Lost in space
This year is a banner year for marking anniversaries of achievements in space. The first walk in space was 50 years ago in March, and 40 years ago this month, the Apollo-Soyuz mission brought two Cold War adversaries together.
We can look back with pride on our achievements in space, but we should look ahead with concern for the uncertain future of America's human spaceflight program.
We should have a policy built on past activities and on a vision that doesn't change as administrations come and go. But we don't have one.
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The Hubble Space Telescope makes the point. Twenty-five years ago, on April 25, the space shuttle Discovery put the Hubble into orbit around Earth. In its quarter century of star gazing, Hubble has significantly altered the world's perception of the cosmos and furthered humankind's understanding of the universe. It has revealed previously unattainable properties of space and time. It is a unique scientific facility that continues to provide new views of the heavens and opens the door to discoveries.
But Hubble is more than just an outstanding science facility. It is living testimony to the value of humans in space and an incredible example of how humans and robotics can complement each other to achieve spectacular results.
Space shuttles have taken 355 people to space. Since their demise in 2011, the United States has been unable to put people into space except on other nations' spacecraft. It's a capability the U.S. has had since Alan Shepard's flight on May 5, 1961. The U.S. went from flying and operating the most advanced and capable spacecraft in the world, to flying as passengers under foreign command. Americans continue to journey to space on Soyuz spacecraft, but we are no longer able to work on facilities such as Hubble, or assemble large structures in space. We will look back on the space shuttle one day and realize what the nation lost, or rather, what it gave up.
America is not building a second-generation space shuttle but is instead building three space capsules: the Orion and two others, from Boeing and SpaceX. All will land by parachute, like spacecraft of the 1960s, and none will allow space walks comparable to the space shuttle. Unlike Hubble, the next big telescope, the James Webb Space Telescope (due for launch October 2018) will have to be right the first time. There will be no way to repair it. It is already more costly than originally planned, and there is no shuttle to take astronauts to save it if something goes wrong.
The U.S. Air Force's Boeing X-37B, which began as a NASA craft but was transferred to the Pentagon in 2004, is an unmanned space plane that looks like a small space shuttle. Like the shuttle, it returns to Earth and lands on a runway. It has been flying successfully for five years. A scaled-up version with an astronaut crew to work outside the vehicle could reestablish America's ability to build and maintain big structures in Earth orbit.
