The Space Shuttle Discovery landed safely in California this morning. Given the problems that developed from the start of the mission, this is good news, and I’m glad that the astronauts made it home safely. That said, I think its time to shut the Shuttle program down completely.
Already, NASA has admitted that the 2 1/2 year gap between the Columbia disaster and the launch of Discovery last month was not enough time to develop effective solutions to the many problems that the Shuttle faces. The shuttle fleet may be grounded now, but it seems unlikely that things will be any different the next time they launch a shuttle.
The shuttle program is 1970s technology performing a mission from the 1960s. The manned space program, which was sending men to the moon in 1972, has spent the last 25 years orbiting the Earth in a big space truck that does little more at this point than help maintain the International Space Station — also known as the early 21st century version of Spacelab.
Where is the vision of the early days of the space program ? Outside of the unmanned probes to Mars and the outer planets, it certainly isn’t at NASA. The future of manned space flight is being made not in Florida or Houston, but by the people involved in projects such as the Ansari X-Prize. While NASA worries about how to fix the aging shuttle fleet, the teams competing for the X Prize are making history. Its time for NASA to get out of the way.
December 9th, 2006 at 8:15 am
[...] I’ve said much the same thing myself before here and here [...]