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It's time to mothball the space shuttle and spend the money on real exploration.
The men and women who ride into space have always been willing to take risks. The men and women who run NASA's spaceflight program - and many of the millions who support it - are much more cautious. They are incredibly protective of the current system, fearing that any change will mean the end of space travel. In the aftermath of the Columbia crash, it's time to face that fear and get past it.
The shuttle was conceived as the cheapest way to ensure that Americans would continue to fly into space. Its design was compromised from the beginning, and it has proved costly, temperamental, and dangerous to operate. Perhaps its most profound failing, though, is that until the missions to Mir in the mid-1990s, the shuttle had nowhere to go. And that made human spaceflight repetitive and kind of boring. Because it provided a plausible destination, the International Space Station was allowed to lumber along through umpteen redesigns, "descopings," and cost overruns. And while construction of the station has provided the shuttle fleet with a belated raison d'étre, it is not a project that has set many pulses racing.
The only real achievement the codependent programs can boast is that they fulfill the shuttle's original goal of keeping Americans in orbit. Sadly, many people who believe humankind has a destiny beyond Earth have decided that's good enough. They think the dream of spaceflight is so fragile that, while crashes cannot derail it, the cancellation of a single program could shut it down for good. They fear that if we take one small step back, we will never again be able to go forward.
The Columbia's loss gives us an opportunity to take a step back - and prepare a giant leap forward. Keeping humans in space isn't an end in itself. We are there to explore, which means going places we haven't been before rather than building destinations in the places we can just about reach. The exploration of Mars in particular offers immense scientific promise. To understand Earth as a planet - one of the great developing themes of contemporary science - we need to understand other planets, too, and Mars is both the most accessible and the one most likely to have supported life at some point in its past. But Mars isn't the only possible destination: There are arguments to be made for the moon as well. (Astronomers would love to install telescopes there, to look for life around other stars.) The specific destination is not the most important thing; the most important thing is to define a program that goes somewhere for some real purpose rather than justifying its circular orbits with circular arguments.
A destination-based project - a place program instead of a space program - would need new technologies. It would need heavy-lift vehicles like those of the Apollo era. With those, it could send large payloads straight to Mars, or lift Skylab-sized, no-construction-needed space stations into orbit around Earth. Such stations could serve as prototypes and test rigs for the spacecraft to be sent to Mars. They could also be used to study ways of keeping people healthy in the months of microgravity they must endure during such a mission. The current space station, for all its expense, is not particularly well suited to this.
Such a program would also benefit from the development of space-based nuclear power. Sending nukes into space may sound like madness when Columbia's debris is scattered over half of Texas, but properly designed reactors - inert when launched and guaranteed never to return to Earth after being activated - will eventually be a must for solar system exploration. Though nuclear rockets are not necessary for a voyage to Mars, nuclear power would enable the robots sent as advance scouts to be far more capable and would make life much easier for their human masters when they arrive. Most important, as Mars Society president Bob Zubrin has pointed out, nuclear power lets you manufacture rocket fuel for the return trip.
What a destination-based program would not require, in the near term, is today's space station and shuttles. So the brave thing to do now is to shelve the station in a high, stable orbit and turn off the lights, then mothball the shuttles. Use a good chunk of the $6 billion a year saved to start work on heavy launchers and a deep-space initiative. Use the rest to try out a variety of ideas - experimenting with old and new sorts of engines, with wings and without - for Earth-to-orbit spacecraft, and see which ones show promise. Take a bit of time: There's no need to rush into building a reusable replacement for the shuttle. The deep-space program can be designed in such a way that its crew-transfer needs are met with expendable capsules.
In a decade or so, and for no more money than it takes to keep the shuttle and station running, a series of missions could begin that would lead quickly to the exploration of another planet. There is a risk that public and political support might wither in the years without flight. But facing risks, as the crew of the Columbia knew, is part of the process. If the goal is as glorious as space advocates believe, then the case for starting fresh will prevail. The US exploration of space might lose its momentum, but it would gain new technologies, new capabilities, and new purpose.
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