Then he goes on to a more rational explanation of why the
Shuttle Program (and space station) look like they do, much of it rooted in the
Cold War. Now that those goals are irrelevant, its purpose becomes
circular:
In the thirty years since the last Moon flight, we have succeeded
in creating a perfectly self-contained manned space program, in
which the Shuttle goes up to save the Space Station (undermanned,
incomplete, breaking down, filled with garbage, and dropping at a
hundred meters per day), and the Space Station offers the Shuttle
a mission and a destination. The Columbia accident has added a
beautiful finishing symmetry - the Shuttle is now required to fly
to the ISS, which will serve as an inspection station for the
fragile thermal tiles, and a lifeboat in case something goes
seriously wrong.
This closed cycle is so perfect that the last NASA administrator
even cancelled the only mission in which there was a compelling
need for a manned space flight - the Hubble telescope repair and
upgrade - on the grounds that it would be too dangerous to fly the
Shuttle away from the ISS, thereby detaching the program from its
last connection to reason and leaving it free to float off into
its current absurdist theater of backflips, gap fillers, Canadarms
and heroic expeditions to the bottom of the spacecraft.
There is no satisfactory answer for why all this commotion must
take place in orbit. To the uneducated mind, it would seem we
could accomplish our current manned space flight objectives more
easily by not launching any astronauts into space at all - leaving
the Shuttle and ISS on the ground would result in massive savings
without the slighest impact on basic science, while also
increasing mission safety by many orders of magnitude. It might
even bring mission costs within the original 1970's estimates, and
allow us to continue the Shuttle program well into the middle of
the century.
The entire post is quite good, and altogether more informative than the
conclusion that I quote here.
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