My wife, Erika, texted me while sitting in traffic on the Mopac Expressway (the latter part of that highway’s name being very wishful thinking) while on her way to work the other day here in Austin saying that the Space Shuttle had just flown over at low altitude on the back of a 747 (see photos of the flight here). It’s not the kind of thing you see every day.
I was working and, even though the flight path was within three miles of my office, I never saw it. I got the text too late, but on Facebook lots of my Austin friends who work downtown saw it and snapped pics on their phones, some of them pretty good ones, too. For those of us who remember the Shuttle program from start to finish, watching reports as Endeavor made its way across the country, city to city, the Boeing jumbo jet carrying the Shuttle on its back, a journey to a viewing place, where flight is not on the itinerary. It’s a bittersweet thing.
When I was in my early 20s living in Southern California I saw the same picture, a Shuttle, Columbia, in fact, just on the other side of history, piggyback atop a 747 making its way home from Edwards Air Force Base in Southern California, near my home. I was in awe watching the tandem planes, chased by a pair of snow white NASA T-38s, Joshua trees and desert peaks around them all, as they maneuvered on the departure to climb east. That was my neighborhood, and it all made sense in 1981.
Back then the Shuttle represented our continued pathway into space, and it was an ingenious concept. It was, for all intents and purposes, an airplane that could go to space and then glide back home, to be used again and again as we literally “shuttled” our way back and forth to space.
If it ever sounded like an economical approach to space, it wasn’t. It was, indeed, so bold that nobody would dare propose such a thing today. It was only in the afterglow of the Apollo program and our exploration of the Moon that such a thing seemed doable at all. The costs were enormous. The entire program is estimated to have cost $160 billion, and each mission rang the register to the tune of around $1.5 billion. A budget balancer it wasn’t.
With the flight of Endeavor to its final museum home in Los Angeles last week, the era is over. What new era will emerge to take its place remains to be seen. There will surely be more robotic exploration of space. The unfathomable distances, fantastic risk and staggering cost of supporting manned exploration of deep space makes Mars, perhaps, a destination, perhaps even in my lifetime, if I live a long, long time.
The Shuttle was part of that journey to space, one that helped define who I was as a pilot (for I was a pilot in my heart from around the time I could walk) but also as human being, looking out and seeing where we were in the Universe and yearning to see what lies just beyond. For three decades, the Shuttle was our billion-dollar taxi to the stars. It will remain so in my heart.
Take a look back at the Shuttle Program through this historic photo gallery.
All Comments
You should have at least been listening to them on Austin approach, like we were.
I was stationed at the no longer existing Kelly AFB in San Antonio in the early 80's, and had the great fortune to meet the shuttle carrier pilots as they stopped in for fuel with various shuttles on the plane's back. Watching the carrier and its cargo fly by, land and take off were fascinating moments, and sharing a table while they did hanger flying at lunch was some of the best pilot stories I have ever heard. Watching various TV stories of the deliveries of the shuttles to their museum homes made me cry to think that those magnificent, yet scarily deadly, machines are gone from the skies forever. The shuttles were never cost effective, and never lived up to our dreams. But at least, we dreamed. Hope someday we can see spaceplanes flying again, and I might even have a chance to touch one.
I'm all for dreams, and space travel, and all that.
But this was money, taken by force from people who had other dreams they wanted to pursue, and that was wrong.
And, because it's so easy to fund something when you can steal the money, the shuttle cost vastly, unimaginably more than any of the privately developed space vehicles we've seen lately. While SpaceShip One was far from an orbital vehicle, its entire development cost $20 million, that's $0.02 billion! Can you imagine NASA doing anything for $0.02 billion?
So, the Shuttle wasn't just funded at the cost of a few dreams, but many, many dreams.
There is no legitimate national interest in manned space travel. There was arguably one, for defense reasons, before the invention of automated spy satellites, when the Air Force thought it would have to send the analysts into space to look through the telescopes and develop and analyze the photos. Clearly, that never happened.
Now, by all means dream. Send money to Virgin Galactic as a donation, or band together with like-minded friends to buy one ticket on Virgin Galactic between you (you'll have to decide which of you gets the ticket, but you'll have better odds of flying in space than the taxpayers do).
But don't steal other people's dreams to pursue yours. No more public funding of manned spaceflight, please.
