“…But… It’s Time To Go”

Analysis/Opinion By Wes Oleszewski

In the early hours of the first day of June, 2011 the Space Shuttle Endeavour landed and rolled to a stop at the Shuttle Landing Facility at the Kennedy Space Center. Its mission was a complete and total success which her crew and the entire NASA Shuttle and ISS team executed flawlessly. It is a shame that we cannot say the same of those responsible for the leadership and direction of the United States manned space program.

Endeavour, like her sister vehicles and the Space Shuttle program as a whole, are being thrown away after having served just 25% of their designed life. As you read this, Endeavour is already having her working components ripped from her airframe and replaced by dummy components to make her safe to be displayed in a museum. Thus, some 75% of the taxpayer’s investment in the Space Shuttle fleet went for nothing more than museum displays and there is nothing to replace them- nor will there be a replacement anytime soon. Make sure and tell yourself that when you go and see an orbiter at a museum.

One wonders if, in the early 1970s while along the budgetary path to the Shuttle becoming operational, the program could have been “sold” to the Congress by saying “We’re gonna develop this, fly it for a quarter of its designed lifespan and then stick the whole thing in a museum.” Senator William Proxmire’s head would have exploded like a muppet and spread confetti for miles and miles.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden

Yet, NASA officials and some media talking heads now look at us, tilt their heads, fain sadness, add a slight smile and like a parent explaining the end of a birthday party to a four-year-old, gently explain, “…but… it’s time to go.”  What a load of pure BULL. It may be the NASA “company line” but it pure bunk at the same time. This makes as much sense buying a custom pickup truck to haul you family and things around, having it spotlessly maintained after every trip and after 45,000 miles sending it to a museum. Then, when your family is stranded at home without a vehicle, as the tow truck comes and hauls it away, looking at them and saying “…but…it’s time to go.”

A primary reason why the Shuttle’s “time to go” has arrived is because the final domino in the line of dominoes set falling by the knee-jerk reaction to the Columbia accident is about to topple. In the wake of the loss of the Columbia, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board (CAIB) was formed. They came to a number of conclusions concerning the Shuttle, most of which boiled down to the fact that the vehicles were dangerous to fly. After all, we had now lost two of them and a total of 14 brave souls. Thus, the whole system was just too risky to continue. Indeed, flying into space is always highly dangerous, but not unexpectedly so. When the Space Shuttle system was first considered, the expected loss rate was published, for everyone to see, as being 2%. The loss of the Columbia on STS-107 when added to the 1986 loss of the Challenger brought the Space Shuttle system’s loss rate to just a hair under 2%. Yet the CAIB concluded that this loss rate was something that simply could not be tolerated either fiscally, or especially politically. So, the United States needed to seek out and build a new and far safer vehicle and system for launching humans into Space.

Challenger Accident 1986

Enter President Bush and his administration’s “vision” for space exploration which evolved into the Constellation program. It was grand, it was forward seeking, it took us as the human species out into the solar system to once again explore, it electrified the space community, and it was completely underfunded by the Bush administration. You see, here is how the process works. The President “proposes” i.e. “let’s go back to the moon and on to the planets” and then the Congress “disposes” i.e. voting overwhelmingly, twice, to fund the Constellation program and then the funds appropriated are picked up by the president’s Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and used on the programs proposed. There is just one hitch- unless those funds are “protected” at a level specified by the Congress OMB is not required to use the full funding that the Congress has approved. They can silently cut the funding by simply not requesting as much as has been allotted. In the case of the Constellation program, from 2005 on, the Bush OMB consistently shorted NASA by nearly $3 Billion per year. It was just enough to quietly bleed the proposed “vision” to death. Add to that a couple of budgetary continuing resolutions in the Congress and you have the dominoes of failure falling on the program proposed to build the replacement for the Shuttle.

As all of that was taking place, the dismantling of the Shuttle program was moving forward at a steady pace. Hardware for making the External Tanks, for example, was being scrapped and workers were being laid off. Sub-contractors who made one-of-a-kind components saw their contracts cancelled and thus went out of business. Indeed it is much easier to tare down than to build. In keeping with that, critics of the Constellation program began lashing out at the program, especially in the cyber world. Their claim was largely that CxP, (which was their slang for Constellation,) was sucking all of the funds out of NASA. But what was really killing NASA’s human spaceflight program was the Bush OMB. A “gap” between when the Shuttle would retire and when the replacement vehicles would be ready, quickly formed and began to rapidly grow.

Enter President Obama and a new administration, which meant a new OMB as well as a new NASA administrator. Although he campaigned on closing the spaceflight gap by way of adding needed funding (stated in an August 2008 paper released by the Obama campaign) Obama’s OMB simply carried forward the Bush underfunding practices. Seeing the issues that were being created, both presidents could easily have stepped in and preserved the Shuttle to solve the problem- yet neither did so. It was not until Obama’s 2011 budget proposal ran a line through Constellation and thus extended the gap indefinitely that the Congress finally stood up and fully took hold of its oversight responsibility to the US space program. By then, however, it was too late to save the Shuttle. Critical resources in labor and materials had already been scrapped.

All along this path, from the Columbia to the final flight of the Endeavour and the approach of the end of the Space Shuttle program, we can see that those who have been elected to lead the United States forward in the area of human spaceflight failed to do so. The Shuttle could have been easily run on a reduced schedule until a replacement was ready. It would have required only a small restoration by either the Bush or Obama OMB of some of the funding they, alone, had failed to provide.  We elected these presidents expecting them to lead, yet in the area of manned spaceflight, they failed to do so.

Atlantis Will Be The Last Shuttle To Fly

So it is that the most amazing capability in spaceflight ever achieved by any nation is about to be relegated to museums. There is no preservation of the marvelous capability, no extension of its life, no returning it to service and no replacement. We simply will take the entire investment and throw it away while doing taxidermy on the graceful birds that were its centerpiece. Upon examination of the end of the Space Shuttle we cannot state that failure is not an option. In this case we can say that thanks to our political “leaders” failure was an intention.

FMI: www.nasa.gov