As someone who grew up with the NASA manned space program as a beacon of innovation, strength, and hope for the future, it is a sad day for me, and I’m sure for many others.
While at ICCC6, I had the honor of once again meeting Dr. Harrison Schmitt, Apollo 17 astronaut and the only geologist to ever walk the moon.
I made sure that my children met him, and he surprised me the next day by offering two signed photographs. A most gracious man and I offer my sincere thanks. He, like many others, must feel simultaneously a sense of pride and of emptiness today.
My family and I watched this final launch this morning, I made it mandatory to witness history, even if only on television.
et tu NASA?
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Related news from Aviation Week:
Lawmakers Seek To Kill Webb Space Telescope
A House panel recommends killing the Northrop Grumman-built James Webb Space Telescope, calling the Hubble successor “billions of dollars over budget and plagued by poor management.”
Overall, the House Appropriations Commerce, Justice, Science subcommittee backs funding NASA at $16.8 billion in fiscal 2012, a cut of $1.9 billion to President Barack Obama’s budget request, according to a committee statement. The subcommittee is scheduled to approve its draft of the spending bill that also covers the Commerce and Justice departments on July 7. The bill still must pass in the full House and be reconciled with a Senate version before becoming law.
House Appropriations Committee Chairman Rep. Hal Rogers (R-Ky.) defends the committee’s decisions. “Given this time of fiscal crisis, it is also important that Congress make tough decisions to cut programs where necessary to give priority to programs with broad national reach that have the most benefit to the American people,” Rogers says.
NASA’s future space telescope has run into its share of trouble, going $1.5 billion over budget and seeing its launch date slip at least three years.
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I watched it,too. Man, it sure gets outta town in a hurry. If only my mother-in-law could leave that fast!
JDN says:
July 8, 2011 at 10:24 am
“This shuttle design was the worst possible one from the original 1970′s competition. Just go back and look at the better designs that should have won the shuttle competition. The designers of the current shuttle have admitted that they falsified their total cost numbers by lying about the turnaround time”
Another quality product brought you by Boeing™.
There is hard data that fundamentally better technology exists. Policy makers at a very high level know that, and are not spending more on conventional programs. See if you can draw the ‘curtain of ridicule’ over the evidence on this page —
http://www.ufoevidence.org/topics/RadarCases.htm
If a person never experiences a phenomena, then that person doesn’t understand the phenomena the way they could/might. We weed humans to experience the universe first-hand, or humans won’t understand what they are doing.
Andrew
As a former NASA employee who made it up the ladder, I can say that as it was being built some of us knew the Shuttle was expensive and much more dangerous than was admitted. One calculation (performed by an actual statistician, duh) indicated 1 in every 47 launches would result in catastrophe (close to what happened). Now, 1 in 47 for a space vehicle that complicated is outstanding — just not if humans are aboard. So, numbers that were uttered were more in the range of 1 in a “very large number” so as not to kill the golden goose.
And so on. The International Space Station cost 4 times what it was supposed to and (in my opinion) did about 1/4 the science it was planned to do (or less) — not really a surprise to those in the know.
NASA has a lot of hyper-dedicated, very smart folks making things happen. The problem is that usually (not always) the “direction” is provided by political appointees more interested in keeping budget levels high than in doing the “right thing”. Nothing new about that in Government (AGW comes to mind).
Anyhow, I devoted my whole working life to NASA and some of my best stuff was on the Shuttle and Space Station. I’m a NASA Patriot. But, I agree, it is an Agency that needs to make its programs “truly relevant” versus “spectacular”. Had we been doing that from the day I was first employed, funding would not be an issue — and our “spacecraft” (not the Shuttle) would still be flying to support a vibrant science program on our “space station” (not the ISS).
FWIW
It is a very sad day for this country, the country that put a man on the Moon never did anything more than earth orbit in 40 years of human space flight, and now it can’t even do that. It is as if in 1943 people were still flying planes only 100 ft over …the sands of North Carolina, or in 1550 Spain was sailing only 10 miles off the coast of Spain. Maybe, Government isn’t the best organization to expand human achievement beyond the ordinary, to reach beyond the mundane, but at one point NASA did those things. Now all government has to offer are lowly expectations. Listen to any Obama speech and that is all you’ll hear. Don’t cut medicare don’t cut social security, pass healthcare, don’t cut welfare etc,etc, nothing at all about the greatness of this country, nothing about advancing human achievement, nothing at all about the betterment of mankind. No, the only thing we get is attacks on those who have managed to achieve something that betters mankind. Far too many of them have gotten rich through their endeavors, they need to give back, they need to pay even more in taxes, we never get any praise for their achievements. This is not the country I grew up in. In that country we could achieve anything, we could reach our dreams and our dreams included the stars. The end of the space shuttle is just another example of how far we have fallen as a country. We can get it back, but we have to fight for it we have to expect more from this country than just the meager accouterments of survival.
