The closing of an era

[crfriend]

It's not over yet, but when the solid motors lit under NASA's Atlantis yesterday it set in motion the events that will see, when her wheels stop on the runway, the exit of the United States of America from the field of manned spaceflight. Every choreographed motion, every nuance, every click of a switch or burst of reaction-control fire will be the very last. At "wheel stop" the United States will no longer have the ability to get men into even low Earth orbit -- we'll be paying tourists at that point, not so unlike Dennis Tito several years ago who bought himself a ride in one of Russia's Soyuz craft.

Russia, you see, and the Soviet Union before it, won the space race. They didn't get to the moon first, but in that bear-like determined way that the Russian spirit sometimes seems to embody went methodically about colonising -- albeit at a small scale -- low Earth orbit. First went the Salyut missions; then the inimitable Mir -- which, long after her "use by" date taught the human race volumes about living in space, and why it's sometimes important to have humans along for the ride. Finally, there's what amounts to Mir II in the ISS -- and the Russians are planning on building out "their side" of ISS/Mir II so that when NASA decides to push ISS into the Pacific Ocean the Russians will detach their hardware and continue the mission. We'll be cowering on the ground like awks and rheas -- or perhaps ostriches with our heads in the sand -- when the last vestiges of our technology fall to Earth.

Yes, the US of A won the "Moon Race" -- and changed the world in the progress -- but lost the big one. Plans were already in very advanced "back-of-the-envelope" stages for a trip to Mars using upgrades to Apollo hardware -- and could likely have succeeded. But it never came to pass. Spaceflight became "routine"; even the vaunted Apollo Program was cut three flights short. The "will to go" had gone -- and it stayed gone. Three economic "recessions" and one "depression" (which we're still in) have done for that in the modern US psyche; we're not taught to "aim high" and "dream big" any more -- we're taught to go along and try not to draw attention to yourself lest you be in line for trouble (the Chinese version of, "The nail that sticks up gets hammered down"). And so grand visions like manned spaceflight as concepts die Hell, we can't even pay our own credit-card bills now; no wonder we cannot dream big -- we cannot afford to.

NASA are trying mightily to put a happy spin on this; they're even showing off mockups of what they think will be the "next generation" of craft -- a scaled-up Apollo CM -- but there's no launch vehicle, and there won't be for years. Or decades. Likely ever. The money isn't there, and the US public doesn't care any more.

I'm not crying over this just yet; there are still 11 days to go as of this writing, but the clock is ticking as surely as the arrival of tomorrow and with that iconic radio call of "Wheels Stop." I suspect I shall have to find someplace private and quiet. Can't let the boss or co-workers see you care about things; it makes one look weak -- and different. I don't want to be a nail that sticks up; I've taken enough of a hammering over seeing what's become of a great dream and I don't need any more. It'll be trousers on the 20th,

[Uncle Al]

I couldn't say it any better
Well done my friend, well done

Uncle Al

[JRMILLER]

Carl,
In the big scheme of things, some group of humans continues to poke around in space and in all likelihood, the private sector may now take a shot at it if there is money to be made. Expand your borders and include all of humanity, nationalism just leads to wars...

I for one would love to go, but will probably have to wait a few lifetimes to realize this...

[DALederle]

We need a hit show, like Star Trek of old, to catch the public attention again.
That and a balanced budget and a president and congress that cares!
He doesn't and they don't!
It is saddening to me that we have given this up with a whimper!
There's more then what meets the eye here.
I'm not sure what!
But someone pulled the plug and just decided to take it away from the rest of us.
I used to go to the NASA website all the time to watch things. But now they seem boring.


Dennis A. Lederle
Nothing to quote, this is too sad!
Nice post Carl.

[crfriend]

[...] Expand your borders and include all of humanity, nationalism just leads to wars...

Criticism understood and accepted. However, I am somewhat compelled to look at the matter through the lens of my own life experience, and it is through that lens that I am most disappointed.

My early experiences in life, as one might expect, revolved around my immediate family and all of them supported wholeheartedly my excursions into curiosity, and gently guided me when those excursions might have gotten me or the neighbourhood injured. I was allowed to make things "go boom", allowed to build things that flew by way of jets of matter spewed from behind, and allowed to pursue instruments that made rapid sense of numbers. Eventually I gravitated towards the latter of the lot, and in doing so disappointed my grandfather who really would have liked me to pursue medicine as a career (and had it not been for my rotten grades in maths I could have done so). However, I recall most of all was what was going on at a national scale, thanks to the vision of one bloke from Boston who dreampt of flying men to the moon and returning them safely to the Earth within a decade. And the dream came true, even if the visionary wasn't around to see it happen.

My lament is only partially one of nationalism; it is mostly one of the death of a dream -- a vision. More will die with the radio call of "Wheels Stop" than one spacefaring vehicle. What will die will be the ability of a once-proud nation to stake its claim as one of the leaders in exploration and, moreso, inspiration. NASA, and mostly its contractors, notably Caltec's JPL, continue to do yeomans' work at exploring the cosmos -- but they do so with machines, not human beings. That "bloke from Boston" might not have necessarily understood the notion of robots (thank you Mr. Čapek for the term), nor do I know how he would have reacted to it -- he absolutely specified humans.

To those who would say that Milfmog and I have "locked horns" on this topic would be incorrect -- for he and I are in complete agreement that for the practical matter of exploring the heavens that machines are best; what I pine for is the inspiration that came from those very heady days of the 1960s. Machines do the job better in 99%+ of the cases; putting man in the loop, however, tends to inspire more.

