Sometimes words are superfluous. An image is enough — like the one displayed on giant posters on auditorium walls throughout the Johnson Space Centre, near Houston.
They spell out Nasa’s aims in stark and unequivocal terms. A shuttle takes off in a plume of flame and smoke; in the background Earth’s blue orb hangs in space; behind is the moon; and beyond that is a red planet, its surface riven with canyons. You get the point. The United States is going to Mars.
For Nasa’s astronauts, scientists and officials who have gathered to prepare for the return to flight of the space shuttle — scheduled for this week — this is their real purpose. The pain and effort of returning to space is just a small step to the re-emergence of the US space dream and the long march to Mars.
”Flying in space has a purpose to it,” says Eileen Collins, who will captain Discovery, the first shuttle to take to space since the loss of its sister ship Columbia on February 2003. ”We very much believe in it. It is something people did back in the 1500s when new lands were discovered and people were brave enough to go out to sea.”
For the first time in a generation, it would seem that Nasa has a straightforward space plan for the next 20 years, one that can be summed up in the simple phrase: moon, Mars and beyond.
The idea was outlined by US President George Bush last year and envisages Americans returning to the moon in 15 years. Bases there will then serve as a launch pad for Mars.
”We do not know where this journey will end, yet we know this — human beings are headed into the cosmos,” Bush declared.
It sounds great. There are some problems, however. Indeed, some observers believe there is a prohibitively long and dangerous list of them. And one of the most worrying is the shuttle itself. Of the five of these spaceships that have been built, two have been destroyed in service, killing 14 astronauts.
It is now considered safer to ride on one of Russia’s creaking old Soyuz rockets — designed in the Soviet era and once derided as orbiting rust-buckets — than fly on a craft that was originally hailed by Nasa as the most sophisticated flying machine built to date.
In fact, this week’s flight of Discovery, scheduled to lift off from the Kennedy Space Centre on Wednesday, is really only a test mission to try out ways of repairing the shuttle in orbit in case another catastrophe starts to unfold and threatens what remains of Nasa’s ageing fleet of spaceships.
Columbia was doomed when pieces of insulation fell from a fuel tank and smashed through panels on the main craft’s wing. The crew went through their entire mission unaware that Columbia would be incinerated when they tried to re-enter the Earth’s atmosphere. Nasa is determined this will not happen again.
Cameras — on the launch pad, on the shuttle itself and on nearby aircraft — will track falling debris. After that will come inspections, by the shuttle crew using robot cameras in space, and, if serious damage is found, Nasa has developed a variety of patching methods to cover holes in the shuttle’s outer skin: mainly forms of putty or bandages.
Uncannily, this kit bears a striking resemblance to the contents of a bicycle-tyre repair bag and reveals the administration’s desperate levels to keep its space fleet in operation. Nor is it clear that its extra-terrestrial grouting kit will work in space.
”Some things you cannot test on the ground,” admits Steve Poulos, a Nasa manager at Houston.
What if?
So what will happen if a hole is found, a space repair proves useless and Collins and her six crewmen are marooned in space? The answer, says Nasa, is its ”Safe Haven” plan. The crew will bail out of Discovery, climb into the International Space Station (their mission destination) and wait — amid rapidly dwindling oxygen and water supplies — for a rescue shuttle to arrive from Earth.
Given that it will take at least 32 days to get one aloft and that the space station will only be able to support Discovery‘s crew for 45 days, this safe haven has a narrow window for success.
”It is a high-risk option and we don’t want to have to risk it if we don’t have to,” says Wayne Hale, deputy manager of the shuttle programme.
Such an incident would end the shuttle programme, of course, because it would still be seen as a disaster for the project. It would also freeze all human spaceflights for the foreseeable future — including Bush’s plan to go to the moon, Mars and beyond — for basic, logistical reasons. Nasa needs the space station to act as a staging post to get to the moon and then to Mars.
The station is only half-built and it will take all three remaining space shuttles, operating flat-out over 28 flights, to complete it by the end of 2010. This is the date decreed by Bush for the grounding of Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour, which will have reached the end of their working lives.
Nasa has already been charged with designing a new, much simpler and smaller launch vehicle for its astronauts. This will certainly not have the capacity to carry the huge components needed to finish off the station, however. Only the shuttle can do that.
Thus Nasa’s dream hangs by a thread, which is why Wednesday’s mission is being watched with such intensity. This is the agency’s last chance to set up a sustained human spaceflight programme.
One more failure, one further shuttle loss, and there will be no more space station, no moon base and no man on Mars. And as risk analysts now rate the chance of Discovery, Atlantis or Endeavour being lost in flight as more than 40%, we get a measure of the headaches facing Nasa’s new boss, Michael Griffin.
