Tomorrow, June 21, 2011, may well be the most exciting day of my long and, thus far, inillustrious, life. Not that it could be compared to, say, the days on which my children were born or something like that but it will stand out as one of those, “where were you when,” kind of days that remain solidly embedded in one’s memory until the day one departs the planet… spiritually… not physically. So, I’m taking a moment to knock out a post about it. Please pardon any spelling or grammatical errors…this is a “quickie.”
Tomorrow is Discovery Media Day at the Kennedy Space Center and a bunch of us media types who have been covering the launches on a regular basis for awhile have been invited to actually go INSIDE Discovery’s crew compartment onto the mid deck and the flight deck. Although I’ve been told in no uncertain terms that I will not be allowed to sit in the Commander’s or Pilot’s seats, just the thought of going where virtually no one (except astronauts and the techs who work there) has ever been allowed before sends rivers of chills down my spine. It’s my understanding that when the shuttles go on display, they will be suspended from ceilings or in some kind of environment that will preclude anyone going inside.
Discovery is the oldest of the three remaining space shuttles and will eventually be displayed at the Smithsonian Flight Museum in Washington, DC. It was the “return to space” vehicle after both the Challenger and Columbia tragedies, carried the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit and flew two of the three Hubble servicing missions. It was first launched on August 30, 1984, on mission 41-D, to deploy three communications satellites. I covered that launch on the radio. In those days there was no Media Center, just a big set of telephone wired bleachers outside facing the launch pad and countdown clock. Back in “those days,” reporters got really gussied up for the launches in strange ways; one wore a hat with a big shuttle on it that flopped around like a crazed bird, another wore a Buck Rogers space helmet and still another dressed as a Star Fleet officer. Nobody does those things anymore.
So, tomorrow kind of closes the circle for me. I was at Kennedy for Discovery’s first launch and I was there for its last launch. Tomorrow, I get to personally wish it a happy retirement even though I know its way too young to stop working.
Discovery and its “shuttle-mates” were designed and built for at least a hundred flights. The fleet is only one-third through its designed lifespan. And, although, being bolted next to a huge tank of explosive fuel is inherently more dangerous than being bolted on top of it, the people who maintain and fly the shuttles have made them as safe as possible with the chances of another incident being extremely low (yes, my fingers are crossed, why?).
Many people have asked me what I think of the current direction of the space program and here is my reply: What direction? I hear the NASA Administrator Charlie Bolden and all the various NASA department heads being very positive that commercial spaceflight is the direction in which the country should go now but I don’t see a goal anywhere. I was there when President Obama announced the new space policy and heard him say that we could go to an asteroid, or zip up to geosynchronous orbit to fix a satellite or even go to a LaGrange point and sit there a while. LaGrange points are the five positions in an orbital configuration where a small object affected only by gravity can theoretically be stationary relative to two larger objects (such as a satellite with respect to the Earth and Moon). The Lagrange points mark positions where the combined gravitational pull of the two large masses provides precisely the centripetal force required to rotate with them. Got it? Good. So, when’s the last time you heard someone say, “Hey, let’s go to a LaGrange point?” Yeah, me neither.
What you have heard people say is, “Hey, let’s go to Mars,” or, a variation on that. Any way you slice it, Mars is the target in everyone’s mind. Nobody cares if we orbit an asteroid a few times or repair a satellite. What the public wants to know is when do we go to Mars and clear up this face stuff? And, the answer, I’m afraid, is still, “not in your lifetime.”
I think, what we SHOULD do (or rather, should have done) is:
1. Use the space shuttle fleet to build another space station in equatorial orbit while helping private industry develop the where-with-all to use it. Why equatorial orbit? Because the ISS is in an orbit inclined 56 degrees to the equator and one cannot go to the moon very easily from there.
2. Go back to the moon? Yes. Before we go to Mars, we must learn to live and work for long, long periods of time in a vacuum (although a small voice in the back of my head tells me the people in Congress have already mastered that). We can best do that on the moon. It’s as hostile as Mars but yet close enough that rescue and resupply missions are possible. I don’t know about you but I would not want to go to Mars without knowing that the equipment that’s allegedly going to keep me alive and get me back home had been thoroughly tested and retested and redesigned and retested again and again and successfully used on the moon for an extended period of time. On a Mars trip, there is no rescue and there is no turning back. The stuff works or death ensues.
3. Put a space station-slash-refueling dump-slash-ship building facility on equatorial orbit that could build and launch bigger ships capable of carrying more people and cargo to and from the moon and enable us to construct a true city on the moon, Moonville, where we could learn how to live in a very hostile environment and perfect the equipment and systems needed to exist on Mars for extended periods of time. On the moon we could learn how to extract water from lunar regolith (dirt) and make rocket fuel out of it. We could also “mine” helium 3 for use in future fusion reactors. But, most of all, we could learn and perfect.
4. Put a space station-slash-refueling dump-slash-ship building facility on equatorial orbit so a spacecraft wouldn’t need to “break the surly bonds of earth” every time it headed for the moon so getting there would be a lot less expensive. It’s much easier and takes a LOT less fuel to accelerate to 25,000 mph (escape velocity) when you’re already going 17,500 mph (orbital velocity) than it is going from 0 mph on the ground. Plus, launching from orbit means that ships could carry enough fuel to decelerate back into equatorial orbit and dock with the station when coming from the moon, too. Gee, a fleet of reusable moon ships. How *novel.
5. Put a space station-slash-refueling dump-slash-ship building facility on equatorial orbit that could be made out of Bob Bigelow’s inflatable space station modules. They are much less expensive and, because they could be crammed into the shuttle’s cargo bay deflated, could be significantly larger on orbit than the current ISS modules. More room, less cost. They might even be useful in constructing Moonville.
6. Develop a plan like this to give the country, NASA, commercial rocket companies and, well, the world, a direction. We kinda had one under the Bush Administration but no money was allocated for it. We spend about 15-billion bucks a year on space. NASA gets that much to not only do the manned program, but invent and launch the unmanned landers (one more is heading to Mars in November) and all kinds of satellites, do research, study and develop ways to make commercial air travel safer and much more. Think of what we have today compared with 1961; incredible medical advances have been made. We have cell phones, high-speed computers, fiber optics, cleaner running cars, flat screen TVs and monitors, so much it’s almost impossible to list…all an offshoot of the space program and NASA driven developments. And all it costs is 15-billion a year. Last year Americans spent 83-billion dollars on cigarettes. Wow.
Putting a plan such as this together would cost some money but it would create a better life for everyone, create thousands upon thousands of new jobs and, like the moon program, open new markets for new products yet undreamed. The US deciding to put a man on the moon in 1961 changed the world. We could do it again.
And, for those of you reticent about giving anything back to the country that has given you so much, I’m not saying that we need to raise taxes to do this… there’s a whole other answer for that and maybe, if your luck runs out; I’ll tackle that in an upcoming post.
*See any novel Arthur C. Clark ever wrote
Lyle Wood's Blog 