Man In Space

 

Man In Space

When someone finds out for the first time that I am a retired NASA scientist, the conversation will almost always turn to his enthusiasm for space travel. And then I have to face his disappointment when I have to admit that I don't share his enthusiasm. Part of my negative attitude toward man in space is due to my experience when NASA first began sending satellites into orbit. On learning that it takes about 10 pounds of fuel to put one pound of payload into space, a few of us decided that we were faced with an ideal opportunity to develop the robotics needed to perform the observational functions required of the satellite.

However, the government opted to set a goal of putting a man on the moon. For this project, the spaceship would require nearly a much greater fuel/payload ratio. The project was justified as a kind of national honor goal in the ongoing Russian – American space race. And its success was looked on as a national achievement. It was a tremendous engineering feat that has remained unmatched after decades of space activity. The public imagination, heightened by the current popularity of science fiction movies and TV series, was captivated by the idea of space flight, and NASA had no trouble in getting its desired budget approvals.

After sending several crews to the moon and back, it became obvious that nothing further was to be gained by the project. Then the question arose as what should replace it. Again, this should have been an opportunity to face the fact that man in space was an expensive and useless concept. NASA's abilities could been put to work on basic robotics research.

But instead NASA instituted the Space Shuttle program. It also met with public approval, despite wasting billions of dollars providing us with such useless information as the fact that various insects and other animals can breed in space, a woman can survive in space, a Japanese man can survive in space, etc. The Space Shuttle vehicle was a horse-and-buggy concept from the outset, with its ridiculous jigsaw puzzle of tiles glued onto its surface – a dangerous, impractical design concept that assured the loss of tiles on each launch.

There were already important commercial applications of satellites for communications and observation, and the Space Shuttle did carry some of them; but they charged companies enormous fees for this service. Consequently, some of the companies turned to other nations (notably France) whose rockets were sensibly designed and unmanned. The payload devices were remotely controlled and did not require a human at hand. And the fees were much lower than NASA's.

At this point the reasonable, logical thing to do would be to take advantage of new material and design concepts to build a practical spaceship; but, instead, NASA chose to stick with the outmoded design and set a goal of launching one shuttle per month. The result was an enormous expenditure of funds for useless information.

Finally, after decades, the newly formed SpaceX corporation, with private funds and a few competent engineers, built spaceships that performed their functions efficiently and safely. These spaceships could return two booster rockets to designated landing locations, to be recycled for further missions. This accomplishment exceeded by far any of NASA's achievements.

Today, several other space companies have been formed. They routinely carry out space missions without the many difficulties that plagued NASA's shuttle program.

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