I, too, grew up in the space race era. A great many technological breakthroughs came directly or indirectly from the efforts to reach the moon and beyond. That said, today’s NASA is not the same. NASA of the 60’s had a definite goal with thousands of scientist and engineers all working that way. Today we have no goal for the space program which is why it is seen as an overbloated, beauracratic sinkhole. In order to return the agency to relevance, we must have a clearly defined goal to move toward.
It seems strange to me that the government would shut down the one program that has shown any return at all.
Jeremy says, “Well, paint the statistics any way you want. No human in their right mind would ever own a car that had a 2 in 134 chance of exploding each time you turned the ignition key.”
Quite a few race cars face that kind of odds during a race, yet companies, consortia, and a few lunatics own and/or drive them. They may not be in their right minds — *I* wouldn’t race the things — but there are enough to do it, and plenty to watch. And the cost is no small change, either. Worse, they end up where they started.
Accountancy has powers, but they don’t cover all of human behavior.
The shuttle was an example of American Exceptionalism, thus it had to end.
Americans must now apologize for being so exceptional.
/sarc
I think it is completely, utterly, bonkers, humungous insanity, to not have developed a new system that can take over now the moment they scrap the old. It’s like they’ve been doodling for 30 years. And now the old immensely cheap soviet system will reign supreme for maybe ten or more years, because the EU won’t chip in all that much (too expensive apparently) on the new systems, and US won’t back it neither with the funds actually needed because of the state of the new and approved US socialist economy.
But another 240 billion dollars a year they want to spend on climate research to save us from climate change by changing the climate back to what it was in ’88. EU is on board with it this too, so they’ll let the billions of tax euros flow freely as well.
NASA does NOAA who does ONR and also tries for USGS. USGS who tries to not be overrun by EPA who do whatever as long as it is in the political realm of the World Wild Life of the Greenpeace Fund.
I can understand for profit organizations branching out into new areas of research, even federal funded organizations such as JPL, going away from their core research and business into, for example, oceanographic research, that’s all sound business 101 strategy: but only if the business is booming, otherwise it’s just the feeble death woes of a dying business trying to grab a hold on to anything for survival, as in trying to keep the organization equally fat of projects and employees as it was when it was at the top.
Would the thing called green technology even exist if it weren’t for everything researched for space exploration? Neither hydro nor airponics would probably not exist if not for the possibilities of furthering space exploration, and certainly not for the cheap price it has today that pretty much anyone can afford it.
Space exploration has given us everything from proper mattresses to use to ultra cheap hand held water purification tubes, and even solar cells. And for the last 40 years, pretty much, for pennies.
Even the automobile industry gave us proper tech for pennies but only because of availability of coal and oil. All that was needed was the incitement to make more money by being the best.
Green funded tech has given us bird choppers and subsonic animal sterilizers and CO2 to trade on a NON regulated market, and are spawning mad scientist wanting to suck stuff out of the atmosphere or add other stuff to it. And not to forget far far less tax funds to use for real research.
Sound investment yields real tangible cheap technology, not more and more expensive vapor ware. So if the branching out isn’t doing to well, scale back and go back to core business, as usual.
The driving force for the putting a man on the moon was cold war military. The USA needed to re-establish it’s high tech reputation, and also not cede the high ground to the Reds. The Reds went bust. Mission over. The military still have needs and a shuttle, just the X-37B is not a manned shuttle and so it a lot cheaper and one of a a range of miltary lift options selected for the mission needs. Shuttle is a carriers looking for a mission.
The Sature V was impressive. Raw brute force showing the USA a a biggest baddest guy on the block. The shuttle was an ugly duckling showing her age with little notable success other than keeping Hubble going. It would have been cheaper to stick to maintence free space telescopes.
If you want to make folks dream, you need an X-15 spaceplane. Shuttle was just a money pit!
“A small step for man – a huge step for mankind”, 1969. That WAS huge! (I was at time in service in Africa). But what has ‘happened’ since, up to today…? Well, considering the huffing & buffing on & around the ‘matter’ of CO2 (ie. Mr. Hanson etCons) as being what it is / or not / one cannot label the NASA’s ‘work’ and ‘actions’ being anything else than driving a scientific unproven and false thread in order to conjure with some form of a ‘world order’. And that + mny more ‘scenarious’ scare the sh*t out of me…
Good work – keep it up!
