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Space Journey 'Will Go On' By Rick Weiss The disintegration of the space shuttle Columbia and its seven crew members over Texas yesterday offered the latest stark reminder of the dangers inherent in humankind's quest to venture into space, but there is no turning back from the 42-year trajectory of manned space flight, scientists and other experts said. Starting with Yuri Gagarin's historic orbital flight in April 1961, and throughout the space race that led to the 1969 landing of U.S. astronauts on the moon, skeptics have wondered why monkeys or machines were not adequate payloads for the world's space programs. After all, many reasoned, weren't these voyages little more than symbolic acts of nationalistic chest thumping? Why risk human lives along the way? In the past decade, however, as the shuttle and the international space station have helped transform space into a giant laboratory for experiments in biotechnology, materials science and medicine, the myth of the unnecessary astronaut has been almost entirely eclipsed. It has been eclipsed in part by practical necessity, scientists said, as it became clear that many of the things people want from space can only be attained by putting people in space. Grief-stricken NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe said as much in a briefing yesterday afternoon: "We will find the cause," he said of the Columbia disaster. "We'll fix it. And we'll move on." But the continuing momentum behind manned space flight also reflects a sensibility, albeit somewhat amorphous, among many that space is a frontier no less worthy of exploration than was the New World or the Wild West. Implicit in that sensibility, some said, is the dream that space may be the place where humanity might at last "get it right." "Just look at all the different ethnic backgrounds of the people on this flight," said Rick Tumlinson, founder of the Space Frontier Foundation, an organization of space activists, scientists and entrepreneurs who hope to simplify and commercialize the exploration of space. "All our highest aspirations can come together in space." Indeed, manned flight appears to be on the verge of significant international expansion. Earlier this month, as one of its unmanned rockets orbited the Earth, China announced that it planned to become the third nation to put a person in space with the launch of a manned capsule in the second half of this year. To the lexicon of space travel, the word "taikonaut" would be added to "astronaut" and "cosmonaut." For all the dangers that will always accompany efforts to work and live in the infinite inhospitality of space, it seems, human beings are destined to leap ever higher from their blue and green nest. And they are not going to be satisfied to have machines or animals do it for them. "I once had a cartoon on the wall above my desk," said Millie Hughes-Fulford, a researcher at the University of California, San Francisco, who was a medical mission specialist on a nine-day shuttle flight in 1991. "It showed a covered wagon coming across the American West, driven by a robot. . . ." Everyone recognizes how hollow such a feat would have been, Hughes-Fulford said. Exploring space by robotic proxy would be just as hollow. And simply turning our backs on outer space is no longer an option. "Our journey into space," President Bush said yesterday, "will go on." Of course, space is not for everyone, Hughes-Fulford said, echoing a common sentiment among enthusiasts. And no one who does go into space, she said, does so without a full understanding of the risks. "Before you fly, they make you take out life insurance. They take Polaroid pictures of your mouth so they can identify you if you blow up. It's not for the faint of heart, but nothing of value is for the faint of heart. I have no doubt that we will have an orbiting hotel someday where people can go." There are no hotels in space yet. But humankind's gradual expropriation of space was never more clear than in the past week's extraordinary concurrence of two independent space missions, with crews on both the space shuttle and the international space station going about their chores and chatting with each other from their respective orbits. Columbia -- the only one of six scheduled shuttle flights this year that was not to be devoted to space station assembly -- carried nearly four tons of scientific equipment for a range of studies from cancer cells to novel fragrances. The space station's Expedition Six crew has been conducting experiments on, among other things, zeolite crystals, with the goal of creating better industrial detergents, optical materials and new methods of refining gasoline. Virtually all the work undertaken by the teams required wetware -- human brains. And although they had no plans to dock in space, the two crews solidified the sense that space had become an extension of home by bantering with each other about family and kids and even playing chess with each other by extraterrestrial e-mail. The two space programs are linked in other, much more practical ways, of course. The space station astronauts, now beginning the second half of their planned four-month flight, have been counting on a ride home to Earth in a space shuttle to be launched in March. With the loss of Columbia, NASA now has just three space shuttles to service the space station and carry out other missions. It took almost three years for NASA to get a shuttle back in the air after the Challenger disaster in 1986. It was unclear yesterday whether the Columbia crash would delay the March launch, and, if so, whether the space station crew might have to get plucked from their perch by a Russian Soyuz rocket instead. The crew has enough provisions to last until June, NASA officials said. But if anything, several experts said, the station crew's predicament points not to a need to give up on space travel but rather on the need to boost public and private efforts to create cheaper, simpler and ever more reliable vehicles for getting people into space and back. Such plans are already underway. Both NASA and the Russian government recently proposed building their own versions of reusable spacecraft for simple supply missions and to serve as relatively inexpensive "life boats" to retrieve crew members from the space station. Japan and other countries are contemplating similar "space plane" projects, some of which could reach all the way into Earth orbit. The private sector is getting involved, too. Tumlinson's Space Frontier Foundation is one of several groups trying to jump-start a private, commercial arm of the U.S. space program, in the belief that as long as the federal government maintains its stranglehold on the industry it will remain too expensive, too complex and too limited in its application. Tumlinson points to the Internet, which blossomed in all its creative eminence only after the government made it available to the public. People opposed to manned flight "are harder and harder to find," Tumlinson said. Replacing them, he said, is a growing cadre who believe in the commercial practicality of transporting people 50 or 100 miles above the Earth or beyond. Some will go as part of their jobs, he said, perhaps to mine precious metals such as platinum from asteroids or from the moon to help run the hydrogen economy for which President Bush has called. Some will go to do experiments that simply cannot be done on Earth, like looking to the edge of the universe to see how it all began. And some, he believes, will go for tourism. "You go up, you float around, you see the blackness of space, you throw up, you come down and get a T-shirt," Tumlinson said. "There are as many reasons as there are people," said Jeff Greason, president of XCOR Aerospace, a Mojave, Calif., company that hopes to commercialize suborbital and orbital travel. "Why did people settle the West or leave Europe for America? Some wanted to find something. Some wanted to leave something. Some wanted to build something new. There are legitimate differences about the best way to do it. But all of these are good reasons to go into space." © 2003 The Washington Post Company |