Did Neil Armstrong steal other people's dreams? Or did he help create someone's dream of private space exploration?
It's natural to be defensive when we realize we've been supporting something that was wrong. And I, too, think space travel is really cool.
Neil Armstrong was an astronaut, an engineer, and a man of incredible bravery and cool nerve. I admire him tremendously. But the Apollo project, which was undertaken to show that America was better than communist Russia, was funded the communist way - by forcefully taking resources from others.
I'm way, way more inspired by Burt Rutan, Paul Allen, Mike Melville and the rest of the team. They did what they did the American way - as free men pursuing their own dreams, without taking anything by force from anyone. If manned space travel ever prospers, it will be due to men like them.
There were programs I never wanted my tax dollars to go, but this was not one of them. I gladly contributed my dollars to this cause and continue to do so. No theft involved whatsoever here, Thomas.
But how do you know that men like Rutan and Allen weren't inspired by Apollo? Did shooting the moon help the demise of comunism in the USSR? What other programs are wrong just because you feel your money was stolen in order to fund it? Do you even realize the technological advancement we have acheived because the of the space program? A program which no other private entity could fund. Now because of those technological advancements, especially in computers, we have private citizens who can fund their dreams.
No one stole anything from you. We live in a country that is a representative democracy and operates under the rule of law. If there are programs you don't like, it's only because we allow it. We get the government we deserve.
"Neil Armstrong was an astronaut, an engineer, and a man of incredible bravery and cool nerve. I admire him tremendously. But the Apollo project, which was undertaken to show that America was better than communist Russia, was funded the communist way - by forcefully taking resources from others."
You mean, like funding the Department of Defense? Or funding the Veterans Administration? Or funding other important societal needs?
You want to discuss the value-added of spaceflight, you're using a very poor argument. "Forcibly taking resources"..."socialism"..."communism"...I hear this all the time....and apparently, most folks talking about these things have very little actual knowledge of what those terms actually mean and represent.
Of course, they sound juicy and nasty, so why not throw them out willy-nilly and hope the other ignorati jump on the bandwagon?
We Americans spend more money on porn than we do on human spaceflight. We spend more on pet food than human spaceflight. We spend more on Starbucks coffee, as a nation, than we do on human spaceflight!
So until you better understand the actual economics involved, you're better off sticking with the "I just don't agree with it" approach, than trying to make spurious and easily refutable arguments about the opportunity costs.
Robert,
Just because you would have contributed voluntarily, doesn't mean it's right to take the money from people who wouldn't. And just because you support the program, doesn't mean you should advocate forcing others to.
Delta v, your argument is that theft is okay as long as you don't take much. I can't agree. I do agree with you, if you read my post, that there are important societal needs that cannot be funded any other way. Theft is, ultimately, wrong for utilitarian reasons: it's not an absolute that theft is wrong, only a presumption (we also make exceptions in cases of extreme need, for example - it's not wrong to steal food to survive). I also said that it was arguable, at least, that the Apollo program met the hurdle to overcome that presumption. The Shuttle, however, clearly did not. The fact that it wasn't expensive, in absolute terms, doesn't mean it was right to steal the money for it. What Bernie Madoff did wasn't expensive, in absolute terms, either - in fact it was a lot cheaper - but that was wrong too.
Luisputzeys, I'm making an argument that might - a large number of voters - does not make right. Despite all the marketing of democracy as the ultimate source of morality, it isn't - and the founders of the United States clearly recognized that, when they created a bill of rights, for example.
I don't know what inspired Rutan and Allen - perhaps they wanted to prove that socialism isn't necessary to support a space program. In any case, what inspired Armstrong?
And, yes, I'm old enough to be very familiar with communism, and socialism. It's easy to think they refer to what Stalin did, but they don't: that was paranoid totalitarian mass murder. Communism and socialism are not necessarily violent, and the damage they do is subtle and slow.
Uh, no, Thomas, YOU are one using the word "theft". Theft is wrong, period. Stealing food to survive is also wrong; how do you know the folks you stole it from are not also on survival rations?
Allocation of resources from a pool of funds specifically designed to pay for things not every single person in a society may agree with is not theft, it is government. The fact that you do not agree with a specific line item in the budget does not make an allocation of resources to that line item "theft" from your pocket.
