Personal Ramblings

Manned Spaceflight

At the time of writing, the space shuttle is in orbit, after repairs, on the first flight after the disaster. And I am wondering if the USA has a future in manned spaceflight any more.

The reason I say this is that there seems to be an absolutely huge gap between America's aspirations and abilities, like never before. The return to flight comes after 2 years, and yet as soon as the shuttle was up there, the fleet, (if you can call 3 vehicles a fleet) is grounded.

The shuttle system is old. Very old - as channel 4 put it, its from the age of the audio cassette, operating in the age of the iPod. It only has a nominal working life of 4 more years, and it looks like another chunk of that will be spent grounded.

The original objectives were admirable - it was clearly wasteful to have things like Saturn boosters, big expensive systems that worked once and were thrown away. But something went very badly wrong - in particular the time and cost required to turn a shuttle around after a flight. Of course there are also successes, but if the objective is a cheap reusable vehicle, the result has to be seen as a failure. I don't know what went wrong, but I remember budget cuts being blamed for overruns in the early stages, and that sounds all too feasible to me as the root cause.

Being a developer of new technology can have huge advantages, but with big up front research and development costs, it only makes sense if you build on it. And that has not happened.

The poor reliability has had deeper implications. America has been unable to meet its commitments to the international space station, to the deep annoyance of partners. This will make it very difficult if the USA wants partners to make a significant contribution to future missions. (As opposed to token astronauts from politically sensitive countries, going along for the ride). It's difficult to get this kind of co-operation at the best of times, everyone wants to work on the exciting stuff, and no one wants to build the toilets...

The gap between capability and aspirations. President Bush has stated he wants to see a return to the Moon, and on to Mars. I just don't see how this can possibly be achieved. Even if the shuttle works exactly as intended, it only goes 250 miles up. The Moon is a quarter of a million miles away, a thousand times further. Mars has a round trip of 250 Million miles, a million times more. Nasa has no manned vehicles that can go those distances, and no budget to develop them.

This is a marked contrast to the Russian approach. The Russian Soyuz system is at its core a development of the same system that launched Gagarin, (and visibly a very close relation to the systems of a couple of years later). Advanced technology is avoided where possible, and the result is a big dumb booster that they can churn off an assembly line. It's cheap, sturdy, and VERY reliable. It's the only thing keeping the international space station operational. They have a reliable fully automatic system in 'Progress', again churned off a production line to order.

I'm not sure how long it was since a Russian cosmonaut was NOT in orbit, but I suspect it's a very long time...

I am reminded of a joke from the Apollo era. They said that the Americans spent a million dollars developing a biro that would work in zero gravity. The Russians decided to use pencils.

More advanced technology will be needed if a mission to Mars is ever to become a reality, but it needs to be developed into something stable and reliable. And to speak of going to Mars, when you can't go 250 miles without having to scrape bits off the wings is stupid.

Now the shuttle can take many more people, in comfort than a Soyuz, and it comes with a large well equipped payload bay. But in other ways the Soyuz is superior. Consider the time each can spend on orbit - a shade over 2 weeks for the shuttle, 7 months for a Soyuz.

It does not make sense to me to use the Shuttle to carry things up into orbit - there's all the overhead of man rated systems, (not least a crew return system), that is really not needed if all you want to do is lift something heavy up 250 miles and leave it there... A simple big dumb booster is cheaper, and safer.

Here's an old picture from when Mir was operating. In this shot you can see Mir itself, the big space station in the middle. Docked with it are a Soyuz and a Progress freighter. Approaching is another Progress. And the photo is taken by a second Soyuz. That's 5 different spacecraft operating smoothly together as intended.

Apart from single vessels going to the ISS, or Skylab, the last time the USA had more than one manned vehicle in orbit was the Gemini program. In fact the ONLY time the USA had more than one manned vehicle in orbit was when Gemini 6 and 7 up together.

I have my doubts about the benefits of a manned mission to Mars - personally I would rather see the money spent on unmanned probes inside the solar system. The idea of a more permanent presence on the moon I find exciting - when I briefly met Buzz Aldrin at a book signing some years ago I asked him when he thought we would go back to the moon. He said 'Maybe 20 years, but next time we will stay'.

I was a kid when Apollo 11 landed, but it was an astounding achievement. I knew as a young child I would see the first man walk on the moon. I never expected to see the last man walk on the moon.

And unless NASA gets the funding to develop a truly reliable and economic space transport system, America's manned space program is doomed. They need a big dumb booster / heavy lifter that can get something like 100 ton payloads into orbit. And a reliable way of getting at least 3 people at a time up there and back, fast and cheaply. Then they can start serious work on the fancy stuff, without having to worry about getting up and down.

The worst of all possible worlds is that NASA are given unreasonable and under funded goals by politicians wanting to look like they have 'vision', but who are long gone by the time their programs collapse. And that seems to be where we are headed now.