2 decades after its birth, 13 years after its worst tragedy, the space shuttle is America's year-round truck service into space - an aging but respected draft horse of the heavens. The venerable shuttle fleet won't likely be replaced for decades to come. Congress is unlikely to give NASA the money. Hence the shuttle, packed with technologies often dating from the 1950s and 1960s, may become the early 21st century's B-52: a high-tech antique still piercing the skies in the 2020s and 2030s, flown by pilots not even born when it first flew. The B-52 analogy is valid. The space shuttle will be hard to replace. Scheduled for completion about 2005 the space station is being assembled primarily via shuttle launches carrying components to low Earth orbit. Delayed retirement is a noble but ironic fate for the shuttle fleet, which almost died in its crib in the 1970s when President Nixon half-heartedly proposed it to a reluctant Congress. The fleet's doom also seemed certain when in January 1986 the Challenger exploded over Florida before countless TV watchers.
13 years later, long after doomsayers predicted a second shuttle disaster, the fleet still flies 7 - 8 times a year. We won't come anywhere near the shuttles' life span in the next 10 years. Although shuttles Columbia, Atlantis, Endeavor and Discovery age gracefully they must be upgraded to make them safer and more efficient. Long-hoped-for replacement vehicles such as single stage to orbit (SSTO) vehicles that would take off and land horizontally like airplanes won't likely become major players in aerospace for decades, given present tight federal funding for aerospace research. The shuttle lands horizontally. Unlike the hypothetical SSTO it takes off vertically, propelled into space by a large orange-brown external tank of liquid fuel and 2 smaller rockets packed with solid or plastic-like fuel.
Federal funding is so tight NASA holds bake sales. A House subcommittee voted to cut over $1.3 billion from NASA's budget as part of a Republican tax cut proposal, an 11% cut from President
Clinton's proposed budget of $14 billion for fiscal year 2000. The cuts enraged NASA. After all NASA's efforts to develop faster, cheaper, better space flight their reward is a knife in the heart of employee morale. NASA appears stuck with the shuttles.
Possible shuttle retrofits
proposals to keep the aging shuttles reliable include:
*Replacing dangerous solid-rocket boosters, playing a key role in the fatal 1986 Challenger explosion, with reusable, winged liquid-fueled rockets that would drop off during launch and return to Earth.
*Placing electronic components inside the whitish tiles that serve as the shuttle's skin and protect it from severe heat as it reenters the atmosphere. The electronics would automatically warn ground crews if a tile had been damaged by, say, a meteor.
*Replacing helium-gas-triggered actuators that activate shuttle mechanical components with more reliable, gas-free alternatives.
Will such technical innovations keep the shuttle flying safely into the third and fourth decades of the next century? Or will they be as useless as plugging holes in the Titanic with gum? In that regard the 1986 Challenger explosion was caused not by faulty technology but faulty decision making, pushing technology to do more than it was designed for, not heeding engineers' warnings that the shuttle shouldn't be launched on a cold day. Cold impaired a simple O-ring, triggering a chain of technical mishaps that blew up the ship.
Nature can't be fooled
Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman helped investigate the catastrophe. In a memorable remark much quoted afterward, Feynman accused NASA of trying to fool nature, but
nature can't be fooled. Is NASA trying to fool nature again? The question arose with 3 small holes in a rocket engine nozzle on
Columbia shortly after its return from space. On that mission, piloted by the first female shuttle commander, Air Force Col Eileen Collins, the shuttle hauled into orbit the giant Chandra X-ray telescope which will scan the heavens for black holes and other galactic exotica. Former shuttle commander Shaw insists NASA must make do with shuttles for a long time to come. They get so much tender loving care they're almost like new at liftoff. "There's no reason you can't fly them a very long time. On the other hand we must develop a complementary or backup space transportation system just in case. I'm not worried about disaster. We work very hard to preclude that. It's not in our national interest to put our eggs in one basket," he said.
