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Space: The final frontier..?
by Me.
On April 12th, 1981, the Space Shuttle Columbia lifted off from the
launch pad at Kennedy Space Center in central Florida. It was the first
launch of the new Space Shuttle, the STS-1 mission. It was the ushering in
ceremony of a new age of space travel, an age where men no longer travel
to other worlds or strive to go further then ever before. It was also the knell
of the golden days of space exploration, the days fo the Apollo program.
For a short half decade men were launched into space atop gigantic white
and black rockets, walked on the moons dry and lifeless grey surface, and
occasionally had the near fatal disaster of needing to use a sock as a
carbon dioxide filter. I doubt that our boys at NASA would have predicted
that socks would make for a good filter in place of their expensive filtering
systems. Inspirations for movies aside, the end of the Apollo program was
without question the darkest day in NASA history. Not even the tragic loss
of the old and venerable Columbia could compare to the devastating impact
that its own birth would have. And while each Shuttle launch awes and
inspires me, filling my heart with pride for the technological achievements
mankind has made in the past century, it also pains me to know that this
very craft was the reason noone has gone to the moon since 1972.
The Space Shuttle was dreamed up as a semi-reusable launch system
which could put satellites into orbit and if, necessary, return them to Earth
for repair. The Shuttle has not lived up to these dreams, and has never
once returned a satellite from orbit because to do so would cost too much
money. It costs just over half as much to launch the shuttle and repair the
satellite or launch a second satellite as it would to launch the shuttle twice,
once to retrieve the satellite and once to redploy it. What is worse is that
the same satellites can be launched by expendable launch vehicles which
cost less then a Shuttle main-tank, which is not retrieved at all. The space
shuttle has never been anything more then a reason to put people into
space as a way to keep public opinion of the National Aeronautics and
Space Administration.
On the other hand, the Saturn-class boosters were capable of launching
objects to the moon, or of lifting objects as bigger and almost 4 heavier as
the Space Shuttle's payload capacity into similar orbits, despite both having
similar launch costs. The entire Apollo program was undertaken using a
budget just barely larger then the current NASA budget. And yet it has been
31 years since the last man has stepped foot on the moon. Science fiction
author Jerry Pournelle once said that he always knew he would live to see
the first man walk on the moon, but never guessed he would see the last.
The Space Shuttle program has devestated America's launch capabilities,
using it gives the United States no advantage over our old Cold War rivals
in Russia, who are now left alone to tend to the International Space Station
while the Space Shuttle group is made safe again for humans to fly in.
Since the first Shuttle flight twenty years ago there have been two
malfunctions which destroyed the Shuttles Challenger and
Columbia, and in that same time Russia's Soyuz booster has suffered
minor glitches. The most recent and urgent glitch that the Russian Space
Afency felt a need to inspect was a computational malfunction that left the
reentry capsule drifting a few hundred miles ofcourse to land in some poor
Kazakh mans farm or perhaps in the middle of the Central Asian steppe.
It's clear that a new and simpler launch vehicle is required for the American
space program, especially when an old Soviet system older then the Space
Shuttle can perform equally as well without the cost or danger.
But a new, capsule-based launch vehicle, perhaps best based on the Titan
vehicle class, does not change one fundemental issue, and that is that Low
Earth Orbit is a waste of money. There is no reason to put men and women
into Low Earth Orbit, as all the functions they serve are also served by
computers in other non-NASA research, such as that done by the European
Space Agency and the National Space Development Agency of Japan, who
coincidentally has some of the coolest agency-related jackets in space
history. Trendy Japanese fashion statements aside, what is clear is that LEO
is a useless place for humans to be, instead the United States must focus on
a Lunar base and establishing a local Lunar infrastructure for the
construction of larger bases and factories. These factories would serve as
processing facilities for Lunar Helium-3, which will fuel fusion reactors to
come in the next half century.
But the United States lacks a launching vehicle to put a man on the Moon
today. It's almost a legend that two fully built but unused Saturn V boosters
lay on NASA's lawns, rusting and in disrepair, while the paper schematics
for the vehicle are lost. Supposedly all that remains of the Saturn V
cosntruction schematics are a scant few microfiches. Digging up the old
schematics is likely to be the best choice for now, because developement
cost is zero, however if the United States are to progress into a fully
modern space agency, new vehicles must be used, vehicles utilising nuclear
thermal rockets. The technology is there, we tested and built them in the
1960's for possible use in the Saturn V's, and it might be wise to use them
so, but launching a moon base might not be within the Saturn V's range of
possibilities. What we need is a new heavy-lifter booster, using nuclear
rockets, that will put a manned base on the Moon. This is the only way
America will progress and enter space. What we need is to bold go where
man has gone before, and this time to STAY.
