I’m sure everyone knows by now that space shuttle Discovery landed safely yesterday morning at Edwards AFB in California. I’m pleased about that, of course, and also pleased that the mission went as well as it did, including the unprecedented repairs to the shuttle itself that were performed by astronaut Steve Robinson. Post-landing glow aside, however, this Interested Observer found himself deeply troubled throughout most this flight, and it wasn’t because of the constantly looming specter of another Columbia-style disaster.

Rather, I’ve been bothered — irritated, to be more precise — by the effect the Columbia accident has had on everyone’s attitudes about the Discovery mission, and the shuttle fleet in general. I’m talking about the overriding preoccupation with the condition and safety of the shuttle and its crew. Does anyone even know what the shuttle astronauts did up there for two weeks, aside from inspecting their own spacecraft for launch damage? Hell, I follow this stuff faithfully and even I’m not entirely sure of what they did while their ship was moored to the International Space Station.

(I’m just kidding, folks; they installed a platform outside the station’s airlock, replaced a failing gyroscope, dropped off fresh supplies for the station’s crew, and brought home a cargo module filled with junk. But the average person would never know that from all the hand-wringing stuff they’ve seen on the evening news.)

Some degree of trepidation is to be expected when you’re following up a horror like Columbia‘s final re-entry, but I thought the media coverage of “NASA’s return to flight” and even NASA’s own actions throughout the mission bordered on the paranoid. One little factoid that barely received a mention in the press was that this shuttle launch, despite the big breakaway foam-chunk that spooked everyone and those protruding gap-fillers that Robinson had to remove, was one of the cleanest in the history of the shuttle program. When Commander Eileen Collins performed a nifty “backflip” maneuver in front of the International Space Station, she revealed a spacecraft that was practically flawless compared to the nicked-and-dinged shuttles of earlier missions. (I’m willing to bet dangling gap-fillers after a launch are nothing out of the ordinary; it’s just that NASA’s never paid attention to them before.)

I’m not arguing the need to be cautious, and it was really Buck Rogers-cool when Robinson dropped beneath Discovery‘s belly to play space-handyman (a significant “first” and something we’ll need to be able to do if we ever head for Mars). But I think all the emphasis on launch damage and chipped heat-shield tiles and falling foam isn’t creating the public image that our manned-spaceflight program needs right now. The shuttles used to be seen as objects of national pride, the pinnacle of American technology, and the toy that no other country had. Now, after a couple of decades and two regrettable, preventable accidents, a lot of people seem to be talking about them as if they’re inherently fragile, outdated, overly expensive clunkers that ought to be consigned to the Air-and-Space Museum.

I will grudgingly admit that there is some truth to the boondoggle charges. The sad fact is that the shuttle design never lived up to the promises made in the early days of the program. The cost of launching and operating these ships never fell over time, as it was supposed to do. The turnaround time between landing and launch, once optimistically predicted to be a matter of days, has remained stubbornly lengthy. And the actual purpose of the shuttle has been unclear from the very beginning; designed to do a number of jobs adequately, it’s never really excelled at any of them.

But the growing perception that the shuttle is a rickety failure akin to the old Ford Pinto rankles me. NASA has flown over 100 missions aboard space shuttles, with only two catastrophic accidents. That’s really not a bad record, as devastating as the actual accidents may have been. Consider the Apollo program, the space agency’s greatest glory: there were only seventeen Apollo missions and there were two catastrophic accidents among them. The fact that the crew of Apollo 13 survived and made it home was largely dumb luck — they easily could’ve died in the early moments of the disaster that crippled their ship, before they had a chance to do anything heroic — and the astronauts of Apollo 1 never even made it off the ground. In a purely statistical sense, the shuttle has been five times safer than Apollo.

If I sound callous, believe me, I’m not. I was absolutely heartbroken by what happened to the Columbia astronauts, and to those aboard Challenger back in ’86. But space is an unforgiving environment. Absolutely unforgiving, in a way that I don’t think most people really comprehend. That makes spaceflight dangerous. If we’re going to fly humans in space, they are occasionally going to die. There’s no way around it, and I find myself very annoyed by the timid fantasy that you can have a 100% safe space mission. Because safety shouldn’t be the only consideration behind everything we humans choose to do. One of the finest moments on the old Star Trek series is Captain Kirk’s often-qutoed “risk speech” from the episode, “Return to Tomorrow.” When the rest of the crew expresses doubts about a particular experiment, saying it’s too risky to continue, Kirk tells them that, “Risk is our business. It’s why we’re out here.” I believe that philosophy applies to real-world space exploration, too. We ought to do everything we can to minimize the risk, of course, but we shouldn’t let the possibility of risk prevent us from doing the thing in the first place. And I worry we may be dangerously close to doing just that when it comes to flying space shuttles.

I’ve got a lot of other thoughts on this subject, on why the shuttles should keep flying, and how the shuttle catastrophes have been due to problems with the launch system and not the orbiter itself. I’d like to detail my theories about why the shuttle program hasn’t amounted to much (I don’t believe it’s entirely the fault of the shuttle design). But I’m running long, I think, so I’ll save all that stuff for another time. For now, I’ll leave you with a selection of spectacular photos that came back from Discovery‘s flight:

• Steve Robinson’s self-portrait.
• Discovery‘s nose-on beauty shot.
• International Space Station, seen from above.
• International Space Station, seen as Discovery backs away.