On Fri, 7 Feb 2003 03:58:11 -0800, Sean Lynch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
><http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2001/8004.easterbrook-fulltext.html> Take everything Easterbrook with a large grain of salt. More properly, a large halite crystal. No, larger than that. Can you lift it? Too small, get a bigger one. His 1980 piece is no more accurate than his post-Columbia piece, of which I said on aRocket, ***** begin extract ***** I disagree mildly with the author's conclusions, but I disagree strongly with his approach and his timing. In addition, some of his statements of fact are anything but. If this article had first appeared in a spaceflight forum - here, for example - it would have been correctly labeled a rant, a troll, and flamebait. Shame on Gregg Easterbrook. Easterbrook calls for immediate retirement of the Shuttle, even if that means no human spaceflight for ten years. He hasn't done his homework: there have been four fatal accidents in human spaceflight; no Russian rocket needs to be launched to retrieve the Expedition Six crew, as Soyuz-TMA 1 is currently docked as a lifeboat; Thiokol engineers did not "beg NASA not to launch Challenger, and were ignored;" the Rogers Commission did not recommend essentially no changes; new safety systems *were* added to the SRBs; an escape capsule would not have helped the crew of Columbia, who never knew they were in trouble, and died so fast they never felt it; "go at throttle up," was not a vow but a simple acknowledgement; and applying maximum thrust is not what killed Challenger. If he had gotten *all* of his facts straight, and scaled his rhetoric way back, he would have written a good article, and it would be one with which I would agree completely. The Shuttle is indeed wasting a lot of money; the ISS is indeed a boondoggle; the human and cargo missions should indeed be separated; and we should not fly humans on demonstrably unsafe vehicles where we can do the job with robots. None of those things mean we should stop the Shuttle program today and consider abolishing NASA. That Easterbrook recommends we should tells me he has no experience inside the Beltway, where his proposal would have to be enthusiastically adopted to have any chance of success, and will instead be ignored like the rant it is. A more sensible proposal would be to be figure out how much it would cost to replace Columbia, including launch costs over her projected remaining lifetime, use a small fraction of that money to buy enough Soyuz launches to fly those missions, and pocket the difference. We would save billions of dollars, and probably a shuttle crew or two along the way. No, they wouldn't be American flights demonstrating American technological superiority. Well what's better, showing off, or flying the mission? I want to fly the mission. Easterbrook also didn't talk about what might replace the Shuttle he wants to kill. I learned a long time ago that if you're going to carp about the problem, you'll be taken a lot more seriously if you have a solution available. ***** end extract ***** >Even the Hubble is only there to justify the Shuttle's existence, as is >the ISS. While I agree that Shuttle and Station are used to justify each other in a marvelously circular fashion (we need Shuttle to build Station; we need Station to give Shuttle something to do), the same cannot be said of Hubble. Hubble would have gone up on a Titan IV if it couldn't go Shuttle. And then we would have been *truly* screwed. Easterbrook also flatly states in his 1980 article that the Shuttle cannot retrieve or repair satellites. This will come as a surprise to the managers of Solar Max, which was repaired on STS 41-C; to the owners of Westar-VI and Palapa-B2, which were retrieved on STS 51-A; and to the owners of Leasat-3, which was retrieved, repaired, *and redeployed* on STS 51-I. >There are plenty of people now campaigning to get a replacement for >Columbia built as quickly as possible. Perhaps ERPS (or a related group) >should commit itself to campaigning *against* replacing Columbia, and >perhaps to scuttling the Shuttle program altogether. ERPS is forbidden by the Internal Revenue Code, and our charter, from lobbying. Besides that, making a stink in the name of space development is best left to Rick Tumlinson and the Space Frontier Foundation, who have been politically astute enough to say nothing controversial in these first few days after the tragedy; besides that, the case against replacing Columbia is already strong (Endeavor, Atlantis, and Discovery are pretty much dedicated to ISS construction for the next few years, so the loss of Columbia, which could barely support ISS, will not have a large impact). Besides that, campaigning to scuttle the Shuttle program is a complete waste of time, except that people with long memories and deep pockets wouldn't like it. Since we're trying to stay beneath the notice of such people, campaigning against Shuttle would be unwise. Remember: we're not trying to defeat NASA. We're trying to obsolesce them. -R -- Every complex, difficult problem has a simple, easy solution - which is wrong. 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