July 26, 2005

A Useless Launch

Discovery had a successful launch. I have mixed feelings. I'm glad NASA pulled it off. I'm always proud of American resilence, but the shuttle is old technology. Man won't conquer space with the risk-adverse methodology of the space agency. It took over two years just to get the shuttle ready for launch. Then a fuel gage malfunctioned and that postponed the launch for two more weeks. The agency is too worried about another accident mothballing the shuttle program--not a bad idea. Engineers are staring at footage from 110 video cameras to see if Discovery was damaged during lift off. That's no way to run a productive, efficient space program.

Rand Simberg writes,

Right now, NASA's hypersafety philosophy has made spaceflight hyper expensive (though not particularly safe). Rather than unrealistically making failure not an option, we need to embrace the fact that failures will occur occasionally. What we have to do is make sure that failures aren't as expensive as they were in the case of Challenger and Columbia (and numerous other lesser NASA program failures). What that means is making it cheap to fail, which in turn means making it cost much less to make attempts. That won't happen until we develop much more robust systems, with much more activity. But investing further millions into Shuttle (not only in terms of money spent fixing things, but the costs of continued delay, which are substantial) in a futile effort to make it any safer than it currently is, is a fool's errand.

SpaceShipOne (at the EAA in Oshkosh) has shown entreprenuers going out on the edge can get Man into space. That's the path to take.

The shuttle program is 30-years old, and it hasn't gotten Man any closer to a permanent presence in space (three-month stays on the orbiting white elephant international space station doesn't count). The U.S. managed to lead the world in microprocessor production without the government creating the Semiconductor Manufacturing Administration. It's time for NASA to put the shuttle out to pasture.

"NASA Studies Debris Recorded During Launch"