JUNK THE SPACE SHUTTLE
After all the time NASA spent fixing the problem of foam coming off the tank, what happens? Foam comes off the tank. If I were an astronaut right now I'd want to just leave the bloody Shuttle out there in orbit and hitch a ride back with the Russians. It's become the Ford Explorer of spacecraft. When I was a kid I used to think what a great thing it would be, to be a spaceman. What must it be like now, sitting out there, wondering if this box you're in is going to hold together? Heroic it may be, but it's got to feel a lot more like helplessness.
It's time - it's way past time - to give up on the Shuttle. The whole thing was a lousy idea to begin with. Unlike the glory days of the moon missions when there was a single clear goal and you could say "Okay, we're going that far so we need a rocket this big", the shuttle never had any clear point. The US needed to put satellites into orbit, for commercial, scientific and military purposes. It wanted a return to "manned flight", partly with a view to future long-range missions but also for prestige - the Russians were getting awfully good at it. And there was a notion to build a permanent space station, so they needed a simple space bus to shuttle crew back and forth. These are not particularly compatible missions; indeed they were competing with each other at a time when space exploration was dropping down the priority list. So the money-saving idea was to build something that could do most of the missions, if none particularly well.
A very theoretical sort of money-saving, to spend billions on a bad spacecraft.
One reason the Russians were good at it was that they'd taken a sensibly simple, low-cost approach. Put a basic station in orbit, have the crew travel back and forth to it in specialized human-delivery rockets. The supplies it needed could be sent up in robot ships, not risking any crew on grocery deliveries. Satellite launching could be done by different vehicles entirely. It wasn't very glamorous but it worked - because it followed the same simple rules that had worked so well for the Americans in the moon era: Decide what your mission actually is, then build your craft for it.
The Shuttle was drawn up by a committee. It can lift some very big weights, but it can't do that without a crew. You really don't need to risk lives in order to put those big weights in orbit. I mean, firing them out of a huge bloody gun would achieve the same effect. It can deliver things into orbit, but not the important high orbits where many need to go. It can put people in space, but it can't keep them there long. And to cap all this, the original point of making it reusable was that this was supposed to keep costs down. It turns out now that it has to be virtually rebuilt - indeed, largely redesigned - after every use.
It's a crock. It should have been binned back in 1986 after the Challenger disaster, when it became eminently clear that it simply contained too many bits that could go wrong. But NASA, and indeed government, was in denial about this. As it was put by Richard Feynman, the Nobel prizewinning physicist who reluctantly headed the enquiry: "It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life. The estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000. The higher figures come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from management..." Management wanted to believe the Shuttle could work because careers were invested in it - invested in a bad idea. Because of this, fourteen lives were lost - and seven more may already be doomed.
NASA needs a different plan. Particularly they need to learn from the Russians, who put people in orbit year in year out with a very reasonable safety record. Firstly, if we are going to be sending people into space then that should be the absolute focus of the mission. The crew delivery vehicle should not be a big space truck with plenty room in the back so that NASA can cut costs by doing deliveries along the way. It should be about their safety, and absolutely nothing else.
It's not rocket science.