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EDITORIAL: Set a New Course: 20 Years After Challenger Tragedy, Space Program Needs Reasonable Goals

Posted on: Saturday, 28 January 2006, 15:00 CST

By The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio

Jan. 28--Today marks the passage of 20 years since the Challenger shuttle exploded soon after liftoff, killing the seven astronauts.

President Reagan predicted during his famous "Challenger Seven" speech that humans always will strive to slip "the surly bonds of Earth."

"The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them."

But now the future of NASA's manned space program is in doubt. Wednesday is the third anniversary of the Columbia shuttle disaster. During shuttle Discovery's mission in August, which was supposed to ease U.S. astronauts back into regularly scheduled flights, similar problems cropped up, but they were detected and fixed during a spacewalk. The next shuttle mission has been delayed until May so that engineers can work out the bugs.

The space shuttle was designed from scratch in the 1970s to be a relatively inexpensive, reusable vehicle. It has turned out to be stupendously complicated and expensive. Any of the 2.5 million aging shuttle parts could malfunction. Even if none of the three remaining orbiters launches within the year, simply maintaining the fleet costs $5 billion annually.

Before that fated launch on Jan. 28, 1986, Americans had begun to take for granted that shuttle astronauts would return to Earth safely. Even a teacher, Christa McAuliffe, went along for the ride, intending to become the first civilian in space.

Thus, the Challenger explosion became a formative memory for the millions of children who watched those surreal 73 seconds in school that morning.

Reagan addressed the nation's youngsters during his speech the following week:

"I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave."

No more civilians since then have been given a ride by NASA, with the exception of former astronaut John Glenn, who returned to space aboard Discovery in 1998 at age 77. Astronauts haven't set foot on the moon since 1972.

President Bush wants to change that with his moon-to-Mars goal. Reaching the moon by 2020 and then setting up a base from which to reach the Red Planet would cost hundreds of billions of dollars.

The space program has lost much momentum since the excitement of the Apollo missions in the 1960s and early '70s. Even the complacency about the space program in the early 1980s was better than the doubt surrounding it now.

So far, the best reason anyone can give for new U.S. manned missions is: Why not? A more appropriate question: Why?

But the National Aeronautics and Space Administration has had some exciting and recent successes. The scientific value of unmanned missions has been unbeatable in recent years, winning fans and endangering only machinery.

The Mars rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, have been going strong for two years, eight times as long as their original mission goal.

On Jan. 15, the Stardust capsule landed perfectly in Utah, bringing the first sample of comet dust, material unchanged for 4.5 billion years.

These are the sort of missions in which NASA should be investing.

Until a project can be developed with compelling objectives for which machines are inadequate -- and the spending makes sense -- manned space travel just doesn't add up. Space newcomers such as China, Europe and Japan may feel the need to replicate American space feats, but they soon will find that they cannot escape the surly bonds of logic and economics, either.

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Copyright (c) 2006, The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio

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Source: The Columbus Dispatch, Ohio

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