Fire Sale on Shuttles

NASA is seeking out museums and other parties that are willing to display the retired shuttles.  The only hitch is that you need to pay about $29 million just to get the shuttle to your location since it will be delivered via a special Boeing 747.  The Wall Street Journal had a good article on NASA's search, titled Shuttle Diplomacy: Museums Launch Bids for Retiring Space Planes.  One of the new locations has already been decided - Washington DC's National Air and Space Museum. The museum will be getting the shuttle Discovery.  And while the museum already has the shuttle Enterprise (which never left the ground), it is willing to put the Enterprise back into play so it is now one of the three shuttles to be relocated (the other two being Atlantis and Endeavour, since the Challenger and Columbia are no longer with us).

NASA requires that the other locations be in the United States and near a large airport that can handle the 747.  Another condition is that you need to get the shuttle from the airport to the proposed location intact, which is no easy feat for many locations.  Some potential future hosts of shuttles include New York City's Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum, Dayton's National Museum of the U.S. Air Force, Seattle's Museum of Flight, Houston's Johnson Space Center, and the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex.  Competition will be fierce, and congressional leaders are expected to muddy the waters with their own pleas. 

I am a bit concerned that we are fighting over these museum relics while our space program currently has nothing on the drawing board to replace the shuttle.  Remember the Soviet Union's Buran?  This Soviet shuttle was a complete rip-off of our space shuttle, which is itself a sad story given the Soviets great strides in space travel.  But the really sad story is the final end to the Buran.  It was retired in 1993 and destroyed when a hangar collapsed in 2002.  Nothing similar was ever tried again.

However, the Russians still have the last laugh since they currently have the only spacecraft that can get American astronauts up to the International Space Station.  Even more interesting, there were rumors of the Russian's trying to revive the Buran shuttle program to take advantage of the demise of the U.S. Space Shuttle program.  I have not read anything new about this, but it would certainly be an interesting turn of events.

More Plumbing Repairs?

This weekend we had two astronauts on a space walk to repair one of two cooling pumps in the American sector of the International Space Station (ISS).  This repair is not going well so far, but everyone is hopeful that the American crew will not need to abandon their section of the station and take refuge in the Russian section.  Last I heard, each shuttle mission to the ISS cost approximately $450 million.  And the ISS itself cost more than $100 billion.  So we are talking a fair amount of money to keep this thing afloat while we argue about whether or not we have enough funds to leave the Earth's orbit.  Does this make a lot of sense?  Yes, we are learning that cooling systems (and toilets) are critical to human survival and it is easier to fix them locally than when the spaceship is on its way to Mars.  But do we need to learn this multiple times at half a billion dollars per shot?  We have a Congress arguing about every penny here on the surface of the planet.  Some one else will do the math soon enough.  We need to start setting a bold vision that includes more than plumbing and cooling.  And maybe this is a chance to get the private sector involved, such as Home Depot.  They have some nifty plumbing/cooling tools and fixtures.

Are We Looking for the Next Big Mac?

I was going through some earlier stories in the The Planetary Report, the journal of the Planetary Society, and came across a speech from Dr. Hawking after he received the Cosmos Award for Outstanding Public Presentation to Science on February 27, 2010.  It brought up a number of good points that are worth reflecting on.  In addition to linking Columbus' expedition to today's Big Mac (not the most convincing argument he made here), he noted the need for a long-term strategy for spreading into space:

This would mean hundreds, or even thousands, of years.  We could have a base on the Moon within 30 years, reach Mars in 50 years, and explore the moons of the outer planets in 200 years.  By "reach," I mean with manned, or should I say "personed," spaceflight.  We have already driven rovers on Mars, and we have landed a probe on Titan, a moon of Saturn, but if one is considering the future of the human race, we have to go there ourselves.

Such plans make sense, but we also live in a world where we laugh at 5-year plans (remember, they are a Communist tool), and approve NASA's budget annually, which is subject to the whim of legislators who need to be re-elected every 2 years rather than every 100 years.  So the vision thing may be a bit of a problem going forward for the United States.  It actually is better suited to the Chinese, who are still pretty happy with long-term planning.  That said, I would not want to bet against our private sector if we give them a good reason to get out there in space, such as profits.  And pride has worked in the past.  Would the United State's have put a man on the Moon if the Russians were not prodding us along?  Most probably not.

Dr. Hawking's also makes it clear that it is self-interest, such as rekindling American science, that should propel us outwards:

As new interest in space would also increase the public standing of science generally.  The low esteem in which science and scientists are held is having serious consequences.  We live in a society that is increasingly governed by science and technology, yet fewer and fewer young people want to go into science.  A new and ambitious space program would excite the young and stimulate them to go into a wide range of sciences, not just astrophysics and space science.  A high proportion of today's scientists say their interest in science was sparked by watching the Moon landings.

Dr. Hawking's also warns us to be careful, since not everything out there may be safe for human contact:

...an independent occurrence of life would be extremely unlikely to be DNA-based.  So watch out if you meet an alien.  You could be infected with a disease against which you have no resistance.

Dr. Hawking's gives us plenty to think about. I recommend you listen to his compete remarks.