“…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.