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The 50th anniversary of the first human space flight comes at a bittersweet moment in the history of space travel. After exactly 30 years of ferrying astronauts and equipment into orbit, the space shuttle era is coming to an end. Private spaceflight companies are hard at work designing new ways to get into space, but there's no ready replacement for the shuttle when it retires. NASA's budget is in flux (along with the rest of the country's finances), and the future of American spaceflight is fuzzier than it's ever been.
David Baker worked with NASA on the Gemini, Apollo and space shuttle programs between 1965 and 1984. He has written more than 80 books on spaceflight technology including his latest, the NASA Space Shuttle Owners' Workshop Manual. Read the excerpt: Anatomy of the Space Shuttle. With all this uncertainty, technologist and space historian David Baker decided to look back and take stock. In his book to be released April 18, the NASA Space Shuttle Owners' Workshop Manual, Baker distills his decades of work at NASA during the Apollo years and the development of the space shuttle into 160 pages of history, diagrams and technical specs on the first reusable U.S. spacecraft.
"It was a tremendous aerospace achievement," Baker said. "We will lose something big when the shuttle program ends."
Wired.com caught up with Baker to talk about how NASA has changed since Yuri Gagarin shocked the U.S. space program into action, and what human spaceflight might need in order to move forward.
Wired.com: What was your purpose in writing this book?
David Baker: Books I’ve seen on the shuttle don’t go into the inside detail of the vehicle too much. It’s all about the pictures and the missions and the astronauts. I thought, here’s a chance for people who really want to know what it’s like, for all the folks who have that big question mark over what is it, how do you operate it and what is it like inside.
Wired.com: Can you sketch out a map of what you can find in the book?
Baker: The book opens with a history of how the shuttle evolved. But the bulk of the book is opening it up as if you’re going inside the shuttle itself, not just where the crew is, but into all the systems.
What are the wings made of? How is the cargo put in the bay? How is it flown? How is it launched? How does it come back? How do you get this hundred-ton glider to come back in at 17,000 miles an hour and land on a very small strip of concrete?
Essentially it’s how it works, how it was built, how it operates, and how it flies. That’s really what it’s about.
Wired.com: How did you gather all the information and put the book together?
'I think everybody within NASA really believed they were starting a whole new way of developing a future for Americans, and broadly for humankind as well.'Baker: I’ve been a great squirrel all my life. All through my life I’ve collected all this archival material. And of course working on the shuttle program, all of the systems books and the manuals and the engineering documents that patterned the evolution of the shuttle, all of those I have in my archive and my files.
Wired.com: You joined NASA back in the Apollo days, right?
Baker: In the mid-1960s, during the Gemini program. It was a very different time to that which exists today. NASA was a very different institution.
Wired.com: What was it like then?
Baker: There was a very different culture. It was a much younger group of guys. When you’re that age, you think you have a God-given right to change the world, and we were being given blank checks to do it. So it was very very different to today.
Wired.com: How would you describe the difference? What is it like today?
Baker: It’s moved across to being a very top-heavy bureaucracy. It started with just a few thousand people, even by the 1950s.
Most of these were scientists and engineers who really wouldn’t give a monkey’s cuss for getting publicity, for lobbying for projects or anything like that. They were just dedicated guys, who loved their work, trying to push every corner of the technical envelope that they could.
I think everybody within NASA really believed they were starting a whole new way of developing a future for Americans, and broadly for humankind as well.
I felt very much motivated by this. I thought the United States had the resources, it had the vision, and it had a plan to hold the line on freedom. It was right in the middle of the Cold War. We thought of the Communists very much as the previous generation had thought of the Nazis.
'We were essentially Cold War warriors in civilian clothes.'So there was that great sense that we were being given a huge mission, a huge responsibility. We were essentially Cold War warriors in civilian clothes.
But then during Apollo, a huge number of people came over from the Air Force, and they tied it all up. All these guys who were very undisciplined, scientists and engineers, they like to be left alone to just do their research. All of a sudden NASA was a huge political tool, it was on everybody’s radar, and it was like working in a goldfish bowl. The press came down onto everything.
