Tomorrow, weather permitting, is the last launch of the last space shuttle. Nobody I know feels very sad about this. The shuttle was originally designed to make space flight routine rather than exciting, and other than the Hubble repair about the only excitement it did deliver was the two catastrophes. Two disasters out of 135 launches is a good safety record for space flight, but hardly routine, and the two fatal accidents certainly made fools out of those NASA engineers who did a bunch of calculations to find that the risk was around 1 in 50,000.
As my wife just said, nobody ever really understood what the Space Shuttle was for. It never made space travel cheap, nor did it go anywhere exciting. It did keep people going into space, but not in a very inspiring way. Its design was a compromise pleasing to noone. It lost so many tiles on launch that it was christened the Flying Brickyard. It was a bureaucratic craft for an age of retrenchment and lower expectations. Time to move on, I think, or maybe way past time.
Tomorrow, weather permitting, is the last launch of the last space shuttle. Nobody I know feels very sad about this. The shuttle was originally designed to make space flight routine rather than exciting, and other than the Hubble repair about the only excitement it did deliver was the two catastrophes. Two disasters out of 135 launches is a good safety record for space flight, but hardly routine, and the two fatal accidents certainly made fools out of those NASA engineers who did a bunch of calculations to find that the risk was around 1 in 50,000.
As my wife just said, nobody ever really understood what the Space Shuttle was for. It never made space travel cheap, nor did it go anywhere exciting. It did keep people going into space, but not in a very inspiring way. Its design was a compromise pleasing to noone. It lost so many tiles on launch that it was christened the Flying Brickyard. It was a bureaucratic craft for an age of retrenchment and lower expectations. Time to move on, I think, or maybe way past time.
All true, but Hubble is a pretty great thing, and could Hubble have happened without the Shuttle?
ReplyDeleteWhat ifs are hard, but a Saturn V could have put the Hubble into a better orbit. It could not have been repaired without the Shuttle, but with money we spent on the Shuttle we could have built a hundred more Hubbles.
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