2012 Issue

29 A MERICA’S SPACE PROGRAM has been very much in the news lately, with the end of the Space Shuttle program and the ongoing debate about where to go and how to get there. What does it all mean? I’m going to take you on a guided tour of where we are and where we should go. Admittedly, I am not an impartial observer. I’ve been a space enthusiast since I was a kid. I remember watching the first shuttle mission land. I mourned with everyone else after the Challenger and Columbia disasters. I still go outside to watch the In- ternational Space Station (ISS) fly overhead. Moreover, as I’ve learned about the engi- neering challenges involved in space travel, it’s only become more interesting. And I currently work for ATK Aerospace Systems, analyzing the new SLS vehicle. So where are we? We landed six missions on the moon, beginning in 1969. We haven’t been back since 1972. The Space Shuttle flew beginning in 1981, delivering astronauts, telescopes, satellites, experi- ments, and most recently, the ISS to Low Earth Orbit (LEO). Now the Shuttle has been retired, and access to the ISS is cur- rently limited to the Russian Soyuz vehicle. We’re at a decision point in the space pro- gram. We need to decide where we want to go and how we want to get there. The on-going federal budget woes also have an impact, since we need to have a way to pay for it. Why Do We Explore? First, we need to decide whether or not we want to go anywhere. There are those who argue that we should explore via robotic missions and spend the budget elsewhere. Why do we explore? In my mind, we ex- plore because we are human. If we can see it, we want to go and experience it. We want to know what’s beyond what we can see. We want to know whether we can rise to the challenges of the new location. And we have the hope that we can make a better life there. This drive to explore is what pushed the Europeans to settle in the Americas, what pushed the early American colonists over the Appalachian ridge, what drew pioneers along the Oregon trail. It’s why we build submersibles to explore the depths of the ocean. We want to go and see and know. We are harnessing this drive as we attempt to expand beyond our tiny blue home planet. We want to go see what’s out there and whether we can make a life there. I think the logical first step is a permanent settlement on themoon. We want to get to America’s Space Program By Terry D. Haws, Jr, PE Mars and even beyond, but we should take it in smaller chunks. If you’ve decided to go live in the middle of the Sahara desert, you would probably want to first make a few test runs in our ownWest desert – try things out a bit closer to home in case some of your ideas don’t work as well as you had hoped. Once we’ve figured out living on themoon, we can tackle the challenges of travelling to Mars. And along the way we can go explore asteroids and Lagrange points, but those are more steps along the way than destinations – when I travel, I want to go visit somewhere, not just stop at milepost 372 to take a picture and go home. How Do We Get There? There’s been a lot of noise and commotion lately about how to have a space program, but the arguments have generated more entropy than anything else. There are those who argue for purely commercial access to space – NASA and others paying compa- nies to deliver astronauts and supplies to LEO. Others argue that NASA should take the lead in developing the launch vehicles. The path most likely to work at this point is somewhere in between. Currently, there isn’t enough demand to support a purely commercial access-to-space paradigm. But the demand will come. So we should be exploring commercial options. Having NASA involved is also necessary, as they have the money and the experience. Getting to space is hard. There are somany variables and things that can go wrong. Even lots of experience doesn’t always guarantee success, as evidenced by the recent Soyuz failure. Soyuz has successfully launched hundreds of times, but it failed because a blocked duct cut off fuel flow to the gas generator on the third stage ( Space Travel News 2011 ). If we are to succeed at space travel, we all need to work together, in as many creative ways as we can think of. Commercial companies like SpaceX and Orbital have contracts to deliver cargo to the ISS. SpaceX has successfully tested its SPACE PROGRAM | continued on page 30