Sapphire and I had an interesting conversation the other night on this matter, and she vividly recalls school stopping cold for radio (remember that?) broadcasts of Alan Sheperd's sub-orbital hop and John Glenn's orbital jaunt during the Mercury Program. She also vividly recalls the Gemini missions which happened before I really "came on-line" but where the "heavy lifting" was done that made Apollo and lunar orbit rendezvous (a notion first conceived of in the nineteen-teens) possible. As always, history has an interesting way of circling back to bite one on his arse; for years I looked down on machines with word-lengths of less that 16 bits -- until I happened upon the LINC architecture from 1961 (a year that will live in infamy) which was a 12-bitter, and the first "personal computer" ever built. I was cured of my 16-bit-centric bent by that one, as I was humbled when I read the written accounts of the Gemini Program when I was in my 40s.

I for one would love to go, but will probably have to wait a few lifetimes to realize this...

This thought has crossed my mind from time to time, and was discounted. However, MIR II (ISS) is pressurised to 14.7 PSIA (same as sea-level Earth) so would be quite a bit more comfortable than your average airliner which gets about 10,000 feet above sea level. Interestingly, flying the shuttle into LEO would (possibly) be far less injurious to this author than flying cross-country commercially.

It is saddening to me that we have given this up with a whimper!

That was happening in the late 1960s, believe it or not. At that time, with the US populace royally fed up with a very unpopular war in southeast Asia, spacefaring was already becoming "routine"; Apollo 11 through 17 had succeeded (save 13 -- a triumph in its own right despite calamity) so interest was being lost. The last three Apollo missions were cancelled before they ever had a chance to break the surly bounds of Earth's gravity. So, this is nothing new -- and in the late sixties were were a vastly richer nation than we are now; other agenda items overtook vision and, what sadly proved to be, spectacle. So we, in LBJ's words, "p!ssed it all away.

[Jack Williams]

Sadly, that seems to be the way.

[sapphire]

Why does no one mention SkyLab?

[Milfmog]

Why does no one mention SkyLab?

Hmmm... now let me think about that...

Have fun,


Ian.

PS Carl, I really don't think we've ever locked horns over manned space flight (or anything else). We have slightly different viewpoints, that's all. I think robots do better science, far more cost effectively and you feel that humans have more power to inspire. No disagreement really as we are discussing different things.

[crfriend]

Did the Aussies ever make good on their (playful) threat to charge NASA with littering?

Skylab was an interesting exercise, and pointed up how one can take what might have been considered an abject failure (premature deployment and amputation of one of the solar-panel assemblies at launch) and do a pretty good job with it. However, it was a short-lived experiment and was not designed for long-haul habitation the way that Mir and ISS/Mir II were and are.

Too, in the sense of completeness, there was also ASTP, the Apollo Soyuz Test Project which was the first joint venture between the then-fierce rivals during the all-too-brief period of Detente. That one posed some fairly formidable challenges because of the different atmospheres the craft carried and the differences in pressurisation.

The Shuttle was supposed to be ready in time to re-boost Skylab into a higher orbit, but I do not know of any plans to re-inhabit the station. As history tells us, Shuttle was late and Skylab fell to earth in July of 1979. Sapphire points out that Arthur Fiedler (long-time conductor of the Boston Pops) died the day before; the two essentially "trading places". Columbia, the first Shuttle flew in 1981; it was a much-anticipated and much-heralded event that lots of folks watched, this writer included, huddled with a pile of co-workers at the first real job I had in my professional career. (John Williams, the famous film-score composer, was named to head the Boston Pops the year before, much to my absolute delight.)

As I write this, Atlantis has just docked with ISS/Mir II and docking and pressure/leak tests are underway. I was lucky enough to catch it on TV. "I know it's true, oh so true, 'cause I saw it on TV." (With apologies to John Fogerty.) And it looks like the US House of Representatives is getting set to torpedo the James Webb Space Telescope.

[Grok]

Constellation project

[Grok]

DC-X

[crfriend]

Constellation project

The briefest of reads points up that all the references to the project are in the past tense. It's dead, and it's not going to start up again unless the economy picks up.

This was what was known in the Bush (II) era as "Apollo on Steroids" and whilst some success was had on the capsule, the solid booster for the Aries I exhibited such violent behaviours that it could never get man-rated, and even if it did no sane person would try to ride one because it'd shake the spacecraft to pieces even if it didn't tear itself apart on the ascent. Ares V (an homage to the Saturn V) never got off the design table.

DC-X

This was a design demonstrator for a vertical take-off and vertical landing rocket-powered craft. With the state of the design, and the capacity of it, it would not even achieve the altitudes that Virgin Galactic's Space Ship One has. It was a nice idea, but passive landing is a safer bet than a powered one; it worked on the moon, but the moon's gravity is 1/6th the force of Earth's. Going from orbital speeds to close to zero on landing using active means in Earth gravity would more than double the amount of fuel required for the trip which means that you'd have that much less payload-to-orbit capability -- and the overwhelming portion of mass at launch is fuel. Lose.

So, in short, NASA have a mockup capsule and no way to loft it. Arianne-5 might be able to do the job, but it's not man-rated. Russia's Energia could also do it, but those are not currently in production and would produce the same problem as buying seats on Soyuz to LEO access.

[sapphire]

LOVE the typo!
Aries vs Ares

[crfriend]

Interestingly, in going back to check my facts, it turns out that my initial callout of the "Aries I" was incorrect -- both the Ares I and Ares V are named for the Greek god of war who, interestingly, tended to turn up on the losing side. Were NASA trying to tell us something?

[ethelthefrog]

Ahh, yes. The Greek god of war. Also known by the Roman name of Mars.

Another place I'm not going to go.