Posts Tagged ‘NASA’

Space shuttle Atlantis lands, ending an era at NASA

Thursday, July 21st, 2011

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The shuttle Atlantis touched down before dawn on Thursday, marking the sunset of NASA’s 30-year space shuttle program.

Landing came at 5:57 a.m. ET, less than an hour before sunrise at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center in Florida, where the last operating space shuttle will make its home in retirement.

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Atlantis commander Chris Ferguson said the shuttle’s final touchdown would be emotional, and he was true to his word. “After serving the world for over 30 years, the space shuttle’s earned its place in history. And it’s come to a final stop,” he said.

“Job well done, America,” Mission Control communicator Barry Wilmore replied.

Ferguson went on to say that the shuttle program “has changed the way we view the world, and it’s changed the way we view our universe.”

“There are a lot of emotions today, but one things indisputable: America’s not going to stop exploring,” he vowed.

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden voiced a similar sentiment in remarks released after the landing: “This final shuttle flight marks the end of an era, but today, we recommit ourselves to continuing human spaceflight and taking the necessary — and difficult — steps to ensure America’s leadership in human spaceflight for years to come.”

Hundreds turned out at Kennedy Space Center to witness the last-ever landing of a space shuttle. An estimated 4,000 shuttle program workers, many of whom will be losing their jobs due to the fleet’s retirement, gathered to watch TV coverage at Johnson Space Center in Texas. Inside Mission Control, team members and VIPs shook hands, hugged and took pictures of each other to document the occasion.

“Right now, at this moment, it’s a celebratory mood,” shuttle systems instructor Michael Grabois said via telephone from Mission Control. “We all know it’s the end of the program … but we’re all here to savor the moment.”

Grabois is due to be laid off next month.

NASA and the White House decided years ago, in the wake of the shuttle Columbia’s tragic breakup in 2003, to retire the space shuttle fleet once it finished its work on the International Space Station. At the time, the plan called for NASA to shift its attention to sending astronauts to the moon. Since then, the Obama administration has revised NASA’s vision to focus on asteroids and Mars rather than the moon, but the plan for retirement remained.

Thursday was the day that the retirement plan took full effect.

Last visit to space station
During Atlantis’ 13-day mission, astronauts delivered enough supplies to keep the space station going through the end of 2012, dropped off an experiment aimed at testing NASA’s robotic capability to refuel satellites in orbit, loaded up a broken coolant pump module and deployed an experimental mini-satellite. Its cargo included thousands of flags and patches — souvenirs to be distributed when the shuttle era goes into the history books.

“It felt like about a two-month mission crammed into 13 days,” pilot Doug Hurley said.

The job was made more challenging by the fact that Atlantis’ quartet — Ferguson, Hurley and mission specialists Sandy Magnus and Rex Walheim — made up the smallest shuttle crew since 1983. That was because walif anything went wrong with Atlantis during its trip, NASA would have had to rely on a series of Russian Soyuz capsules to rescue the astronauts over the course of nearly a year.

Fortunately, nothing went wrong. Except for a launch-pad hiccup at T-minus-31 seconds and a couple of computer problems, Atlantis’ mission ranked as one of the shuttle fleet’s smoothest space journeys ever. That good fortune continued on Thursday. During the descent, Atlantis “performed absolutely wonderfully — not a glitch,” Ferguson said.

Red-white-and-blue sentiment
The crew was awakened for the final day by the strains of “God Bless America,” as sung by the legendary Kate Smith. Mission communicator Shannon Lucid told Ferguson that the tune was played “for the entire crew and for all the men and women who have put their heart and soul into the shuttle program for all these years.”

“What a classic patriotic song,” Ferguson said. “So appropriate for what will likely be the shuttle’s final day in orbit. …. Thank you to America for supporting this program.”

The 26-year-old Atlantis finished its 33rd and last space mission with 5,284,862 miles on its trip meter, adding up to a total flown distance of 125,935,769 miles. The space shuttle fleet has flown 135 missions in all, rolling up more than 542 million miles of flight.
Among the shuttle program’s top achievements are the orbital deployment of 180 spacecraft, including the Magellan probe to Venus, the Galileo probe to Jupiter and the Hubble Space Telescope; repair missions that saved Hubble from the trash bin of space history; and the 12-year construction effort leading to the completion of the International Space Station.

