Discovery 
Lust in Space
Laugh all you want at Lisa Nowak, the lovesick astronaut in the diaper, but there’s nothing even remotely funny about the shuttle program’s bleak future— or the sorry state of NASA.
Kerry Soileau says: Puhleeeeze. This is a very sexist article. Would such a sympathetic piece have been written had the sexes of the participants been reversed? Would you sympathize with a MAN who traveled across several states to confront a MAN with implements of violence? She’s a criminal and a dangerous one at that. Her being a woman doesn’t mitigate that in the least. (February 18th, 2011 at 11:17am)
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While NASA has made a number of remarkable advances in science and unmanned flight—including Voyager, the Hubble Space Telescope, the twin Mars rovers and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, and the Cassini probe now flying by Titan, one of Saturn’s moons—the shuttle has failed at virtually everything we were assured it could do. It was supposed to make spaceflight both low cost and routine, with as many as 64 launches a year; handle the launches of military and commercial satellites; and be the catalyst for a return to deep-space exploration. It has done only one of those things—satellite delivery. Instead, it became an expensive, high-risk program that flew, on average, fewer than 5 times a year and worked only because prodigious amounts of money, manpower, and technology were brought to bear to make sure it went up each time without exploding or disintegrating. The program should have ended with the Challenger explosion in 1986; that it didn’t is testimony to the built-in inertia of a $145 billion public works project that let contracts in all fifty states and, over the years, created tens of thousands of jobs. In case you’re wondering, this is not some sort of dissident, minority view of the shuttle program. In 2005 NASA administrator Michael Griffin testified before a Senate committee that the shuttle was “inherently flawed” and then told a reporter for USA Today, “It is now commonly accepted that [that] was not the right path. We are now trying to change the path while doing as little damage as we can.” When asked if he felt the shuttle was a mistake, he replied, “My opinion is that it was. It was a design which was extremely aggressive and just barely possible.”
From the beginning, NASA sold Congress and the country on the idea that the shuttle was “operational,” meaning not the touchy, temperamental piece of experimental R & D that it really was. The shuttle was, and is, a lethal, jury-rigged assemblage meant to overcome what would twice be a fatal basic design: an orbiter bolted implausibly to a giant external fuel tank containing highly explosive liquid hydrogen and oxygen. It is situated in such a way that the orbiter’s fragile heat shield is fully exposed to falling debris, which occurs on every rocket launch. No matter how good NASA’s spin machine might be, rockets are still very dangerous things. Between 1988 and 2000, launches of various types of rockets failed 23 times. The two shuttle losses equate to one astronaut dead for every 8 flights (there have been a total of 117 flights since 1981). When I asked NASA’s shuttle manager Hale about the inherent dangers of the shuttle, he said, “Captain John Young [the commander of the Apollo 16 lunar-landing mission] is one of my heroes, and he put it this way: ‘You put some people on top of four million pounds of high explosives, you light the fuse, and in eight and a half minutes they are going eight times faster than a rifle bullet. What part of that sounds safe to you?’”
The shuttle is so dangerous, in fact, that it requires an almost complete disassembly and reassembly of its major parts each time it flies—a process that is not without its opportunity costs. It consumes so much of NASA’s dwindling budget that there has been little left to fund a replacement (since the mid-eighties, the agency has spent about $4 billion on a succession of false starts, including the X-33, the Delta Clipper, and the National Aerospace Plane). Indeed, many of the agency’s problems, including crew safety, turn out to be rooted in its declining investment in manned spaceflight. “The program’s budget was reduced by forty percent over the past decade,” said the CAIB report, “and repeatedly raided to make up for space station cost overruns.” The CAIB also pointed to wave after wave of downsizing and outsourcing, driven by NASA’s campaign to do things “faster, better, cheaper.”
The shuttle’s mission log, meanwhile, is full of close calls and chronic problems that started with its very first flight. A piece of the same type of insulating foam that doomed Columbia in 2003 had fallen off the external tank in 1982, knocking off three dozen thermal tiles. In 2002 another enormous chunk of insulating foam fell off during the launch, causing damage to the external fuel tank. Two major technical problems on a single mission in 1999, STS-93, prompted an overhaul that found not only that the Columbia’s thermal tiles were quite fragile but that the craft had 3,500 identifiable wiring faults. In 2002 a fuel line crack found in Discovery and Atlantis and the subsequent detection of similar cracks in the other two shuttles caused NASA to ground them all. The shuttle’s biggest and, ultimately, least solvable problem is the giant, torpedo-shaped object, familiar to anyone who has seen a liftoff, known as the external tank. Its faulty O-rings doomed Challenger; its problems with falling pieces of insulation mortally wounded Columbia. Since 2003 NASA has postponed shuttle launches fifteen times, in all but one of those cases citing problems with the external tank, leading the Washington Post to editorialize that the nation’s space program was a “hostage of an exasperating piece of hardware on the threshold of obsolescence.”
