The Modular Menace
Recently, an entire editorial by Robert Zubrin (of Mars Society fame) was read into the Congressional Record, and NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe was asked to comment upon it. The editorial in question was primarily geared towards making the case that the Space Shuttle propulsion architecture should be taken independently of the Space Shuttle system and made into the foundation of a new American heavy-lift vehicle. I have commented before that the combination of Space Shuttle Main Engines and Solid Rocket Boosters is incredibly powerful (and, at least generally speaking, reusable) but that most of the system's payload capability is squandered on the Space Shuttle Orbiter; now Congress was asking O'Keefe to comment formally on the proposal to take this propulsion baseline and replace the Orbiter with an expendable payload canister, an approach which would quickly and relatively cheaply restore to American spaceflight the kind of heavy-lift capability with which we have done without since the demise of the Saturn V. O'Keefe's sorely disheartening response was to call it "wrong-headed thinking."
It seems likely that this ill-considered judgment was born chiefly out of the Administrator's lack of engineering knowledge; not being an engineer himself, nor even particularly a space enthusiast, he may simply have not had his thoughts in order as regards how America will launch payloads of various sizes, how the Orbital Space Plane will cause us to separate the crew from the cargo, how bad of an idea it is to fly the Space Shuttle for any longer than is absolutely necessary to complete construction of the International Space Station, and so on. If this is the case, I dare to hope that somewhere, somehow, someone or someones will set him straight. There is no good reason to simply automate the Space Shuttle and continue wasting vast payload capability; without people aboard, what is supposed to be the point of the thing? A little expendability, now and then, is a healthy thing.
The really nice thing about a sudden restoration of heavy-lift capability would be the sudden reminder it would give us of exactly what sort of ambitious undertakings we are capable of. This Shuttle-derived booster could take us back to the moon. It could take us to Mars. And we wouldn't be looking at protracted orbital assembly periods for complex modular spacecraft in either case. At least, not as a matter of design necessity. Political judgments remain highly mystifying things, and are almost guaranteed to frustrate engineers who know better. But Zubrin has amply demonstrated in his book, The Case for Mars, that quite ambitious missions would be possible with only a couple of launches of this vehicle, and no assumption of orbital assembly whatsoever.
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