Dreams of space, indeed

Dennis Overbye has an article in The New York Times about the end of an era:

By April of 1981, it seemed that the space shuttle Columbia had been part of the Florida landscape forever. Gleaming white in the sun by day and the floodlights that bathed it all night, the cluster of rockets, space plane and giant egglike fuel tank looked like a craggy Matterhorn transposed to the humid coast. It was surely too big to ever move, and yet the fate of the nation seemed to depend on its doing so. Months earlier, I had traveled with a group of science writers on a weeklong junket through the nation’s space centers. In California, we walked underneath the next shuttle, Challenger, where Rockwell workers were gluing the fragile heat-resistant tiles to its body. At Cape Canaveral, our private jet touched down on the shuttle landing strip and we were taken within hailing distance of the waiting shuttle, close enough to see soldiers patrolling the launching pad with machine guns.
The shuttle was a big deal then. But now, after thirty years of shuttle flights, the last mission ever is being prepped for its launching. Humans are no closer to the stars than before, and the space program is in tatters.
Until that trip past the pad in 1981, the space program was something I had watched on a grainy little black-and-white television at my apartment in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Raised on science fiction, I knew the script: first we take the Moon, then Mars. That, in fact, was the vision pushed in 1969 by NASA’s administrator, Thomas O. Paine, and Vice President Spiro T. Agnew, but President Richard M. Nixon didn’t bite, and history didn’t go according to plan.
By 1981, a decade after the glories of the Apollo Moon landings, it had been six years since Americans had last ventured into space, and editorialists were lamenting the “retreat from space”. The reusable space shuttle was supposed to make spaceflight cheap and almost as routine as air travel, and satellite launchings as uneventful as delivering the mail. There was money to be made in space and a slate of “black missions” to keep the nation secure. But the shuttle was late and over budget. Those thermal tiles, vital to protecting it from the searing heat of re-entry, had an embarrassing habit of flaking off. Some people called it the Flying Brickyard.
Worse, overruns and delays had drastically depleted the agency’s resources for science. NASA couldn’t even afford to send a mission to Halley’s Comet.
Most of the scientists I know would be thrilled to see humans exploring space, landing on Mars, for example; they just don’t think that science should pick up the check. Many of them were suspicious of the shuttle, both because of the cost drain and because making instruments like the space telescope compatible with it would compromise the potential science, restricting them to low earth orbit, for example, and making them hostage to the exigencies of human spaceflight.
But politically, if not technically, the shuttle and the space telescope needed each other.
The mountain did move on 12 April 1981. We got up at midnight to drive on back roads through Cape Canaveral Air Station and then eat peanut butter crackers in our cars waiting for the dawn and the new space age. When the shuttle’s solid-fuel booster rockets went off, it was like a second sunrise blasting our greasy faces. The Alps vanished atop a biblical tower of smoke and flame.
Two days later, when John W. Young and Robert L. Crippen glided back down in the Mojave Desert, the double crack of Columbia’s sonic boom sounded like a message from the gods. Elated to be arriving in dignity like test pilots rather than cargo plopping into the ocean, the astronauts proceeded to strut around the shuttle inspecting it for nicks and dings.
And soon we were in the era of the space truck to nowhere, easy travel to orbit, and the sight of astronauts frolicking like weightless baby sea lions in the capacious shuttle decks and laboratories. Women, scientists, a congressman and a senator, not to mention an array of guest astronauts from other countries, logged time in orbit, performing scientific experiments, often on one another. Captain Young, who had been to the Moon twice, redefined the notion of the “right stuff” when he was pictured in his command chair in his reading glasses looking over flight plans. Judith A. Resnik redefined it further when her long curly locks floated on orbit like a dark corona about her head. Ronald E. McNair, a physicist, brought his saxophone to play in space. There was talk of flying a schoolteacher in space, and even a journalist. We learned that about a third of astronauts suffered bouts of space sickness, until NASA declared that such topics were not fit for public discussion.
It was thrilling to watch astronauts blast off on smoke pillars, but after a while it was irritating that they weren’t going anywhere but in circles around the Earth and the science they were doing was mostly boring compared with the results being beamed back from the Voyager spacecraft exploring the outer planets at considerably less expense and risk.
Why were we there? I recall one newspaper reporter asking out loud at one launching before answering himself. “We’re on a death watch,” he said.
The shuttle had been declared “operational” after four flights, but it could never be routine. Gravity might be the weakest force in nature, as the physicists tell us, but the violence needed to overcome it and release us from the Earth was revelatory to me when I actually saw it in action up close. Back then I totally bought the idea of reusable spacecraft; after all, the space age had begun with rocket planes like the X-15 that went up and glided back down. But the shuttle’s design had been compromised by politics and economics; a more expensive and safer version would have put the crew far above, as on the towering Moon rockets, rather than surrounded by booster rockets and a giant fuel tank in the clunky arrangement that prevailed, and NASA’s managers were drinking their own Kool-Aid.
On the morning of 28 January 1986, I was crossing the parking lot at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California on my way in for the last day of Voyager 2’s encounter with Uranus, when a reporter from USA Today came running out and into a phone booth. I asked him about the impending launching of Challenger, with the schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe aboard. “It blew up,” he blurted.
I went inside to find my colleagues in the press room staring hollow-eyed at television screens. Half of the screens showed Uranus, looking like a big eye surrounded by its tenuous rings; the other half showed the Y-shaped cloud that was all that was left of Challenger and its crew of seven.
Buck Rogers dreams died that day. They died a second death on 1 February 2003, when the Columbia broke apart on re-entry, killing another seven people, after foam insulation had punched a hole in the wing.
I didn’t catch up with the space shuttle again until 1993, when I watched the astronauts train like underwater ballet dancers in a pool in Huntsville, Alabama to carry out repairs on the Hubble Space Telescope, which had been famously and humiliatingly launched with a misshapen mirror. Late one day, an engineer suggested that Story Musgrave, the lead astronaut on that crew, change his routine and turn around at one point to adjust his torque wrench. Dr. Musgrave dressed him down, saying such last-minute changes put the mission in danger.
The Hubble missions, five in all, were the shuttle’s finest hours. In the end, of course, the Hubble did need the shuttle, and its astronauts. It all came to a wonderful high-tech, low-tech climax two years ago, when Michael J. Massimino, channeling his Uncle Frank fixing a car on Long Island, yanked a handrail off the side of the telescope to get at a broken spectrograph underneath it. That spectrograph could someday give us a clue to finding another Earth.
Hubble is alone now with the stars, its vision as peerless as designed. But America still has no vision at all for its space program, no plan for where to go next or how.
I can’t blame NASA for that. NASA works for the president, and the president can do only what Congress will give him or her the money for. And Congress answers to the people; that is to say, its campaign contributors. They’ve all just been doing what they think they have to do, but an astronomer I know who grew up with the same science fiction dreams and expectations as I did once described himself as a member of the “cheated generation”.
I no longer expect to see boot prints on Mars during my lifetime, nor do I expect that whoever eventually makes those boot prints will be drawing a paycheck from NASA, or even speaking English.
During shuttle missions, you couldn’t wander past the old Saturn 5 rockets sitting outside at the Johnson and Kennedy Space Centers and not wonder in awe what giants had built these rockets that had sent humans all the way to the Moon. I can’t help feeling that someday we’ll walk past those shuttles now on their way to museums and admire their creature comforts and flexibility and the aerodynamic research that went into learning how to fly at Mach 25. And wonder who built them.
I wish Commander Christopher Ferguson and his comrades a safe and glorious flight aboard their flawed but magnificent chariot. And bigger and braver dreams for us all in the future.