Hale acknowledges the hazardous design of the shuttle but says it is the result of the U.S. government’s failure to put up enough money back in the early phases of its development. “The shuttle’s mission is very important,” he says. “It is to get back and forth to low earth orbit on a regular basis. The part we never got close to was the economic part. It is a pure case of ‘Do you invest money up front so you can save money in the long run, or do you build something cheaper up front that you know is going to cost more?’ The shuttle is a remarkable achievement. It saddens me to think about some of the decisions that were made over the years by people who did not understand the consequences of what they were doing when they asked the shuttle to get by with a little less.”
As one of the two “test flights” (NASA’s term for them) that went up after the Columbia crash, Lisa Nowak’s STS-121 was all about responding to the blistering criticism contained in the CAIB report. It did not help matters when, in spite of two years’ and 1.4 billion dollars’ worth of frantic engineering, another piece of cooler-size foam broke off of Discovery during the flight that immediately preceded hers, unleashing a torrent of anger and reproach rarely seen inside NASA. Unlike nearly all other shuttle missions, the object of STS-121 was to figure out, first, how to get Discovery into orbit without a loss of foam that would damage its heat shield and, then, because they didn’t really believe they could do that, how to inspect the nose cone, leading wing edges, and tiles on its underbelly and to test techniques to repair damage. Lisa’s job was to manipulate the orbiter’s enormous robotic arm, now with the extension of a sensor-laden boom, so that the crew could look at the underside of the spacecraft. This is what she spent much of her training preparing for.
Why, considering these obvious problems, are we still sending Lisa Nowak and other astronauts aloft in the shuttle? If you ask anyone at NASA that question, the answer is quick and unambiguous: because we need to complete the space station in order to fulfill our commitments to the consortium of European and Asian countries that are our partners. This was not always the goal; the shuttle went up and down for seventeen years without carrying a single piece of space station hardware. But since 1998 the two have been inextricably linked. Like the shuttle, the station has a long and troubled past. It was commissioned by Ronald Reagan in 1984. At that time NASA’s PR machine sold the country on the idea of a large platform in space (think of the space station in 2001: A Space Odyssey). It was going to cost $8 billion and be finished in 1992. At present, it is on schedule to be completed by 2010 at a fraction of its original size and for a price tag of what a number of experts estimate to be around $100 billion, even though there is no long-term use for it. Sometime after its completion date, it will be de-orbited and dropped into the ocean. By 2016 it will disappear from NASA’s budget altogether, replaced by a new mission to land men (and women) on the moon by 2020.
It would be unfair to say that no worthwhile science has been done on the station. Advances have been made in learning how humans react to long periods in space and in learning about technologies that work in zero gravity. “If you ask NASA what we’re doing on the space station,” says Robert Park, a professor of physics at the University of Maryland who is a longtime critic of the manned space program, “they say we are learning how to live in space. But it is not clear that we are learning anything new about how to live in space. We have been doing that for a long time, and there is nothing else going on. There is, for all practical purposes, zero research going on on the space station, and it was built as a scientific laboratory, which was preposterous in the first place.” There is wide consensus that space station science is, at best, minor science and, at worst, a rerun of the same antigravity and human physiology experiments that the Soviets were doing on the Mir space station in 1986.
According to the CAIB’s report, this obsession with finishing the station was not harmless: It contributed to the “schedule pressure” that caused NASA to make the decision to launch Columbia in spite of repeated warnings about the foam problem. Lisa Nowak’s mission was a critical part of this so-called “return to flight,” made necessary by the hard-and-fast end date of the shuttle program in 2010 and the need to haul the rest of the station’s components into space. So was STS-114, its predecessor, commanded by Eileen Collins. “We were under a time constraint because we have this space station up there that needs to be resupplied,” says Collins. “But on the other hand, we’re being criticized by the accident board and outside groups for being pressured by the schedule. So we’re trying to show people that we are not being driven by a schedule. We don’t want to do anything unsafe. But, in fact, we live by a schedule.”
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