A woman with whom I went to high school is an astronaut in the space shuttle program. When the Columbia broke apart over Texas a few weeks ago, I – and I suppose a number of people in our graduating class – passed moments of heightened anxiety until we learned she was not on board. Not this time.
There was grief among the families, friends and old classmates of the seven astronauts who did die, grief that stays fresh with each successive news report about what went wrong, stories about tight budgets, cut corners and deferred maintenance.
What grieves me most about the loss of the crew of Columbia is that their deaths were unnecessary. Unnecessary in the sense that a more vigorous safety program might have prevented the tragedy, but unnecessary in the larger sense, that we have no real need to send humans into space at all.
I am a child of the space age, born less than a week after Alan Shepard became the first American to ride beyond the atmosphere. When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon in 1969, it did not seem magical, it seemed inevitable. Of course, there were Americans on the moon; we’d been talking about the journey my whole life.
Perhaps the most important thing we learned on our journey to the moon is that humans are poorly suited for space travel. We need gravity, we need air, we need backup systems to bring us home safely in case something goes wrong with our technology.
The most important thing we have learned since our journey to the moon 34 years ago is that robotic probes do perform well in space. Mechanical spacecraft, from the Pioneer and Voyager series to the Galileo’s 14-year mission to Jupiter, deliver far more understanding of our planet, star system and universe than humans could ever hope to.
In the weeks since the Columbia crash, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotrophy Probe, now over a million miles from Earth, sent back data that allowed astronomers to see a shadow of the Big Bang and accurately date the age of the universe, and at a cost of only $145 million.
There are a number of experiments run on the space shuttles and the International Space Station – like growing crystals in zero gravity – that could be performed by robots as well as they are by humans, if not better. Other experiments – such as the effect of weightlessness on the human body – were well documented years ago by Skylab, Soyuz and Mir missions.
The doomed Columbia mission took aloft a number of science projects for schoolchildren from around the world, and while its laudable for NASA to want to focus the minds of students on science, the reality is that such experiments are so much zero-gravity busy work, carried out primarily for the sake of public relations and continued congressional appropriations.
Public relations is a terrible thing to die for, and the cost of protecting human life in space – however imperfectly – steals research dollars that could be used for real science, like the Wilkinson probe, science that will really fire the imaginations of the next generation of scientists.
Of course, since so much of the space program is bound up in public relations, calling an end to human space flights, even if it is an acknowledgement of the obvious, also means we knew the program had little value all along. But let’s be honest, the shuttle and space station programs do have little value. Heck, the Apollo program had little scientific value; it’s now widely described as an example of Cold War grandstanding.
If we don’t quit now, when do we? How many years – and accidents and deaths – will it take for us to admit we are squandering billions of dollars and exceptionally talented people on a program with severely limited returns?
Even in high school, my friend knew she wanted to be an astronaut. We used to smile and roll our eyes, whistle the “Star Trek” theme to tease her. She was the smartest and most diligent student among us. She set herself an impressive goal and she achieved it, she has cause to be proud. It would be a terrible waste if she died when her shuttle collided with a piece of space junk or broke up on re-entry. It would also be a terrible waste if she spent her career conducting seventh-grade science experiments for the sake of public relations.
Perhaps it takes a friend to tell you it’s time to come home.
Return to Earth
A woman with whom I went to high school is an astronaut in the space shuttle program. When the Columbia broke apart over Texas a few weeks ago, I – and I suppose a number of people in our graduating class – passed moments of heightened anxiety until we learned she was not on board. Not this time.
There was grief among the families, friends and old classmates of the seven astronauts who did die, grief that stays fresh with each successive news report about what went wrong, stories about tight budgets, cut corners and deferred maintenance.
What grieves me most about the loss of the crew of Columbia is that their deaths were unnecessary. Unnecessary in the sense that a more vigorous safety program might have prevented the tragedy, but unnecessary in the larger sense, that we have no real need to send humans into space at all.
I am a child of the space age, born less than a week after Alan Shepard became the first American to ride beyond the atmosphere. When Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the moon in 1969, it did not seem magical, it seemed inevitable. Of course, there were Americans on the moon; we’d been talking about the journey my whole life.
Perhaps the most important thing we learned on our journey to the moon is that humans are poorly suited for space travel. We need gravity, we need air, we need backup systems to bring us home safely in case something goes wrong with our technology.
The most important thing we have learned since our journey to the moon 34 years ago is that robotic probes do perform well in space. Mechanical spacecraft, from the Pioneer and Voyager series to the Galileo’s 14-year mission to Jupiter, deliver far more understanding of our planet, star system and universe than humans could ever hope to.
In the weeks since the Columbia crash, the Wilkinson Microwave Anisotrophy Probe, now over a million miles from Earth, sent back data that allowed astronomers to see a shadow of the Big Bang and accurately date the age of the universe, and at a cost of only $145 million.
There are a number of experiments run on the space shuttles and the International Space Station – like growing crystals in zero gravity – that could be performed by robots as well as they are by humans, if not better. Other experiments – such as the effect of weightlessness on the human body – were well documented years ago by Skylab, Soyuz and Mir missions.
The doomed Columbia mission took aloft a number of science projects for schoolchildren from around the world, and while its laudable for NASA to want to focus the minds of students on science, the reality is that such experiments are so much zero-gravity busy work, carried out primarily for the sake of public relations and continued congressional appropriations.
Public relations is a terrible thing to die for, and the cost of protecting human life in space – however imperfectly – steals research dollars that could be used for real science, like the Wilkinson probe, science that will really fire the imaginations of the next generation of scientists.
Of course, since so much of the space program is bound up in public relations, calling an end to human space flights, even if it is an acknowledgement of the obvious, also means we knew the program had little value all along. But let’s be honest, the shuttle and space station programs do have little value. Heck, the Apollo program had little scientific value; it’s now widely described as an example of Cold War grandstanding.
If we don’t quit now, when do we? How many years – and accidents and deaths – will it take for us to admit we are squandering billions of dollars and exceptionally talented people on a program with severely limited returns?
Even in high school, my friend knew she wanted to be an astronaut. We used to smile and roll our eyes, whistle the “Star Trek” theme to tease her. She was the smartest and most diligent student among us. She set herself an impressive goal and she achieved it, she has cause to be proud. It would be a terrible waste if she died when her shuttle collided with a piece of space junk or broke up on re-entry. It would also be a terrible waste if she spent her career conducting seventh-grade science experiments for the sake of public relations.
Perhaps it takes a friend to tell you it’s time to come home.