Entry flight director Tony Ceccacci celebrated the shuttle program’s legacy in closing remarks to his team at Mission Control in Houston: “I believe that the accomplishments of the shuttle program will become the next set of shoulders of giants for the future programs to stand on. Hold your heads up with pride as we close out the space shuttle program. You have earned it.”

The sentiment was similarly strong at Kennedy Space Center. “I saw grown men and grown women crying today — tears of joy, to be sure,” launch director Mike Leinbach told reporters. “”Human emotions came out on the runway today. You couldn’t suppress them.”

Wave of layoffs
The landing was bittersweet, and not just for sentimental reasons: Atlantis’ touchdown signals the beginning of a fresh wave of layoffs for the shuttle program, which has already been hard hit by workforce reductions.

About 3,200 shuttle program contractors are getting pink slips soon after landing, NASA program manager John Shannon said last month. By mid-August, only 1,000 contractors will remain to help with the transition to shuttle retirement, he said. About 1,000 NASA civil servants will be shifted to other duties at the space agency.

Atlantis’ sister shuttles, Discovery and Endeavour, are already being prepared for museum display. Discovery is to go to the Udvar-Hazy Center, an annex of the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum near Washington. Endeavour is destined for the California Science Center in Los Angeles. And Atlantis will be exhibited at Kennedy Space Center’s visitors complex.

The prototype shuttle Enterprise, which was used for atmospheric testing but never flew in orbit, will be moved from its display space at the Smithsonian to New York’s Intrepid Sea, Air and Space Museum, to make room for Discovery.

Fergusoln said he hoped the shuttles would continue to inspire long after their retirement: “I want that picture of a young 6-year-old boy looking up at a space shuttle in a museum and saying, ‘Daddy, I want to do something like that when I grow up,’” he said.

What lies ahead in space
For the next few years, NASA will have to rely on the Russians to ferry astronauts to the space station and back, at a cost of up to $63 million per seat. NASA is also spending hundreds of millions of dollars to support the development of new private-sector spaceships that could carry astronauts starting around 2015.

One of the companies receiving NASA funding, California-based SpaceX, could start taking supplies to the space station by the end of this year. Another company, Virginia-based Orbital Sciences Corp., is on track to start unmanned cargo trips within the next year or two. Other companies hoping to build spaceships for NASA include Blue Origin, the Boeing Co. and Sierra Nevada Corp.

Meanwhile, NASA is proceeding with a multibillion-dollar effort to develop a new crew vehicle called Orion and a new heavy-lift rocket currently known as the Space Launch System. The space agency’s current timetable calls for sending astronauts beyond Earth orbit, to a near-Earth asteroid by the mid-2020s and to Mars by the mid-2030s. That timetable, however, is heavily dependent on funding levels over the next decade.

Ironically, the end of the shuttle era came 42 years and a day after what was arguably NASA’s greatest success: the Apollo 11 moon landing. Thursday also marked exactly 50 years since Mercury astronaut Gus Grissom made America’s second spaceflight.

NASA mission managers vowed to keep the spirit of Mercury, Gemini and Apollo — and the shuttle program — alive during the coming transitional years.

“We know there’s going to be a rough spot for a while,” Ceccacci told journalists on the eve of the landing. “But we hope that when we do get a good plan, a good direction, a good mission, that we can come back in here and do what we’ve been doing for the past 30 years for the shuttle and the years before that with Mercury, Gemini and Apollo.”

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NASA’s Final Shuttle: The End of an Error?

Tuesday, July 5th, 2011

It’s never been hard to blame Richard Nixon for stuff. Communist witch hunts? Nixon. Illegal war in Cambodia? Nixon. Massive corruption and the decades of political cynicism that followed? Nixon and Nixon.

That’s a little glib, of course. Bad wars, crooked pols and red-baiting were all around before the 37th president. And give the man his props too — for the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the EPA, the opening to China, all of which were genuine Nixonian gems.

