The Houston Chronicle has a touchy-feely report about NASA moving head after the Endeavor landed safely in Florida yesterday. I’m glad to see the media portraying a sense of optimism about space travel, but one quote from Michael Griffin (NASA Adminstrator) caught me off guard:
Griffin said his agency can move ahead to finish the station’s construction by 2010 — the date set by the White House for the shuttle’s retirement — without rushing. But he stressed there will be risks.
“This is very much an experiment vehicle,” Griffin said. “Anyone who doesn’t believe that just doesn’t get it.”
I’m sorry, but how is the space shuttle still an “experiment vehicle” when it’s twenty-eight (28!) years old? When does space travel cease being experimental and start becoming normal and mainstream? In my opinion, it is this attitude and the short-sightedness of policy makers which have doomed us to repeat the same types of missions in low earth orbit time and time again.
I guess Dr. Griffin is right–I’ll never get why we quit reaching for the stars, instead settling on doing the same missions that we did in the 1970′s with thirty year old technology.
Perhaps he is referring to the fact that even though years have passed, the actual testing opportunities have been few and far between. Imagine when the first automobile was developed. It was very experimental and didn’t become mainstream for quite some time. And that’s with an unlimited amount of time to test, develop, and rebuild the vehicle.
Space travel astounds me simply because they can do so much with so little. Imagine being tasked with finding out some specific function of the shuttle vehicle when it was located in the atmosphere of space. How would you go about preparing for that one 2 week shot, and then studying the information you gathered so that you could apply it to the next vehicle which may not be launched for another year?
He said it was an experiment vehicle not an experimental vehicle.
He could be refering to the fact that the shuttle was designed to carry people into space to do experiments not to act as some kind of orbiting flat bed trailer carrying building supplies into space. Since he was talking about rushing to get the station built it could have something to do with how much can be brought to the station at 1 time due to limited cargo space you cant hook a U-Haul up the the space shuttle.