Cohete sin destino

Soy lo suficientemente mayor para recordar que el Transbordador Espacial iba a volar una vez por semana, que produciría una cantidad asombrosa de avances científicos y que sería tan barato que un ciudadano privado casi podría permitirse mandar carga al espacio. Varios años después, ha quedado claro que el transbordador es una máquina penosa que ha logrado pocos de sus objetivos y que además ha puesto en peligro la ciencia en el espacio. Su dependencia absoluta del vuelo espacial tripulado -que sólo se puede justificar recurriendo a las falacias emocionales y a cantos ideológicos como la «exploración» o el «destino de la humanidad»- lo han malogrado como vehículo útil. Mientras tanto, las naves automáticas son las que han investigado en el espacio y las que han producido conocimiento científico de verdad.

A Rocket To Nowhere analiza la historia del aparato, desde su concepción inicial:

By the time Shuttle development began, it was clear that the original vision of a Shuttle as part of a larger space transportation system was far too costly and ambitious to receive Congressional support. So NASA concentrated on building only the first component of its vision, a reusable manned spacecraft that could reach low earth orbit. Since NASA assumed it would be able to fly Shuttle missions with a turnaround time as low as two weeks, this left the vexing question of what to do with all that spare launch capacity. The tiny commercial launch market was in no shape to supply such a wealth of satellites, so NASA turned to the one agency that had an abundance of things requiring shooting into space – the Air Force – and asked it to abandon its unmanned rocket programs, instead committing all future satellite launches to the Shuttle.

The Air Force was only too happy to agree, but at a crippling price. What the Air Force wanted to launch was spy satellites – lots of them, bulky telescopes with heavy mirrors, the bigger the better – and it wanted to launch them in an orbit over the Earth’s poles, so they could snoop over the maximum amount of Red territory. This meant NASA had to go back to the drawing board, since polar orbits would require a heavier orbiter than the Shuttle design had anticipated, which in turn meant using a bigger rocket at launch, and dissipating more heat during re-entry.

Hasta sus «experimentos»:

This brings up a delicate point about justifying manned missions with science. In order to make any straight-faced claims about being cost effective, you have to cart an awful lot of science with you into orbit, which in turns means you need to make the experiments as easy to operate as possible. But if the experiments are all automated, you remove the rationale for sending a manned mission in the first place. Apart from question-begging experiments on the physiology of space flight, there is little you can do to resolve this dilemma. In essence, each ‘pure science’ Shuttle science mission consists of several dozen automated experiments alongside an enormous, irrelevant, repeated experiment in keeping a group of primates alive and healthy outside the atmosphere.

Hasta las conclusiones:

Meanwhile, while the Shuttle has been up on blocks, a wealth of unmanned probes has been doing exactly the kind of exploration NASA considers so important, except without the encumbrance of big hairless monkeys on board. And therein lies another awkward fact for NASA. While half the NASA budget gets eaten by the manned space program, the other half is quietly spent on true aerospace work and a variety of robotic probes of immense scientific value. All of the actual exploration taking place at NASA is being done by unmanned vehicles. And when some of those unmanned craft fail, no one is killed, and the unmanned program is not halted for three years.

Over the past three years, while the manned program has been firing styrofoam out of cannons on the ground, unmanned NASA and ESA programs have been putting landers on Titan, shooting chunks of metal into an inbound comet, driving rovers around Mars and continuing to gather a variety of priceless observations from the many active unmanned orbital telescopes and space probes sprinkled through the Solar System. At the same time, the skeleton crew on the ISS has been fixing toilets, debugging laptops, changing batteries, and speaking to the occasional elementary school over ham radio.

NASA is convinced that stopping the Shuttle program would mean an indefinite end to American manned space flight, and so it will go to almost any length to make sure there is a continuous manned presence in space. The arguments in its defense may be disingenuous, this reasoning goes, but the manned program is an irreplaceable asset in itself, as well as a high-profile mission that keeps funding flowing in for worthy but less glamorous NASA activities.

But this attitude is actually doing damage to the prospects of real manned space exploration. Sinking half the NASA budget into the Shuttle and ISS precludes the possibility of doing truly groundbreaking work on space flight. As the orbiters age, their upkeep and safety requirements are becoming an expensive antiquarian exercise, forcing engineers to spend their ingenuity repairing obsolete components and devising expensive maintenance techniques for sclerotic spacecraft, rather than applying their lessons to a new generation of rockets. The retardant effect the Shuttle has had on technology (like the two decades long freeze in expendable rocket development) outweighs any of its modest initial benefits to materials science, aerodynamics, and rocket design.

Que lo disfruten.

(vía rc3.org)