Here’s another sight we likely won’t ever see again, at least not after Endeavour leaves Kennedy Space Center for LA come September: two space shuttle orbiters in the same place. In this case, Enterprise and Discovery, the prototype and the grizzled veteran, sitting nose to nose on the tarmac outside the Udvar-Hazy Center. Enterprise was wheeled out of its long-time parking stall this morning and this afternoon Discovery took her place, but first there came the photo op, the speeches, the dignitaries, and the formal exchange of pink slips.
Looking through the photos of today’s events, one thing that struck my eye is how shabby Discovery looks alongside the spotlessly white Enterprise. That’s deliberate, apparently; my understanding is that the Smithsonian specifically asked NASA not to do any restoration or clean-up work on the most-used orbiter in the shuttle fleet, because they wanted to show the public what a real, workaday spacecraft looks like after it comes back from a mission. Personally, I think that’s a good call. I like the patina; it makes her look authentic, which Enterprise didn’t quite pull off when I saw her in person last year. It’ll be interesting to see if Atlantis and Endeavour are presented differently when they reach their respective final resting places.
And I guess that’s about all the remains to be said about Orbiter Vehicle Designation OV-103, more commonly known as space shuttle Discovery, the third production model and the oldest surviving example of them. From here on, she’s just a tourist attraction. If you’ll bear with me for a moment, though, I would like to climb up on my soapbox again and respond to something that’s been bugging me.
Over the past few days, I’ve seen a lot of sentiments expressed about Discovery‘s final ferry flight on blogs and comment threads that essentially amount to “good riddance.” Many people — and I’m going to make a grossly uninformed and possibly incorrect assumption that these are probably mostly younger folks who weren’t around for the early days of the program and therefore have a reflexive contempt for whatever their elders think is cool — are sneering that the shuttle program was a dead-end we never should have gone down, an overpriced and dangerous boondoggle that prevented the United States from doing something really cool like building a moon base or sending men to Mars. Many seem to have it in for the shuttles because they’re “old,” and a few are even making cracks about their looks, calling them examples of “1970s style” that look ridiculous up here in the 2010s, as if the orbiters are pot-bellied guys in their fifties wearing leisure suits with polyester shirts unbuttoned to their navels or something. And a handful of posters I’ve read seem to be downright angry at the shuttles, as weird as that sounds; not at the shuttle program, but at the shuttles themselves, the actual machines. My amateur-grade Psych 101 diagnosis is that they must be transferring their frustration about our country’s loss of direction in space — and possibly even our general decline in earthbound matters as well — onto the orbiters, as if the machines themselves are to blame rather than those who made the policies. (To be fair, I’ve also seen plenty of calm, reasoned, but ultimately negative comments as well, made by perfectly rational people who just happen not to share my affection and unwavering loyalty to my beloved shuttles.)
Needless to say, I find all of this very distressing. This is exactly how I didn’t want to see the shuttles remembered. Look, I can’t argue that the shuttles weren’t incredibly expensive to operate. They were, and they never became any cheaper over time, as they were supposed to. And I also can’t deny that they failed to usher in the dazzling future that was promised us by the breathless, speculative magazine articles of the ’70s and early ’80s. Or that their actual purpose for existing became increasingly fuzzy as the years wore on. In hindsight, it’s pretty obvious that NASA made a mistake by putting all of its manned-spaceflight eggs into a single, shuttle-shaped basket and that we would’ve been better off, ultimately, if the shuttle program had been less ambitious in scope, and more just a single element in a much wider portfolio of launch vehicles and spacecraft that were specialized for different jobs. But that was an error in policy. The orbiters themselves were — and still are — remarkable things that ought to be remembered for what they actually did, and not what they failed to do.
The number-one thing to keep in mind is that they were the first reusable spacecraft. (Well, okay, mostly reusable. The orbiter and the solid rocket boosters were reused.) It cannot be stressed enough what a shift of paradigm that was, coming after roughly 20 years of a completely disposable model in which the rocket and the capsule atop it were thrown away on every single mission. We may be turning back to capsule-type designs now, but notice that every single commercial rocket builder out there is designing its vehicles for reusability. It’s the most practical approach… and the shuttles were the first to embrace that philosophy.
The orbiters were — and still are, for the time being — the largest vehicles ever flown in space. (I’m not talking about the launch vehicles; the Saturn V rockets that lifted the Apollo missions to the Moon were taller and heavier than a shuttle stack, but the actual Apollo spacecraft that rode atop the Saturn would have fit handily into a shuttle’s payload bay.) That ought to count for something, I think.
And they were unique among all the spacecraft operated (as opposed to designed or prototyped) to date. The orbiters are space planes. They flew through the atmosphere like a glider and landed on a runway. In my mind, that’s what a true spaceship ought to do instead of crashing into the ocean and a (hopefully) soft field somewhere and then waiting around for a massive military search-and-rescue operation to come find it. That’s what Artoo and Threepio’s escape pod did.
But, everyone always says, we now know those capsules are so much safer than the shuttles, because the shuttles were either deathtraps to start with or becoming frail due to their age, or both. Well… I guess I’m just hardnosed about the safety issues. Manned spaceflight is dangerous. You’re riding several million pounds of high explosive into the most inhospitable environment there is, aside from the very deep ocean. The astronauts have always understood this, even if the general public has tended not to think about it. As I’ve said before, we lost two shuttle crews out of 135 missions; the Apollo program killed one crew and damn near killed a second one in only 17 missions — one of which hadn’t even left the ground. So which one of these spacecraft is statistically more dangerous? NASA’s big mistake here, I think, was in pushing the idea that the shuttles were going to make all of this routine… that, in fact, it had become routine prior to the Challenger disaster. (I think it’s also worth noting that in both the Challenger and Columbia accidents, the problem that led to the vehicle’s destruction originated in the launch system, not the orbiters themselves. So far as I know, the orbiters have always performed flawlessly. It’s an interesting question… could the orbiters still be used if we designed a different set of rocket boosters for them, and came up with a replacement for the troublesome foam that coated the external fuel tank?)
As to the charge that the shuttles are rickety with age… bollocks. The orbiters were designed to endure 100 missions, but the most-traveled of them, Discovery, has only 39 missions under her belt; Atlantis had 33 missions, and Endeavour, the baby of the family, a mere 25. Endeavour didn’t even come online until 1992. They’d all received periodic upgrades to modernize their systems. It seems to me they had plenty of life left in them. Now, you can make the case there was nothing left for them to do once the International Space Station was completed. I get that one. But the decision to shut down the program was, in my mind, a policy choice, not a technical necessity. Certainly it wasn’t really because these ships are old. Hell, the Air Force is still flying B-52s that were built in the 1950s and, last I heard, it intends to continue doing so for at least another decade. If machines are well-maintained, there’s no reason why chronological age alone should be a concern.
Finally, that thing about clunky “1970s style.” I guess that’s in the eye of the beholder. Personally, I have always thought the shuttles were beautiful and cool-looking. I love their contours, especially from a nose-on angle. But then what the hell do I know? I still like muscle cars and feathered hair, too…
