Just as I feared he might, Joe Barton just went and blew away my short-lived renewal of goodwill.

Rep. Joe Barton, R-Texas told NASA Administrator Sean O'Keefe that he believed the shuttle was so unsafe that it should never again fly with people on board. "We are putting American men and women at great risk to their lives to fly an orbiter that is 30 years old and cannot be made safe," said Barton at a hearing of the House Science Committee. He pledged to "do everything I can" to prevent astronauts from going up in the shuttle, which he called "inherently unsafe." "We've lost 14 men and women and if we keep flying we'll lose 21 others in the next 10 to 15 years," he said.

We know it's a risk to fly the Shuttles, but it's a known risk (at least when the right people pay attention to the risks and know how to analyze them).

But let's take a look at the options:

• Kill Shuttle Now -- Scuttling the fleet now, with no further flights, means ISS never gets completed. NASA entirely eliminates the small, known risks from further manned flights, but at the expense of a warehouse full of costly station modules which will never be deployed, and the goodwill of the international partners we'd be abandoning. The public is unlikely to go for that, given the enormous price tag of the project. (Whether abandoning ISS is a good idea, or whether there should have been international partners in the first place are topics for another rant on another day). ISS as it exists need not be abandoned under this scenario, but keeping it occupied without the Shuttle makes us completely dependent on the Russians for access and resupply for several years until we can come up with alternatives.
  
• Fly Shuttle Unmanned -- This is remotely possible, the only major obstacles being the current lack of an automated docking system, and the excessive sphincter-tightening NASA would feel concerning a suitably-automated Orbiter performing "proximity operations" without a human aboard (this was a serious comfort-level issue concerning VentureStar). The public might accept it, but NASA is unlikely to be comfortable with the risk, for one, and would balk at the lack of opportunities for the astronaut corps and the attendant public support astronauts-as-heroes garner the agency. And like abandoning Shuttle altogether, flying it unmanned means we are entirely dependent on the Russians for crew transfer until an alternative becomes available. The biggest question regarding this scenario, however, is: "Why bother?"
• Flying Modified Shuttles -- This is the scenario currently being carried out. Shuttle will fly again, as early as next spring, once a number of critical modifications are made to the elements of the system and to the organization behind it. Further modifications are planned beyond the resumption of flights, but are not "must-haves" prior to the resumption. All future flights will be to ISS, eliminating most of the risk for a repeat of Columbia (the station crew can visually inspect the Orbiter before it departs; the Orbiter crew has a safe haven if something is damaged; more time and resources can be available for attempting repairs; the Orbiter can be returned with a minimal or no crew in case repairs are not fully trusted; etc.). This has the advantages of making the system safer in certain specific areas, allowing ISS to be completed and occupied without total reliance on the Russians, and keeping the industrial base intact until NASA can straighten out its affairs. One big problem with this scenario is that NASA will be spending several billion dollars on Shuttle modifications and long-term upgrades and life-extension programs, rather than on OSP or other, more worthy ends like R&D for manned Mars missions or even the infrastructure repairs and maintenance backlog.
  
• Flying Shuttle (Almost) As-Is -- Possible, given that the foam strike really was a freak accident, and one for which a preventative modification is already being implented. Everyone talks about "aircraft-like operations" for space vehicles -- this path would resemble what happens after a mass-fatality air disaster, when the fleet of related planes is briefly grounded for inspections and in some cases retrofits of suspect parts or systems, and then is allowed to fly again. We don't talk of permanently grounding whole classes of airliner after such a disaster, nor do we consider flying them unmanned. This scenario is probably not politically viable, but it would get Shuttle back in service as quickly as possible, allow OSP to be accelerated, and wouldn't blow scarce funding on improving a vehicle which is due to be retired in the near term.
  
  
  So, Joe, which of these alternatives can you afford to support? Which ones will your constituents accept you supporting? Much as I would like to see Shuttle retired in favor of something better, we don't at present have anything better, nor will anything better be available for several more years thanks to the bungling of previous Shuttle-successor programs by both NASA and Congress. Like them or not, we are stuck with Shuttle and ISS for the time being, so we might as well continue using them until we can come up with something better -- and make sure that we come up with something better as quickly as possible.
  Posted by T.L. James on September 11, 2003 08:55 PM