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The Lost Frontier
I was walking down Brick Lane yesterday when Dave (O'Neill) rang me from Venice to tell me that Italian TV appeared to be reporting that there had been a major shuttle accident.
It's 17 years since the last shuttle disaster. Half a lifetime. I can remember how shocked and upset I was then.
I feel different now. The loss of Columbia is a terrible event, but not really any more terrible or tragic than seven people being killed in (say) a road accident. It's more *symbolic*, because the shuttle is a symbol of both America and the manned space programme.
It's too early to say whether or not the shuttle will ever fly again. A ~2% failure rate is probably unacceptable. There's no reason why Soyuzs shouldn't keep flying and the US could fairly easily produce a some kind of system based on the assured crew return vehicle and the Titan launcher. The ISS will probably continue.
Does it matter? I thought it did when I was 17, but I'm not so sure now. It's just too damned difficult and expensive to get into orbit. Manned missions to the Moon or Mars are pipe dreams under current economic and technological conditions because there is no way that one can justify spending tens of billions of dollars on a geology field trip.
Opening up the space frontier will have to wait for new technology that brings the cost of getting into orbit down by a couple of orders of magnitude. Maybe mass drivers, maybe space elevators. But even then, it's unlikely we will ever have planetary colonies. Why would you want to live there on Mars. Visit there sure, but live? It might seem fun to spend six months at Halley Base, but the novelty probably wears off after a couple of days. Tourists and scientists visit Antarctica, but no one lives there because there are much more convenient and attractive places to live. That's going to be even more true for the Moon or Mars. Sure, in the long term, it might be possible to terraform planets or build large scale arcolgies/worldhouses, but it would still be easier and cheaper to do that on Earth (Siberia, the Sahara, the ocean floor) than in space.
The shuttle is (was?) a great piece of technology, a marvellous work of art. That's also true of Concorde. But, in the long term, the shuttle probably isn't terribly important to the fate of humankind. The shuttle and the ISS are symbols that, yes, we *are* doing cool and sexy things in space. But whether we all end up getting together at the wrap party at the other end of the galaxy in an eon's time depends, I think, more on Moore's law than the shuttle.
It's 17 years since the last shuttle disaster. Half a lifetime. I can remember how shocked and upset I was then.
I feel different now. The loss of Columbia is a terrible event, but not really any more terrible or tragic than seven people being killed in (say) a road accident. It's more *symbolic*, because the shuttle is a symbol of both America and the manned space programme.
It's too early to say whether or not the shuttle will ever fly again. A ~2% failure rate is probably unacceptable. There's no reason why Soyuzs shouldn't keep flying and the US could fairly easily produce a some kind of system based on the assured crew return vehicle and the Titan launcher. The ISS will probably continue.
Does it matter? I thought it did when I was 17, but I'm not so sure now. It's just too damned difficult and expensive to get into orbit. Manned missions to the Moon or Mars are pipe dreams under current economic and technological conditions because there is no way that one can justify spending tens of billions of dollars on a geology field trip.
Opening up the space frontier will have to wait for new technology that brings the cost of getting into orbit down by a couple of orders of magnitude. Maybe mass drivers, maybe space elevators. But even then, it's unlikely we will ever have planetary colonies. Why would you want to live there on Mars. Visit there sure, but live? It might seem fun to spend six months at Halley Base, but the novelty probably wears off after a couple of days. Tourists and scientists visit Antarctica, but no one lives there because there are much more convenient and attractive places to live. That's going to be even more true for the Moon or Mars. Sure, in the long term, it might be possible to terraform planets or build large scale arcolgies/worldhouses, but it would still be easier and cheaper to do that on Earth (Siberia, the Sahara, the ocean floor) than in space.
The shuttle is (was?) a great piece of technology, a marvellous work of art. That's also true of Concorde. But, in the long term, the shuttle probably isn't terribly important to the fate of humankind. The shuttle and the ISS are symbols that, yes, we *are* doing cool and sexy things in space. But whether we all end up getting together at the wrap party at the other end of the galaxy in an eon's time depends, I think, more on Moore's law than the shuttle.
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Its a good time for a review of the entire US space programme - I'm just not sure what that will herald at the moment.