That Was Almost Another Giant Leap For Mankind…
Those who know my frothing dislike for anything Obama might expect me to react strongly to the news that BHO is moving to cancel NASA's Constellation Program. With the Space Shuttle Program winding down this year, this will leave us without any civilian, non-commercial space launch capacity. Surely, I would rail and shout against this, and paint horns and a goatee on BHO... but I'm not.
I'll give you a second to collect your jaw from the floor and discuss the Space Shuttle itself: it is a remarkable piece of engineering. Designed from more than a million parts made by the lowest bidder, this behemoth spacecraft rides atop more than a million pounds of potentially highly explosive thrust into space itself. It supports protects a small crew of humans from the vacuum of space, solar and interstellar radiation, volitile temperature changes and hurtling bullets of space debris as it itself orbits the planet at several thousands of miles per hour. Then, on command, it drops from the sky wrapped in an envelope of glowing plasma and hurtles through the atmosphere at speeds as high as mach 25, before gracefully gliding to touch-down on a runway usually not far from where it launched days-even-weeks earlier. It is truly a magnificent piece of junk.
Caught that last part, did you? Let's face it, every time they send an orbiter up, pieces fall off. It has a dismal safety record; of the five orbiters built since the 1970's, two have been destroyed during operation. Ironically, it's not the craft itself that failed in these events; a faulty booster shredded Challenger and debris damaged Columbia fatally on launch. The crew performed most of it's mission unaware that it was already doomed. If we omit the Enterprise - the prototype used for testing flight characteristics and support systems - then the shuttle has a 50% accident rate with a 100% mortality rate. In the entire Mercury, Gemeni and Apollo programs, we only ever lost three Astronauts, and every one of those spacecraft were practically prototypes. The promise of the shuttle was a reusable, single-stage-to-orbit (SSTO) payload and crew delivery system to support a manned presence in space. The inability to engineer the SSTO part ultimately made the shuttle no more practical than multi-stage rockets still in use by military and commercial space flight organizations.
The Shuttle Program was a grand experiment, but one that needed to be reigned in a decade ago in favor of a more advanced, more scalable, more efficient vehicle or fleet of vehicles. Instead, the brain cases at NASA gave us... rockets to the moon. The logic was sound mind you - rockets are a proven technology which are save and reliable. With a minimum of investment, we could get maximum results. The failure mode in this thought is that we were actually sacrificing a level of efficiency gain just to accomplish a goal that we had already accomplished.
Going to the moon isn't about reliving the glory days of yester-year. It's about reviving the effort itself, an effort that led to a bounty crop of technologies that impacted evey aspect of the life we enjoy today. Some people believe that America has lost it's mojo, that we could not get back to the moon even if we wanted to. I say, Yes We Can. And while Obama's reasons for cancellation have nothing to do with giving the American space program the kick-in-the-pants it needs, and there's no doubt that Obama doesn't truly believe in the concept of American Exceptionalism, at least he's nipped in the bud a program which stands completely contrary to the notion.