Then there was the space shuttle, which bears Nixon’s stamp as indelibly as all the rest. It was on Jan. 5, 1972, that Nixon brought the shuttle program into being with a presidential order and an appearance alongside NASA administrator James Fletcher. And this Friday, the 135th and last shuttle mission is scheduled to be launched, ending a program in which five ships carried 777 passengers into space, traveling a collective half a billion miles — or out past the orbit of Jupiter. These shuttles built the International Space Station, carried the Magellan, Ulysses and Galileo probes aloft and sent them on their ways to Venus, the sun and Jupiter respectively. They lofted the Hubble Space telescope too — easily the most productive scientific instrument ever built — and made occasional servicing runs to it, with astronauts conducting surgically precise repair work on the $1.5 billion instrument in the impossibly challenging environment of space. (See incredible pictures of space, shot by an astronaut photographer.)

But there’s the other side of the shuttle too. The $500 million price tag every time one took off, the months of maintenance and prep work needed between flights, the temperamental electronic and hydraulic systems that scrubbed launches time and time again, the thermal tiles the ships would shed like dry leaves. And, finally, there are the 14 astronauts who lost their lives when first Challenger and later Columbia soared aloft but never returned home.

It’s easy both to hate and love a ship like that. Conservative pundit Charles Krauthammer, who yields to no man when it comes to finely crafted crankiness, distilled that kind of cognitive dissonance splendidly once when he wrote that the space shuttle belongs in “the Museum of Things Too Beautiful and Complicated to Survive.”

The fact is, the shuttles almost didn’t exist at all. A reusable, low-orbit space truck was hardly the initial direction NASA was planning to go in the triumphant afterglow of the Apollo program. It wasn’t even the initial direction the Nixon administration advocated. Not long after taking office, Nixon appointed a space task force to determine the future of cosmic exploration, chaired by Vice President Spiro Agnew. The group came back with an ambitious long-term plan that included the establishment of a near-Earth space station, further explorations of the lunar surface and a manned landing on Mars by 1986. (See a photo history of the space-shuttle program.)

“If there is any doubt that a manned landing on Mars has become the next grand objective of the U.S. space program, a reading of the Space Task Group report should dispel it,” wrote one commentator in the January 1970 issue of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “The report … not only designates Mars as the next port of call for astronauts, but also shapes most of the total space program in the next 16 years.”

But Nixon wanted none of it — nor of much of the remainder of the existing lunar program either, which was supposed to continue through Apollo 20 but was canceled before its final three missions could be flown. There has always been speculation in space circles that Nixon’s antipathy for the lunar program was based on the fact that it was an idea initiated by President John F. Kennedy — whom Nixon never quite quit resenting. Maybe that’s true; the man who gave us a White House enemies list was clearly not above pettiness. But it’s also true that it was Nixon who was in office when Apollo 11 landed, and thus Nixon who got to perform the presidential touchdown dance — phoning the astronauts on the lunar surface, appearing on the deck of the aircraft carrier Hornet to welcome them home. Apollo had effectively become Nixon’s program and any future Mars initiative would have been his baby as surely as the early space push was Kennedy’s.

The more prosaic explanation for Nixon’s wariness was money. The Vietnam War was still consuming an outsize portion of the federal budget and inflation was roaring — at 6% in 1970 — prompting Nixon to take the now unthinkable measure of imposing wage and price controls in the summer of 1971. Throwing money at Mars at a time like that might simply not have seemed tenable. Instead, we’d go the practical route, and a space shuttle would provide the way. (See pictures of the space shuttle Endeavour docked in space.)

A reusable orbital vehicle, Nixon promised in his 1972 statement, “will revolutionize transportation into near space, by routinizing it. [The vehicle will] be recovered and used again and again — up to 100 times. The resulting economies may bring operating costs down to as low as one-tenth those of present launch vehicles. [The trip to and from space will be] safer and less demanding for the passengers, so that men and women with work to do in space can ‘commute’ aloft.”

So how’d all that work out? The answer to that question, which was impossible to know at the time, was probably already baked into the overall plan — and the recipe was never very good. The grand — and so far unattained — dream of all orbital engineers is to design a craft that can take off either from a rolling start like an airplane or an upright posture like a rocket, fly to orbit and come back down without shedding any hardware along the way.

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