Brds from Sweden
//TJ
Ric Werme says on July 8, 2011 at 10:14 am
Actually, Ric, I think you will find that having the government do it is far more expensive. Private enterprise brings costs down, in my experience.
Having just turned 41 yesterday, the Shuttle era has defined the majority of my living memory. It is truely sad to see them go. Young children of today will remember them only through photos in history books or a visit to a museum. I doubt there will be a comparable replacement for the Shuttle in my lifetime, unless the Chineese build it.
Thirty years ago whilst I was at school in England we were all allowed to go into one of the classrooms and watch the first ever launch of teh Space Shuttle. I remember at the time being awed at the speed with which it cleared the tower compared to the old rockets and inspired at the idea of a brighht new future of space exploration.
I am immensly saddend by the end of the programme, believe it was entirely the wrong decision and consider this one act of vandalism against the aspirations of humanity for which I will never forgive the current US administration.
The Space Shuttle programme has been a huge success and for me, watching the last liftoff this afternoon, this was a day of great and enduring sadness.
Cancelling the Shuttle will hopefully end the 40-year long federal monopoly on manned space flight. The reason costs have increased while operability and safety have decreased is entirely due to lack of internal or external competition for manned space flight here in the US. Break that monopoly and allow a marketplace to start up and you will go a long way toward decreasing costs, improving safety and operability if for no other reason that the newSpace guys don’t have to carry around the standing army of tens of thousands that NASA currently does.
And a bureaucracy with a monopoly will always defend that monopoly. For example, in the early 1980s, Klaus Heiss led a group of investors and made an offer to purchase a fifth orbiter and give it to NASA. They thought they could make money scheduling and filling unused cargo bay volume and mass on the remaining shuttle flights. They reportedly had $1 – 1.5 billion in the bank. They were slow rolled until the investors went elsewhere.
The newSpace guys starting with Virgin Galactic are already bending metal on suborbital and orbital hardware – manned and unmanned. They will compete for customers for bodies and cargo into space. NASA will end up chartering flights rather than being owner-operators. This is not a bad thing. We even have Robert Bigelow’s Bigelow Aerospace which has flown two station modules based on the old transhab that they intend for commercial visitors. SpaceX built a booster and capsule somewhere between one tenth to one hundredth the money already spent on Orion. And they flew it once already. Do a search under the keywords newSpace and/or the Space Frontier Foundation for more info. There is a lot of very good stuff going on in the commercial space sector.
Disagree with previous Hubble comments. Early servicing missions were absolutely required. However technology continues to move and a good economic case could be made that it would have been better to build new very large diameter mirror modern telescope(s) than visit Hubble the last couple times at $1 billion a pop.
The real tragedy of this retirement is turning the orbiters into lawn ornaments like they did with the flight hardware of the last 3 cancelled Apollo flights. There are a number of wingless orbiter concepts that have been floating around for the last 30 years that would convert the orbiters into 150 ton, turnkey, manned or man capable, one shot space platforms. The orbiters should be sold to the highest bidders, converted and retired on orbit. Cheers –
We are merely in the middle of a Depression, and an incompetent national administration headed by yet another political hack. There is no way we won’t rise back up to advance the dreams of space adventure, begun by Jules Verne and H.G. Wells over a century ago. I am 63, and I may yet go myself. You never know…
Childhood’s End.
============
What the hell nearly everything we buy is made in China and India so why not have our space program, if that is what they still call it, dependent on the Russians.
If our leadership is demonstrating the US is not exceptional by destroying the ability of the US to succeed they may be proving we are not exceptional in our choice of representation.
Richard Sharpe @ur momisugly 11:26 am
I agree with you, private enterprise needs to operate on market principals, which means that it has to produce things as efficiently as it can (if it has competitors that produce similar products that offer an alternative to the target market).
Anthony’s referring back to Columbus’ voyages made me think of something else: in the beginning of the development of “the New World”, the voyages were so expensive and risky that no private company would do them. Looking at the risks involved against the expected rewards, it’s not surprising. Only after governmental bodies had paved the way and shown it could be done repeatedly and (mostly) safely did the private bodies come into it. Today, there aren’t a lot of governmental agencies that actively transport people across the Atlantic (though there are a lot of regulators that make a living watching, limiting, protecting, and controlling those companies that do). I see the development of space being similar, but don’t know that the economic reasons for going to and beyond orbit are sufficient yet. Communications are a great start, but without real, concrete products that are made better and cheaper in space I don’t see any beanstalk elevators in our near future.
