Launch Day

Go Atlantis!

In just a few hours STS-135 is scheduled to depart Launch Complex 39 at the Kennedy Space Center for the final flight of the Space Shuttle. It is a mission to the International Space Station (ISS), resupplying it and swapping crew, but its real significance is more symbolic than many of those that have gone before. Let me lay out some ways in which this last flight of the Space Shuttle is memorable.

I would argue that the Space Shuttle has been a symbol of American technological verisimilitude. From first flight to this last mission the Space Shuttle has been universally recognized as such by both the American people and the larger international community. NASA’s Space Shuttle remains after three decades one of the most highly visible symbols of American excellence worldwide, and a positive one unlike the nation’s enormous military might.

No other nation on the face of the Earth had the technological capability to build such a sophisticated reusable vehicle during the 1970s. Few could do so today. A massively complex system—with more than 200,000 separate components that must work in synchronization with each other and to specifications more exacting than any other technological system in human history—the Space Shuttle must be viewed as a triumph of engineering. As such it has been an enormously successful program. The research, development, and operation of the Space Shuttle represented a worthy follow-on to the positively viewed Apollo program of the 1960s and early 1970s.

The shuttle evokes a sense of wonder and awe around the world from the beginning of the program to the present. Ask almost anyone outside the United States what ingredients they believe demonstrate America’s superpower status in the world, and the Space Shuttle often emerges as a constant reminder of what Americans can accomplish when they set their minds to it.

With the shuttle’s retirement, this “prestige” issue will be altered. One could claim that this might be appropriate, others will think it unfortunate. Regardless of perspective, this represents an important change.

From a personal perspective, I believe it is time to give the Space Shuttle an honorable retirement. It has been a venerable space launch system, satisfying many of the objectives for which it was created. It was not perfect, of course, but on balance it was quite a successful program. My hat goes off to the team of thousands that made the shuttle fly successfully for all of these years amid a fairly persistent public apathy, budget reductions, and in a few cases some antagonism. But the vehicle is also technology that has been outmoded for some time, and its flaws have been exposed in tragic accidents. The Columbia Accident Investigation Board recommended in 2003 that it be retired by 2010 unless it were modified. That is the trajectory toward retirement we have been on for the shuttle program since the loss of Columbia.

I am also jazzed by the prospect of new possibilities in human spaceflight. If the Obama administration’s agenda is successful we may well turn low-Earth orbit over to the private sector as an operational activity, freeing NASA to pursue deep space exploration. If this happens it will follow the pattern of all frontiers in American history, as the first incursions into new territories tended to be government-facilitated; and while they may have led the way they represented a vanguard of others who followed them into these new territories and pursued their individual economic activities and lives. Can we do the same in low-Earth orbit?

I would like to see humans moving beyond Earth, and this represents a possibility to go in that direction. There are risks involved in this strategy, to be sure, but if successful there is great possibilities before us. I’d rather take that risk than be stuck for another 30 years in low-Earth orbit with a government owned and operated vehicle.