Disney expands into space
NASA seeks shuttle sponsors
Mickey Mouse may not be on the next space shuttle's wing but possible NASA-Disney partnership in space was clear at the first Shuttle Development Conference, drawing over 700 people to Mountain View's NASA/Ames Research Center. Disney, its core product perfectly suited to NASA, could place a Webcam in the shuttle for 24-hour mission coverage. Space is fundamentally a story about someone facing obstacles. The 4-day conference in Hangar 1 promoted upgrading the space shuttle program, underscoring the private sector's increasing role in space exploration. In the 1960s there was no question we were behind the space program. Today NASA turns over as much as possible things private industry can do faster and cheaper than the government. As conference participants spoke glowingly of the international space station and the shuttle program, many wanting to repopularize space acknowledged the American public's waning interest. Space.com aims to raise public interest, combining space industry news with e-commerce to bring to young minds the same curiosity and desire to explore space people had when man first walked on the moon.
For those who build and operate the shuttle the conference's primary purpose was networking, share and learn from each other and combine capabilities and expertise. Over 2,000 companies in 44 states contribute parts and services to the program, from industry behemoths such as Boeing's Rocketdyne Division designing the shuttle's main engine to smaller outfits making flight simulation software. On the most recent mission the Columbia shuttle developed leaks in 3 liquid hydrogen tubes along the nozzle. Though the problem did not jeopardize crew safety, questions were raised about sensitivity of the shuttle's diagnostic equipment. NASA/Ames is a leader in sensory technology, giving automated feedback on a machine's working conditions to engineers in labs. Boeing and Ames engineers brainstormed on applying that technology to the leaking tubes problem.
X-ray eye in the sky peers into cosmos
Shuttle carries potent telescope
Think TV's violent? Check images produced by a new observatory in outer space. X-ray telescope Chandra, launched aboard space shuttle Columbia, will map galaxy-gobbling black holes, exploding stars, neutron star collisions and cosmic cataclysms we never thought of. Plans include mapping vast spider web-like hot cosmic gas streams slowly collapsing into galaxies. The $1.55 billion Chandra X-ray Observatory is space-based astronomy's biggest breakthrough since 1990's Hubble Space Telescope and 1991's Compton Gamma Ray Observatory.
45-foot Hubble, seeing in visible light, is astronomy's Ansel Adams, revealing cosmic vistas of unparalleled beauty and grandeur. Compton maps gamma radiation from the sky. 45-foot Chandra, taking over 20 years to develop, will map cosmic sources of X-rays. Chandra is a technological zoo with millions and millions of parts to worry about if one wants to. Hubble orbits circular, close to Earth. Chandra orbits an elliptical 6,000 - 80,000 miles from Earth, 1/3 of the way to the moon. Chandra will map X-ray radiation from matter being compressed and heated as it plunges into black holes, and from super-hot debris from exploded stars. Chandra will look for X-ray afterglows of gamma-ray bursters, puzzling gamma bursts from point sources far beyond nearby galaxies. Chandra will measure X-rays from Jupiter's atmosphere and from comets.
Cosmic X-rays are emitted by extremely hot objects with temperatures of millions of degrees. The sun's surface is only 10,000 degrees F. One mystery Chandra should solve is the nature of cosmic X-ray radiation coming from all directions. Astronomers are uncertain whether all the radiation truly comes from all directions or from innumerable individual X-ray sources such as stars so vast in number they appear merged into a smooth surface, like dots in a newspaper photograph. Past X-ray space images were fuzzy, as if taken by a poorly focused camera. Chandra's images are more precise, with fine resolution characteristic of visible light pictures. X-ray astronomy is a Cold War spinoff. In the 1960s orbital space probes scanned for sudden flashes of X-ray radiation, revealing covert Soviet nuclear bomb tests on Earth or in the upper atmosphere or deep space. Space probes detected cosmic X-rays not from nuclear bombs but from a previously unknown, unbelievably bright type of star, the quasar (quasi-stellar object) Quasars are thought to be radiation from a galaxy slowly devoured by a black hole.
Chandra is named for the late Nobel Prize-winning Indian astrophysicist Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar, who taught at the University of Chicago's Yerkes Observatory in Williams Bay WI.
Chandra's students included Carl Sagan. Scornful of scientific inexactitude, Chandra intimidated students. They avoided passing his office when he was there, according to Kameshwar C Wali's 1991 biography. Chandra kept Mickey Mouse comic books in his desk. Thanks to super-instruments like Chandra's namesake we'll finally understand or not understand the universe.