We lost control, essentially, of the dream. It became just a political football. That was really one of the changes that I think came through in the '70s with the Apollo program, and it was never going to be the same again. Ever since then, its programs and its successes have been used largely for political purposes.
In the Cold War, that was very necessary, in my view. My dad had been in the Air Force during the Second World War, I was born during the Second World War. We grew up thinking, We’re not going to let the world slip back into that kind of tyranny that we fought hard to prevent.
It’s difficult today to understand that kind of mentality. But it was for all the best reasons.
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April 12, 1961: Soviets Orbit Gagarin, First Human in SpaceWired.com: Do you think the way NASA has morphed today, a lot of people are talking about how it’s lost its vision – what do you see, from the historical perspective, as the reasons behind that shift? Is it all going back to this personality change with Apollo?
Baker: The problem with NASA is what I call the myth of presidential leadership. Folks over here on this side of the pond, who don’t really know American politics, think a president comes into power and he’s going to wave his wand like Mr. Wizard, and it’s all going to happen.
Unfortunately, Kennedy took NASA’s goal menu of missions that it had, ditched everything else, and thrust NASA centrally to the moon-landing goal. In actual fact he screwed up the whole of NASA’s planning. He never was a space cadet. And yet he’s been pumped up into this by this myth.
Still today, under the Bush administration, the most recent one, as a result of the aging of the shuttle, big questions were asked. After the loss of Columbia, with all these concerns about the cost of upgrading it to keep it flying, correctly, in my view, a new mandate was written for using legacy technology from the shuttle for the Constellation program.
I think what has happened in the last 18 months under the Obama administration, which is very very definitely dictated from the White House – let me say, I believe we can embrace commercial interests massively, but there needs to be a sense of direction and leadership.
Gathering together a consensus on national leadership surely has to be the big function of the White House. I think to completely throw it open to an experiment that nobody has yet conducted – in other words, "Oh, we will forget a national goal, we will forget a specific objective, see what all those guys in the little back sheds are doing" – that there’s no leadership. There’s no sense of direction anymore.
So right the way through from that, there’s been this myth, the big daddy in the White House can make everything right, make it all come home with cherries on top.
But when you look at the terrible history we’ve had of presidents meddling in the space program, this is why we’ve got so disjointed. There’s a complete lack of a national plan.
If ever we needed it, we need it now. It should dramatically encourage private companies to use their skills, and get behind a national goal and not have it dictated from inside the Beltway.
Wired.com: It sounded like you said before that we only achieve these great things when we have somebody saying, “Here’s the goal, go do it.” That seems inconsistent with the idea of a myth of presidential leadership. If we need a goal for everybody to focus on all together, who sets that goal?
Baker: I think the national leadership that is needed now is to give a goal that is not within the tenure of a single presidential term or two. These should be major national goals. They should not be presidential goals. When they become purely presidential, personal goals, they stuff up what NASA is best at, which is very long-term consistency in planning.
Look at the planetary program. That’s tremendous. Look at the astronomy program. When you get these sudden spurts, you’ve got the Bush administration wanting Constellation, the Obama administration wanting to throw it all into private – it’s just thrashing back and forth. You’re going to completely destroy it, if it isn’t allowed to proceed under its own energy.
I think there needs to be a consensus. America is a nation created by people who liberated themselves. Grassroots, the long haul, building a whole new horizon – that’s what you’re still good at as a people. I despair that that’s being thrown aside because it will cost too much.
The space program brightens the lives of human beings, and gives young people a sense of fulfillment and achievement. If they can do things that no one has done before, if they can discover things, learn the tremendous feeling of fulfillment that comes from being able to do things that you never thought you could do before … that’s what NASA used to be. You didn’t look at something and think, oh, I don’t know if I can do that.
Yes sir, I can do that. You didn’t know how the hell you were going to do it, but you did it. It’s that kind of mentality that made America great. It’s that that we need to get back.
Let’s put fire in folks’ bellies. Let’s put that wow into their eyes again. I’ve never lost that enthusiasm. We live in a cynical world where nobody wants to bother very much.
But there’s nothing more exciting than discovering something that nobody else has seen before. The space program has given the world that opportunity.
Image: NASA
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