Space-station controversy
But even if things go well with the station’s construction, its use has become mired in controversy. Nasa’s partners on the project are unhappy that the US has unilaterally changed its use from orbiting laboratory to interplanetary staging post.
Japan, Canada and Europe have paid billions of dollars to join the venture and were already peeved when its construction was halted two-and-a-half years ago when Columbia blew up. The European Space Agency believes that delay cost it almost €500 000.
”Columbia was destroyed around Saturday lunchtime on February 1 2003, and within half an hour, we had put together a team to find out how we were going to react to this thing,” says Alan Thirkettle, a director of human spaceflight for the European Space Agency. ”It has been a bloody miserable time since then. It is not fun going through this kind of stuff.”
European space administrators have also been angered by Nasa bureaucrats who have threatened to refuse European astronauts access to some space-station equipment because this might contravene US technology-transfer laws.
Even more controversial has been the US decision to concentrate all experiments on the station on astronauts to see how well they could cope with lengthy Mars mission — those aboard that flight will have to survive years in interplanetary space.
As a result, almost every space-station experiment is geared to examining such factors as the effect of zero gravity on bones, muscle loss and the impact of radiation on the human body.
”We have had to refocus the science we are doing. We want to bring down the risk of sending people to the moon and Mars and beyond,” said Don Thomas, a programme scientist with the space station.
This is no minor shift of priorities but a complete change in use of the station. It was sold to American citizens — as well as those of Europe, Canada and Japan — as a unique scientific laboratory for carrying out research in materials, biology and medicine. Now Nasa is trying to turn it into a zero-gravity gym, an idea that appalls many Americans as well as Europeans.
”This impressive facility cannot be allowed to be used simply as a tool for moon and Mars exploration-related research,” Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison recently warned a House hearing on the station.
Cutbacks for Mars
And then there is the issue of cash. Bush has directed Nasa to get to the moon and Mars but with no extra funds. As a result, the agency has embarked on a major series of cutbacks in projects to fund Bush’s vaguely defined Mars plan.
Half-a-dozen Earth observation missions, crucial to understanding global warming, have been cancelled; the Voyager missions, now sweeping into deep space beyond the edge of the solar system, are threatened with being switched off; and a probe to Europa, which has a possible life-bearing ocean of water beneath its icy surface, is facing the axe.
Both vision and commitment are needed to send men to the Moon and planets. Bush has provided only the former and has charged Nasa with repairing the shuttle, completing the space station, designing and constructing a new manned space launcher, building a moon base and sending men to Mars with no mention of an increase in its budget. It won’t work, say observers.
The problem for many of these scientists and engineers is a simple, ultimately profound one: it lies with putting humans in space, a largely unnecessary and dangerous activity when robots can explore the universe for a 100th of the cost and at no risk to life. This is not a point that Nasa is prepared to acknowledge, however, and it has indulged in a barrage of rhetoric to back its man in space plans, often using Discovery‘s astronauts as front men for its cause.
Human beings, says Steve Robinson, who will conduct several space-walks during the shuttle’s mission, just cannot stop themselves from looking around the next corner. Exploration is hardwired into our natures.
”I finally don’t think we can help it,” he says.
Japanese astronaut Soichi Noguchi, who will fly on Discovery, is even more direct: ”I just want to go to see the Earth from outside. I want to have just glass between me and space.”
It is laudable and touching. Yet the embarrassing fact remains that the cutting edge of space exploration in the past decade has been done by robots. Two automated rovers are currently driving around on the surface of Mars, having spent more than a year investigating the planet’s surface by digging trenches and probing rocks. Other craft are circling Mars, mapping the surface in detail that rivals that of our knowledge of Earth and even probing below the surface, using radar, to search for potentially life-giving water.
Elsewhere, a robot lander has touched down on the surface of Titan, one of the Saturn’s moons. Another has parked itself in orbit around the ringed planet for a long mission to explore its complex system of moons. And just last week, another Nasa probe fired a projectile into a comet, analysing the resulting spray of material for clues to the early origins of the solar system. Ironically, these are the types of missions that are now threatened by Bush’s Mars programme.
In the end, the return of the shuttle to space duties is unavoidable and inevitable. If nothing else, there is a clear, strong sense at Nasa of owing it to its dead astronauts to get the shuttle back into space.
”It will be closure for everybody to have the space shuttle flying again,” says Collins.
Just how long it remains there, in active duty, is now the most pressing issue facing the world’s greatest space power. — Guardian Unlimited Â