The Space Shuttle Must Be Stopped — Feb. 10, 2003
Gregg Easterbrook wrote an article for Time magazine:The Space Shuttle Must Be Stopped. The basic argument is that pork barrel politics have kept the shuttle program going, rather than being replaced by a more rational combination of cheap unmanned launches and the development of a new space plane for the situations where a manned launch is necessary. The current shuttle program is so expensive it sucks resources from any research that may develop a shuttle replacement. The contractors that maintain and operate the shuttle liked the status quo — a complicated-to-maintain ship implies large contractor fees indefinitely. Easterbrook had written an article for the Washington Monthly in 1980 about the hazards of the shuttle.
One thing he didn’t note in this most recent article is that the shuttle program as constituted is almost a dollar-auction, where no one is willing to throw away the already large investment into a clearly suboptimal program. This vacuuming up of other resources locks into place a technology system designed in the 1960s and built in the 1970s; he does note that the heat tiles for the shuttle were developed before new discoveries in materials sciences, and that the computers were stunningly old. He doesn’t follow up with the idea that in an era of rapid technological change, the operating life spans for these sorts of vehicles should be designed to be relatively short or upgradeable, rather than for four decades long. New generations of space planes will take advantage of new technology. We shouldn’t be stuck with the vehicles we built twenty years ago. We shouldn’t plan on using them for the next twenty years.