Bruce Moomaw
Wed, 05 Mar 2003 18:20:33 -0800
...in a debate in the Raleigh News Observer: http://newsobserver.com/news/story/2274980p-2136404c.html
Every point I've made, he also makes -- and more. He also cuts the Gordian
knot of what to do about the Station by warming up an idea I was wondering
about for years before the latest accident, but had put on the back burner
because someone told me they thought it was impractical: turn the damned
thing into a man-tended -- rather than permanently manned -- lab, to at
least minimize the number of remaining Shuttle visits that must be made.
(And, yes, this will involve decreasing the number of onboard experiments.
Too bad.)
"I put the so-called space science done on the Shuttle and Station in two
categories. One is to conduct experiments that don't need people there.
That Israeli astronaut died because he was up there to push a button on a
camera. We do exactly what he was doing with automated spacecraft all the
time...The only experiments that need people there are human physiology
experiments, and those are all directed at solving the problem of
deterioration of human physiology in prolonged periods of weightlessness.
We've been doing that for 40 years. We've got an awful lot of data on that.
NASA needs to process the data it already has. Remember, we're waiting to
hear about John Glenn's experiment, octogenarians in space. This is all
made-up hokey stuff; there's nothing serious going on."
As for the supposed desire of other countries for manned flight: "To be
perfectly honest, if you look at the Shuttle mission, what did the Israelis
want? They didn't want an experiment that was conducted from the shuttle...
They wanted a hero. That's what everybody wants... So I think every time we
do go up to visit the [man-tended Station], we'll take one national hero up,
and they can get their time in space."
He also points out in an associated article ("We're Shackled by the
Shuttle") that, while NASA admits to a cost of $450 million per Shuttle
flight, the real cost per flight is somewhere between 1 and 1.5 billion.
And he repeats something pointed out to me by Jeffrey Bell: since most of
the cost of building the Hubble Telescope went into its initial development,
we could build and launch, on an unmanned booster, a completely new (and
somewhat improved) copy of the Hubble for much less than the cost of each
individual Shuttle mission to service the current one. In short, he agrees
with me completely that the entire manned space program, at least since
Apollo, has been a total and cold-bloodedly deliberate fraud by NASA, and
that it will be a long time before we get one that might actually be worth
the cost.
(My thanks to Gail Leatherwood for pointing out this article, which I would
never have seen otherwise.)
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