Over the Moon
NASA needs a mission beyond the shuttle and space station.

Thursday, August 28, 2003 12:01 a.m. EDT

The proximal culprit in February's Columbia space-shuttle accident
(the foam did it) was already well known before this week's report of
the investigation board, led by retired Admiral Harold Gehman.

So was the general charge that NASA kept the shuttle flying with
hairpins and twine, metaphorically speaking. It knew that insulating
foam had a habit of breaking off the external fuel tanks during
launch, but the agency never rigorously examined the problem before
concluding it was a nuisance, not a threat. Why? Because of a
mindset, we're told, that didn't go out of its way to look for
reasons to throw shuttle launches off schedule.

Admiral Gehman has been especially keen for the public to understand
how closely his findings hew to those of the Rogers Commission, which
examined the Challenger accident of 1986. Maybe what we needed this
time instead was a report on the thoughtless accretion of thoughtless
priorities inflicted on the space agency by outside policy makers
that has led to NASA's persistent high-risk juggling act.

The Gehman report at least semaphores in the right direction, noting
that a coherent rationale has been lacking for manned space flight
since Apollo. But for all of its hard-hittingness, the report
ultimately gets on board and paddles furiously in the same direction
that 10 Congresses and five Administrations have been moving for two
decades. It endorses the international space station as "the major
destination for human space travel for the next decade or longer."
This effectively endorses the shuttle's return to the workhorse role
that the Gehman report itself finds so inconsistent with the
craft's "developmental" nature.
More than a few space-exploring enthusiasts believe the space station
has become an orbiting money pit, the modern equivalent of a New Deal
program to keep spacemen busy digging holes and filling them in again
until we can find some more productive goal. With tax and title, the
final price is expected to be $100 billion, and yet we never got
around to providing the planned escape vehicle that would allow more
than three inhabitants at the station at a time.
Three is enough to keep the place from falling apart, not enough to
perform any useful science. But never mind. The Japanese, Europeans,
Russians and Canadians are all co-investors now, each eagerly
awaiting their turn to get their heroes in orbit for the political
bonanza back home.

The Columbia astronauts were brave and accomplished and died
prematurely doing the nation's work. Despite its drubbing this week,
NASA itself is a can-do agency: It's not about to go on strike,
saying we can't work in these conditions, with these tools, with
these priorities. But changing the "culture" of NASA will take
outside leadership to craft a new and more compelling space mission.

In their inchoate way, the politicians are on to something in their
unwillingness to pull the plug on manned space flight. The public may
not be glued to the tube, but flying in space has become part of who
we are. Perhaps we fear that if we don't keep going forward we'll
lose the knack and begin the long retrograde crawl back to the
primordial ooze. If the U.S. decides to give up that ambition, sooner
or later some other country will take it up--perhaps China.

By now there's an industrial-strength lunatic fringe in the space and
technology community that believes that a mission to Mars is doable,
that even a settlement could be sustained there. Let's start hearing
from these people. The project doesn't have to be funded like a new
Apollo program, but the mere aspiration of grander exploration will
lift NASA's sights, and maybe our own.
The agency has already tried to free up a slice of its budget from
the shuttle and station programs to develop nuclear power as
propulsion and as useful energy for life supports and effective
research in deep-space. As always, though, NASA can't bring itself to
acknowledge trade-offs, claiming that the space station and shuttle
are essential platforms for anything else we may wish to do in space,
including Mars. Budgetarily, that's not realistic, all the more so
after Columbia.
Worse, it suggests the agency's real problem, hinted at but not
stated clearly in the Gehman report: Like any public bureaucracy,
NASA won't say "no" to unrealistic priorities set by the political
class. If our political leaders really want to change NASA, they are
going to have to change its mission.