Unless and until science throws off the shackles of Newton’s and Einstein’s “Gedanken Dogma” our species will never get off this mortal coil. If you thought Climate Science was a crock you ain’t seen nothing. Cosmology is the largest continuous scam in the history of science. They can’t even tell you what light or gravity IS let alone know HOW THEY WORKS and after two decades of searching LIGO is a total failure. But if you give them another couple of billion they may be able to come up with a mathematical reason why. Maybe Higgs is Surfing Gravity Waves in Another Dimension.
If science wants a Unified Theory then they can start by discovering what Heat, Light, Electricity and Gravity together have in common. As long as they are treated as four separate entities we aren’t going anywhere.
To people saying the shuttle is unsafe. Let’s look at actual numbers (from 2006):
Soyuz (1967-Present)
——————————
Flights: 95
Failures: 4 (2 non-fatal)
Failure Rate: 4.21%
Cosmonauts Flown: 228
Fatalities: 4
Fatality Rate: 1.75%
Shuttle (1981-Present)
——————————
Flights: 116
Failures: 3 (1 non-fatal)
Failure Rate: 2.59%
Astronauts Flown: 692
Fatalities: 14
Fatality Rate: 2.02%
Soyuz Failures:
Soyuz 1 (1967), Soyuz 11 (1971), Soyuz 18A (1975, Non-Fatal), Soyuz T-10A (1983, Non-Fatal)
Shuttle Failures:
STS-51L (1986), STS-83 (1997, Non-Fatal), STS-107 (2003)
—————————–
The shuttle isn’t so bad, is it? Remember, Challenger was a DECISION mistake, choosing to operate in known unsafe conditions. That is not the same as an accident when all seemed well, like Columbia. And even Columbia was a freak accident of foam hitting directly on a landing gear well seal, not actually from the damage to the heatshield itself (last I read of the reports).
What caused all the Soyuz accidents? If the shuttle is so bad, then the Soyuz must be just as bad, eh? Modern technology could easily take the shuttle and spit out a shiny new model that is vastly superior safety wise to what it is right now. And for a lot less than the Constellation program’s idea of starting from scratch.
People… I honestly don’t know where such strange perceptions come from. Reactions to an explosion I guess, blown (haha?) completely out of proportion.
Oh well, apparently we’ve lost our ability to dream in this nation! Unless it’s about iPads and iPhones and other shiny gizmos that aren’t necessary for life or our future as a species.
And those saying sending people into space isn’t useful: of course it is, as it is vital we learn how to spend people to space, learn how to live in space, learn the effects on space, and develop better techniques through time to make living in space more beneficial and safer for us. After all, if we’re going to go to another planet, it’ll take a lot longer than 15 days! But abandoning sending people into space effectively grounds our species just on this one rock. Just the knowledge we’ve gained so far is INSUFFICIENT for the future. Every mission adds more.
This is a sad, sad day. Not just because it’s the last shuttle flight, but because of what it shows of us as a people.
To relate this to the original discussion:
I stand by what I have said in light of the original subject. Take that down whatever path you want. The Shuttle is not safer than a modern 4-door sedan or commercial plane flight.
I should add, at least things are not all gloom. Thank goodness for Space X and other private ventures.
Going to space will always be dangerous, people need to get over that. It takes a lot of energy to blast off a planet, and a lot of danger coming back through an atmosphere. Get over it people. It’s why astronauts are heroes, risking themselves every time. And you know what? Every time we’re learning more and getting safer. But we’ll never make progress without risks! So, here’s to Space X and the rest, doing privately what the common man of this country (or at least our leaders) apparently no longer have the guts or bravery to do.
It certainly is the end of an era. 50 years from now, or even 20 years from now, it will be interesting to see which nation has the most numbers of their citizens in space and/or on the moon and Mars. My guess, China by a wide margain, and the U.S. won’t even be second. This is a period of sea change for the world, as power, money, influence, and technological advance shift from the west to Asia, and even South America. Before you get upset about me saying this, realize that I flew my U.S. flag on July 4th, Memorial day, and several other times this year. But I also am not blind to the tides of history, nor the excesses in spending the U.S. has been guilty of. A day of true reconing is upon us. It is time to pay the piper, and the withdrawal of the U.S. from manned space flight for a period (longer than some might suppose) is one sign and consequence of this, but will be far from the most extreme. Why would we want to continue with a manned space program that we have to borrow money from the Chinese to operate? Once we get our financial house back in order, we might consider manned flight once again…