End Of An Era

So, the last space shuttle mission ended today. I've read and heard a number of people say that it is a sad thing. But, I don't see it that way. The space shuttles had a degree of coolness, but to be honest I'm glad they're done. In fact, I belong to the school of thought that manned space travel is a bad idea.

I shall explain.

One of the issues you have when you put a man into space is that you kind of need to bring him back. This means that in addition to the man, you need a vehicle. This vehicle needs a lot of fuel. This in turn means that you need a lot more fuel to get the man and his vehicle and its fuel into space in the first place. A Saturn V rocket was 363 feet tall and weighed seven million pounds, all necessary so that three men could go to the moon and back (and only two of them actually got to land - one had to stay in orbit). That's a lot. No other rocket comes close. I can't imagine how big a rocket you would need to send men to Mars and back.

Of course, going to Mars would mean a multi-stage mission, not a single shot. Probably an enhanced space station would be built to support a permanent moon base. The Mars mission would depart from there, probably with the crew in one rocket and supplies in other rockets. All just to get some men there who would take some pictures, collect some rocks, and then scamper for home.

Meanwhile, we are already exploring Mars. Mariner, Viking, Global Surveyor, Phoenix, Pathfinder, Odyssey, Spirit and Opportunity, Reconnaissance Orbiter, ... The list keeps growing, and each mission is more sophisticated than the last. There have been plenty of failed missions as well, but the price of failure is a hundred pounds of scrap metal smeared across a Martian plain. That's a lot cheaper than a half dozen human beings smeared across the same plain. A robotic explorer doesn't need food or water or exercise equipment or a toilet, and it doesn't need fuel to bring it back to earth. A human explorer may be able to do more than a single robot, but every year the gap is narrowing. How many robotic explorers could we send to Mars for the cost of a manned mission? Hundreds? Thousands? Not exciting, not glamorous, but we'd learn far more about another planet.

The space shuttle is basically a dump truck. Big payload, powerful but short-range rockets. To keep the cost down, it was designed withe the rockets, the fuel tanks, the payload, and the crew all side-by-side, rather than stacked like a conventional rocket. This meant that when something went wrong, as it did with Challenger in '86 and Columbia in '03, the crews were vulnerable, and they died. In both cases, cost- and PR-conscious NASA administrators overuled attempts to actually solve the problems, and the crews died. NASA has become as clumsy and badly-configured as the shuttles themselves.

Seeing people be launched into space, and safely return, is a stirring sight. But is it worth it, when there are cheaper, better ways that don't put brave people at risk? I don't think so.