AMERICA:Yesterday's launch was the end of an era, and possibly the end of US supremacy in space
EACH TIME he laments the US falling behind in the study of science, President Barack Obama speaks of America’s “Sputnik moment”, an allusion to the panic in the US when Russia launched its first satellite in 1957. The space race started the following year, when Dwight D Eisenhower founded the space agency Nasa.
So there's a certain irony in the fact that after the scheduled return of the Atlantisspace shuttle on July 20th, the US will have to rely on Russian Soyuz spacecraft to take US astronauts into space.
The exploration of space was an integral part of the Cold War, but it was also more than that – an inspiration and an aspiration. John F Kennedy called space “the new frontier” when he announced, 50 years ago, that the US would send a man to the moon. Ronald Reagan turned his initiation of the space station programme in 1984 into a morality lesson for the world, saying, “We are first; we are the best; and we are so because we’re free.”
Yesterday’s space shuttle launch was the end of an era, and possibly the end of US supremacy in space. No other country has put a man on the moon, but nine countries – including India, Israel and Iran – have put payloads in space.
More than 50 countries have their own satellites. India and Russia are co-operating on a robotic moon mission.
Over the past 30 years, the space shuttle programme has sent five airplane-like capsules on half a billion miles of space travel, equivalent to 2,248 trips to the moon, or 5.7 times the distance from the Earth to the sun.
The 135 US missions built the football field-sized International Space Station and dispatched the Magellan, Ulyssesand Galileospace probes towards Venus, the sun and Jupiter. They put the Hubble space telescope in place, and made several maintenance missions to Hubble.
Richard Nixon, who started the space shuttle mission, predicted flights would cost as little as $7 million each, and that each capsule could be used 100 times. The shuttle never fulfilled his promises. Each mission costs $500 million, and Discovery, the most-travelled shuttle, flew only 38 times.
Nixon envisaged the shuttle as a kind of commuter bus; it was more like a delivery lorry. And it was marred by tragedy. Who can forget the horrific site of the Challengerblowing up in the sky over Florida in 1986, and Columbia disintegrating over Texas as it re-entered Earth's atmosphere in 2003? Both disasters were the result of design flaws.
Now the space shuttle mission is over. Perhaps, as the conservative commentator Charles Krauthammer wrote, it belongs in the "Museum of Things Too Beautiful and Complicated to Survive." After its return, Atlantisis destined for a museum, like its predecessors Endeavourand Discovery. In the past, a second shuttle was on hand to rescue astronauts if necessary. If for any reason Atlantisis not able to bring its crew home, the Americans will have to wait in the space station with the six international astronauts living there until they can hitch a lift with the Russians.
Nasa has many plans, most of them unfunded and unconfirmed. Only this week, a House committee cut funds for Nasa’s James Webb telescope. Nasa’s budget for fiscal 2011 is $18.5 billion – 0.5 per cent of the $3.7 trillion federal budget, or roughly what Americans spend on pet food each year. But at a time of 9.2 per cent unemployment, space exploration is a hard sell with voters.
The trend in the US is towards privatising the space programme. Nasa administrator Charles Bolden told the National Press Club on July 1st: “We have to get out of the business of owning and operating low earth orbit transportation systems and hand that off to the private sector.”
But will Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic and similar companies be willing to invest the billions in research that have led to important spin-offs in medical, radio, sensory and other technologies? Nasa executives and former astronauts have broken with tradition in expressing their angst over the unmapped future of America’s space programme. “The end of the shuttle programme is a tough thing to swallow, and we’re all victims of poor policy out of Washington,” Michael Leinbach, the director for yesterday’s launch reportedly told his team.
The Obama administration has kept development of the next- generation manned spacecraft Orion on a drip feed, but scrapped the lander programme that goes with it. Obama has spoken of a mission to a near-Earth asteroid. Grounded astronauts dream of a mission to Mars.
For Nasa, unmanned missions are where the action is. The Mars rover Curiosity, about the size of a Mini Cooper car, will be launched in November and arrive on Mars in August 2012. A probe called Juno will head to Jupiter next month, for arrival in July 2016.
