We are all familiar with the shuttle that has been used for centuries in a loom. It changed the course of weaving and increased the manufacturability of cloth to such a great volume that it gave the British the economic strength to hold up their empire. For want of the shuttle the nation would have been lost.
We are also familiar with NASA's Shuttles. They are those huge aerospace pickup trucks (the Shuttle is longer than the Statue of Liberty is high) that call ever again on the courage and ingenuity of those who fly them.
Ill-designed by a bureaucratic committee in the 1970s, the Shuttle is covered in tiles, each of which has a custom shape requiring a custom manufacture. This alone is a "no no" form of design.
The Shuttle became a combination of rocket and plane with all the faults of each and none of the pluses. It is a poor rocket and a lousy plane.
The two-and-a-half-year hiatus between launches was ostensibly to ensure that the next Shuttle was both launch and space ready. Shuttle Discovery has been the much-vaunted revival of the Shuttle flights and is bolstered by a $1.4 billion research and repair bill -- surely a shock, even for our spendthrift U.S. government. But as falling debris and tile problems only too dramatically revealed, the work, in part, failed. But duct tape came to the rescue. That's what NASA gave our astronauts to fix in space what was not fixed on earth. Alas!
The goal of this mission was to take supplies to the International Space Station, from which we receive endless failure reports and pictures of floating astronauts, and remove garbage. Both these tasks could be done with existing robotic space technology and vehicles, at no risk to humans.
Unlike our robotic Mars Rovers and space telescopes, the Space Station gives us very little back other than anxiety and expense. And the Shuttle is an expensive way to service a Station that seems to have very little in the way of a substantial mission.
NASA's solution is to design and build new vehicles to serve the Station. The Heavy Lifter (the name may give us some notion of its cost) is for cargo, and the Crew Exploration Vehicle is for the astronauts. They are, at this point, more conventional in design, and we should pray they will be designed for manufacturability and ease of maintenance.
But, I wonder, wouldn't all of this money be better spent deepening our ports, repairing our bridges and making the U.S. infrastructure work more efficiently?
National pride and prestige, as well as a sentimental and science fiction-derived romance of humans in space, seem to make us go on regardless of need, cost or impact on the economy. We are conquering space and losing, through hubris, a sense of our real national mission.
The recent record of NASA has not done great things for our nation's scientific prestige. We look tired and careless. Maybe this is an example of the theory of intelligent design as promulgated by our scientifically sophisticated executive leader. Don't look facts in the face. Rather, create unsubstantiated theories of waffle and nonsense that only Tom Cruise could swallow.
If our space missions are going to be designed by faith, then that faith better drill down to the people that stick on the insulation tiles. For want of the right Shuttle the nation may feel lost.