It is either ALL theft, or NO theft. You don't get to pick and choose which is which.
You may disagree that human spaceflight (and I will point out that the STS was not the end all be all of human spaceflight, but that seems to be where your ire is specifically directed) is something worth funding. Fine. But to call it "theft" because you disagree with it is enormously arrogant and self-serving. Sorry, dude, but there are also others of us also living in this society who may appreciate the allocation of those resources.
Why? Because I have personally seen the spark in TENS of THOUSANDS of kids eyes, all over the world when they get a chance to talk to or visit with someone who has flown in space – robots are fun and interesting, but human inspiration comes from human achievement (disclaimer: I am not an astronaut, but my day job for the last 20 years brings my into constant and close contact with astronauts and cosmonauts from 35 different countries). I personally and viscerally understand the value of what astronauts bring to the table, in terms of inspiration for the next generation of scientists, engineers, and aviators (oh...guys like Rutan and Allen, for example).
For you, this expenditure for human spaceflight is "theft".
For me, and many many others, it is a "gift" to future generations.
DeltaV,
Yes, I'm the one using the word. You're dancing around it.
But I think we understand each other, so I've made my point.
Cheers!
DeltaV,
In the spirit of mutual understanding, I see a key difference in the way we think about this.
Your view is, there is a pool of resources already set aside, that must be allocated, so we get a majority opinion (or have a majority designate representatives to decide) on how to spend it.
My view is, decide what social needs are important enough to justify taking ("stealing" is a more emotional word, to bring attention to the nature of the act - I claim/acknowledge that there are such needs, but the threshold of justification must be a high one), and then take only enough resources (which, ultimately, translates to hours spent working) from the people to provide it.
In my view, you take only what you need; you have no right to take for something you merely prefer, like, or think uplifting. I admit, there is a vagueness about what determines "need", and I am open to reason on that subject. But taking what you do not need, to a high threshold, is stealing. A majority vote, to me, is not a high threshold.
In your view, you take, and then decide what the best use of that is. I assume you determine how much to take by majority vote. Stealing, in your view, is taking whatever a majority would not agree to take.
"I'm making an argument that might - a large number of voters - does not make right. Despite all the marketing of democracy as the ultimate source of morality, it isn't - and the founders of the United States clearly recognized that, when they created a bill of rights, for example."
You are making a straw man argument. I never said democracy is the ultimate morality. I said we live in a representative democracy. And the founders made it that way explicitly because mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable thank to right themselves. This is not a nation of majority rules. We vote for people to vote for us. This is not marketing, it's the way it is, period. It's not about about democracy. It's about freedom and liberty. Democracy is just a tool and the constitution is the path towards securing these rights. If you feel that government has become destructive of these ends, it is your right to petition and alter government. But it's not stealing in the simple definition of the word.
Luis,
That's fair enough.
One voice, alone, will not change anything, and I am looking for ways to communicate the notion that it is simply wrong - a moral notion, but one grounded in utilitarian theory too - to use democracy to make others pay for one's own wants and preferences. Not society's actual bottom-line keep-it-working needs, but wants and preferences. And, in my view, the Space Shuttle clearly falls into the "unnecessary but nice" category, and taking money from others to fund it was - from a utilitarian or moral perspective - wrong.
I recognize that the march toward freedom, toward more respect for others' right to make their own choices wherever possible, will be a long one! But, there's been progress on many aspects of civil liberties; this is simply another.
Cheers!
You mention the cost of 160 Billion as if it were supposed to impress some one of being expensive, when it no longer does. For one the number is so large it is meaningless to most thinking people while on the other hand our government throws more than that down their favorite rat hole. Nationally the teachers unions have more than 2 Trillion dollars in unfunded retirement assets. Two trillion is enough to find more than 12 entire space programs. Now that is a LOT of money.
The shuttle program was a thing the country and people could point to with pride. As a pilot I felt a connection to it, even though tenuous at best. Now we have to hitch rides on launches made by other countries.
BUT...Commercialism is showing some guts and I do believe that in just a few years we (the astronauts) will able to catch rides on commercial flights to and from the International Space Station at a small fraction of today's cost. And we will have an intermediate stop for the moon and other locations being the ISS or a new development. The potential and possibilities are there if the governments of the world don't bankrupt us first.
