[Infowarrior] - 3, 2, 1, and the Last Shuttle Leaves an Era Behind

[Richard Forno]

3, 2, 1, and the Last Shuttle Leaves an Era Behind

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

https://www.nytimes.com/2011/07/09/science/space/09wilford.html?hp=&pagewanted=print

KENNEDY SPACE CENTER, Fla. — There was a time, some of us remember, when a countdown at Canaveral stopped the world in its tracks. On television or at the launching, every breath was held at liftoff and every eye followed the fiery plume of ascent, up and away. Godspeed, said someone who was everyone.

That was a half century ago, when men first squeezed into their machines and, defying gravity, rode into a new dimension of human experience. Unbound to Earth, our species could imagine that an age of spacefaring was truly under way, the Moon and Mars within reach, maybe even an asteroid where the Little Prince awaited our visit. The promised new reality legitimized fantasies.

The atmosphere here on Friday at the launching of the space shuttle Atlantis was, in some respects, reminiscent of the old days. The crowd was the largest in years, attracted by the last chance for no telling how long to see astronauts in this country leave for space.

Everything was class-reunion festive. The gray-hairs recharged memories from youth. Their grandchildren trooped along to see what had turned people on when there were just a few channels of black-and-white TV and the only telephone in the house was at the end of a cord — and the only ones twittering were sparrows.

As rain clouds hovered ominously and the countdown began to the 135th departure in the 30-year-old shuttle program, the milling crowd grew still and anxious. There was concern for the four lives in the winged space plane, of course, and all eyes searched for the break in the clouds that finally came. But this time, more than ever, spectators and others who care about NASA worried for nothing less than the future of human spaceflight in the United States.

“We’ve come full circle since 1961, back to when we had yet to show we could launch people into space,” said Steven J. Dick, a retired NASA chief historian. “We will be hitching rides from the Russians to go to the space station that is mainly ours.”

The irony of having to send our astronauts up in Russian Soyuz capsules is as plain as cold war history. The Soviet Union’s early dominance of space, manifested by the Sputnik surprise in 1957 and subsequent feats, prompted the United States to match and then surpass the Soviets in a program topped off by the Apollo 11 lunar landing in 1969. Human spaceflight would have come along anyway, but not with quite the urgency of the Soviet-American competition.

Foreseeing the end of shuttle flights, the Obama administration and NASA last year proposed new plans, approved by Congress, to develop heavy-lift rockets for sending people deeper into space, to be ready perhaps after 2020. Meanwhile, NASA has begun financing research for intermediate crew-only spacecraft to be produced and launched by commercial companies, probably no sooner than 2016. Such plans, of course, are at the mercy of the budget cutting and government downsizing spreading in Washington.

Lori B. Garver, the deputy administrator of NASA, insisted this week that the future was bright for human spaceflight. “We are tapping into how we developed almost everything great in this country, through commercial enterprise and competition,” Ms. Garver said.

Other NASA officials noted that Congressional support for the new programs was bipartisan. But they acknowledged that budget cuts were possible, and would ultimately take a toll on launching capabilities.

John M. Logsdon, a space policy expert and the author of “John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon,” said there had been gaps in human flight before, especially after Apollo flights ended in 1975 and the first shuttles flew in 1981. “We can accept that as long as a replacement is in the pipeline,” Dr. Logsdon said. “But we are ending programs with no sure follow-ons.”

Dr. Dick, the historian, questioned whether the barely started new programs would be ready to boost this country’s astronauts into orbit in this decade. “We’re stuck in the short term, can’t rouse ourselves to do much that’s inspiring,” he said.

Whatever happened to the space age as imagined back in the 1950s and early ’60s, when science fiction writers and rocket scientists spun tales of travel out in the solar system and beyond? Propellants, oxygen and other good stuff never seemed limited, or radiation a risk, or Congressional budgets a curse. This alternate universe appealed to some in a society flush with confidence after winning the Second World War but feeling a bit confined in the postwar gray-flannel conformity. Americans seemed to have lost none of their can-do spirit.

No one disputes that the space age is here to stay. Think of how much our day-to-day lives depend on the herds of satellites occupying orbital space, the world community’s commons. They are integral to communications, social media, business transactions, military operations and surveillance, surveys for charting world resources and climate and the G.P.S. devices that help us keep track of ourselves and others. As an inspiring bonus, other robotic instruments have extended human curiosity to the very edge of the solar system and out to the galaxies, close to cosmic beginnings.

This does not assuage the lingering disappointment of some of those who grew up with the space age, the countdowns, the Moon walks, the unpiloted encounters with other planetary worlds and the touchdowns on the russet plains of Mars. For various reasons, the spread of no-can-do limits has swept aside the optimism with which Americans met the initial challenges of the space age.

The Apollo lunar-landing successes, restoring national pride and asserting pre-eminence in space technology, reduced the immediate geopolitical pressures driving human space efforts. The Nixon administration rejected NASA’s post-Apollo plans for permanent Moon bases, orbiting space stations and flights to Mars. Flying reusable space shuttles was NASA’s consolation prize.

Although the vehicles had their triumphs servicing the Hubble Space Telescope and assembling the International Space Station, they never came close to living up to the extravagant promise to make spaceflight more efficient and economical, approaching the reliability of aviation. The Challenger and Columbia disasters set back the program, which never approached an early objective to fly every few weeks at a cost of only $7 million (it was more like $1.5 billion a mission).

The shuttles consigned American astronauts to low orbits, going round and round, unable to strike out to distant destinations. Spaceflight dropped off the front pages — though on Saturday, all will report the successful launching of the Atlantis, at 11:29 a.m. Eastern time Friday, two and a half minutes behind schedule.

Studies of the effects of long-duration space travel by Russian and American scientists have introduced cautionary notes tempering the early enthusiasm for astronaut trips to Mars lasting several years. M. G. Lord , the author of a memoir, “Astro Turf,” on growing up in the aerospace culture in California, suggested that these findings contributed to a growing awareness that our bodies are far more fragile than science fiction writers thought when they concocted wide-ranging colonization scenarios.

“These days my pet fantasy for exploring the universe has to do with downloading human consciousness to machines — silicon is more resilient than flesh,” Ms. Lord said, her imagination by no means grounded.

Fifty-one years after the Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk, the Boeing 707 was rolled out as the first commercially successful jet airliner, as Howard E. McCurdy, a historian at American University and author of “Space and the American Imagination,” pointed out the other day. He was acknowledging that aviation offered no guidance for how space travel was likely to unfold.

The optimistic Dr. McCurdy noted that private entrepreneurs continued to invest in space technology and transport systems and that “other nations clamor to join the spacefaring club.” The persistence of this vision in the face of adversity, he said, suggests that space travel reflects “an elemental need.”

After Atlantis lifted off on Friday, NASA replayed photography of the ignition and ascent over and over, from all angles, as if to hold on a little longer to this last parting of a space vehicle whose time had passed.

Other images, of the vapors drifting away and exposing the now-empty Launching Pad 39-A, evoked the sadness and uncertainty of what is left behind at the end of an era.