of the shuttle in case of just such a problem.

The only answer I can come up with is money. It costs a lot of money to get a shuttle mission off. It takes a lot of time and a lot of preparation. Some pencil-necked engineer put money ahead of safety and it cost us a shuttle and 7 astronauts. His penny-pinching has cost far more than a dozens of aborted missions.

I love all these Monday-morning quarterbacks. Particularly when they don’t even understand the rules of the game.

Tom, just because you can’t come up with any other answer doesn’t mean that there isn’t one.

Consider the possibility that a) they didn’t know if the damage was a problem, since this had happened before with no problems, b) aborts are extremely risky, and have never been even attempted, let alone successfully completed and, most importantly, c) they didn’t know about the insulation hitting the vehicle until the next day, after it was already in orbit, because they only found out by reviewing launch films.

In any event, “dozens of aborted missions” would in fact cost much more than the loss of an orbiter and crew, particularly when one considers that at least some of those aborts would probably result in loss of vehicle in themselves, but even without considering that, it would come to many billions of dollars in reflights and ISS program delays.

He also thinks that NASA warned people away from debris because parts of the Shuttle are “classified.” This is nonsense. The entire Shuttle design is in the public domain. The only thing that was sensitive was the standard box used for encryption for communications, which, if found, might give someone an idea of exactly how we encrypt data, and thus help them break it.

Consider instead the possibility that NASA didn’t want the public tampering with key evidence, and perhaps ruining the investigation, which again, is the reality.

I wish that people would read the damned FAQ, instead of indulging in ignorant speculation and conspiratorial fantasies.

Based on this article from the news agency that can’t call a terrorist a terrorist, I have to add a couple new (synonymous) phrases to the glossary.

“unilateral” or “on their own“:

Taking action with a large number of nations in a coalition, but without Kofi Annan’s permission.

John McCaslin at the WaPo has one of the last emails from William McCool before Columbia began its fatal descent:

“PS ? As I write, we just experienced a sunset over the Pacific, just [west] of Chile. I’m sitting on the flight deck in the CDR seat (front right) with a view of the Earth moving gracefully by. Sunsets and sunrises from space come every 45 minutes, and last only about 30 seconds, but the colors are stunning. In a single view, I see looking out at the edge of the Earth ? red at the horizon line, blending to orange, then yellow; followed by a thin white line, then light blue, gradually turning to dark blue, then various gradually darker shades of gray, then black with a million stars above. It’s breath-taking.”

Yet many people still believe that no one would pay for such an experience.

[via Betsy Newmark]

Daniel Greenberg has a good summary of the problem with Shuttle and station over at the WaPo today.

It’s all basically correct, but I want to comment on this one point.

Dating from 1981 to 1999, the surveys, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, found that between 9 and 18 percent of respondents during those years believed that the government spent “too little” on space exploration, while 39 to 52 percent felt it spent “too much.” Far ahead of space exploration, spending preferences were expressed for “reducing pollution,” “improving health care” and “improving education.”

I’d be willing to bet that a large number of those respondents who think we are spending too much haven’t a clue how much we’re spending. My experience with such polls is that large numbers of people think that we spend much more on NASA, as a percentage of the federal budget, than we actually do. Very few people are aware that it’s less than a percent. I’d be interested to see if those numbers change if you poll people after telling them that.

Of course, the issue is not how much we’re spending, but how (and how poorly) we’re spending it. NASA has had more than enough money to make great progress in space over the past few decades–hundreds of billions in current-year dollars. But they haven’t had the philosophy, will, or political permission to spend it sensibly, at least if our goal was to create a space-faring civilization.

There’s an interesting dialogue over at Slate today, between Nathan Myhrvold and Gregg Easterbrook–an extension of the discussion that Gregg started with his good, albeit flawed, Time piece. It’s obvious that Gregg either didn’t read my critique (likely) or that he disagreed, though since he didn’t really respond to any of my criticisms, most likely he’s (not surprisingly, despite Glenn linking it) simply not aware of it.

I want to focus in on three of his comments:

Almost every analyst who thinks rationally about the situation comes to the same conclusion: that what’s needed is a new generation of low-cost throwaway rockets for putting payload into orbit, coupled to a small “spaceplane” carrying people only on those occasions when men and women are truly needed in space.

Well, I like to think that I’m an analyst who thinks rationally about the situation, and I do not come to that conclusion. I happen to believe that “low-cost throwaway rockets” is an oxymoron. There are smart people who disagree with me, and some of them are attempting to build such devices. Certainly we can have lower-cost throwaway rockets, but if we want to get truly low cost, for either passengers or cargo, we have to have space transports.

As to the point about “men and women being truly needed” in space, I’ll address that after the next excerpt:

Get the payloads off the shuttle and onto unmanned throwaway rockets, and astronauts will stop dying to perform humdrum tasks. The crew of Challenger died trying to deliver to orbit a data-relay satellite; the crew of Columbia died after conducting some minor experiments that an automated probe could have handled at one-tenth the price.

Sorry, Gregg, but people die doing “humdrum tasks” every day. What is so special about space that people cannot risk their lives to accomplish things of economic benefit? Why are space workers’ lives so much more valuable than, say, construction workers, or coal miners, or truck drivers?

Yes, I know, astronauts have a high value because it costs a lot to train them, but that’s just because NASA has artificially created this myth of a superhuman called an “astronaut.” In reality, a lot of the useful things that people can do in space could be blue-collar work.

If you can truly do it at lower cost (and risk) without using people, then fine–that’s the criterion on which the decision should be made–not whether or not they’re risking their lives. Shuttle is so expensive that it probably does make sense to use other vehicles to deliver payloads, but not because of the risk of astronauts’ lives. Until we clarify our flawed thinking on this issue, which is a holdover from the Cold War space program, we aren’t going to be able to come up with the right solutions.

But a shuttle replacement is exactly what’s called for, and a small spaceplane for people, plus new throwaway rockets for cargo, would fit the bill. Once such systems existed, we could think about going back to the Moon, or onward to Mars. Right now NASA isn’t even planning trips to either place, because the shuttle stands in the way.

Gregg continues to believe that there’s no private demand for human space activities, and that only NASA can take us to the Moon or Mars, or even to LEO. He’s wrong, and his proposed solution, while perhaps an improvement over Shuttle, will simply continue to put off the day that we have affordable, low-cost access to space.

We need to recognize that we have a chicken and egg problem. We will only get low costs and reliability with high activity levels, and we will only get high activity levels with vehicles designed to sustain them, at low cost (and that means not throwing them away). Gregg’s proposal does nothing to move us in that direction–it’s just a continuation of limited space activities by the government, at a slightly lower cost than the current program.

Futurepundit Randall Parker has a good post on inherent Shuttle reliability vis a vis airline reliability, and why we need to abandon Shuttle (and ISS) as quickly as possible.

Futurepundit Randall Parker has a good post on inherent Shuttle reliability vis a vis airline reliability, and why we need to abandon Shuttle (and ISS) as quickly as possible.

Futurepundit Randall Parker has a good post on inherent Shuttle reliability vis a vis airline reliability, and why we need to abandon Shuttle (and ISS) as quickly as possible.