Maybe the Right Stuff
You know, at this point I’m really not sure what to think about the new NASA administrator, Sean O’Keefe, or the Bush Administration’s attitude towards space exploration in general.
It’s true that the International Space Station is drowning in red ink. But considering how many times over the years the space station program has been redesigned (every time shrinking smaller and smaller while ultimately costing more and more, though of course officially supposed to cost less), I wonder if calling off the bulk of the remaining assembly process is really the answer. If the space station is four or five billion dollars short, how about we just go ahead and spring to finish the thing? I can just imagine someone building a house, having projected construction costs of $150,000. When it turns out that the house is actually going to cost $175,000, should they start trying to rationalize stopping construction and living in an incomplete house? “Well, we don’t need windows or roof shingles anyway. We’ll just put tar paper up everywhere.”
The problem is compounded by the fact that the analogy, while apt, lacks a necessary dimension. You can live in a house as long as it has four walls and a roof; running water and electricity are nice to have. But the International Space Station is supposed to be a facility for conducting top-notch research. As it stands, without a habitation module and a crew return vehicle to expand the crew from three to six, the research that can be conducted is nowhere near what we would have hoped for. Upkeep of the station currently absorbs most of the attention of the three-man crew.
Everybody knows as much, too. Thus the efforts of a blue-ribbon panel to decide exactly how much (that is, how little) research can be done by the space station crew given the “U.S. core complete” paradigm of stopping construction, and then to make it sound like we’ve accomplished everything we wanted to.
I shouldn’t neglect the international dimension, either. Remember that we have a host of international partners in this endeavor. If we bail out of the project, considering that together with the Russian components our contributions are foundational to the entire enterprise, they will be left high and dry. Some of them are trying valiantly to stand in the gap we leave behind--notable are the Italian discussions regarding building the habitation module themselves--but still and all our abandonment of construction will be a heavy blow.
Latest Articles