THIS AFTERNOON, the space shuttle Discoveryis due to land at Cape Canaveral in Florida after a 10- day trip to the international space station. Discoverywill never fly again. It will head to a museum and when its sister ships complete one more flight later this year the entire shuttle programme will come to an end.
It is a programme which lasted for 30 years, far longer than was intended. At the outset it captured the imagination; the days of the expendable launcher, we were told, were over. Reusable launchers would make space travel affordable and frequent. NASA estimated that there would be 50 missions a year costing some $7 million each. Instead, there was an average of just four to five missions a year and it was a huge struggle to get mission costs below $500 million each. It may have been reusable but it wasn’t cheap.
Arguably, a desire to keep costs down led to the destruction of two of the five shuttles and the deaths of 14 astronauts. Those tragedies underlined the need for safety first. They drove up the cost and greatly reduced the mission numbers. The programme was only an experiment – and a commendable one – which was meant to last for about a decade. Thereafter NASA had even bigger ambitions, such as a manned flight to Mars.
But the money wasn’t available so the shuttle programme was extended and used principally to ferry people and supplies to the equally questionable space station. After this year, the nation that was first to land on the moon will see its astronauts having to hitch a ride on a Russian rocket – at a cost of $50 million per seat.
The shuttle and the space station served a purpose in commanding media attention but no amount of publicity could mask the fact that neither of them were a lot of use. It would be hard to find a professor of astrophysics who would place any significant value on repetitive low-orbit flight.
Indeed, many astronomers are dismissive of all manned flight which they regard as mere showbusiness. The amount of research they accomplish is limited and the cost is horrendous. More can be accomplished at less cost by unmanned flights.
Significantly, the Discoveryflight which lands today carried a robot, Robonaut2, built with the assistance of General Motors. It is a racing certainty that a robot will land on Mars long before an astronaut does.