From 2003: It is rocket science

From SF Gate, Feb 9, 2003: It is rocket science
A generation ago we beat stratospheric odds, shooting daring men to the moon.

Today, our attitude toward space is: "Been there, done that, got the T- shirt."

From miraculous to mundane in fewer than 40 years.

A nation once awestruck by astronaut heroes winning the "space race" has learned to seek its vicarious thrills elsewhere. Who tunes in to observe a group of scientists and payload specialists routinely climbing aboard for another shuttle cargo run? Not when you can see giggly young women in tube tops grab squirmy electric eels on "Fear Factor."

Today's space program gets attention only through NASA's frequent gimmicks and its occasional catastrophes. The disastrous fate of the space shuttle Columbia was a reminder of exactly what we had taken for granted as the shuttle flew under the radar of the public imagination. Then, last weekend, the space program again grabbed the world's attention -- briefly.

Most Americans could not name a single astronaut who's flown a successful shuttle mission in the past 10 years, although many can identify 'N Sync pop star Lance Bass as a wannabe "space tourist" scrounging for Russia's $25 million ticket price to hitch a Soyuz rocket ride to the international space station. A Washington Post piece a few months ago suggested that space had done the impossible -- become dull: "You know what they are doing in (the) space station right now? Growing soybeans. Even C-SPAN is taking a pass."

Most Americans didn't know there were seven astronauts in space until Columbia plummeted piecemeal across the Texas prairie. And many American youngsters, after enduring the harrowing shocks of school slayings and terrorist attacks, have achieved a sad cognitive dissonance: They regard the Columbia as a cosmic car crash that claimed the lives of a few noble strangers.

What a contrast to an earlier era, when magical moonbeams flickered through cathode tubes coast to coast as the country cheered Neil Armstrong's "one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind."

The disconcerting truth is that most of us had grown blase, even glib, about space exploration.

Meanwhile, NASA is busy dispatching shuttles to and from the space station - - a football field-size, 400,000-pound structure orbiting more than 200 miles above Earth. At the program's inception, NASA envisioned the shuttle making 50 to 100 trips a year to the station, which was to become a floating science lab and a launching pad for missions to Mars and beyond.

Both the shuttle and the station have fallen far short of those lofty expectations -- and tallied huge cost overruns in the process. The station is just half completed, and the shuttle makes only a handful of journeys a year, slavishly schlepping tons of solar panels and trestles for the structure's many additions. A growing number of skeptics fret that the shuttle exists solely to service the space station, and that the space station exists solely to give the shuttle somewhere to go.

To keep the public intrigued -- crucial to retaining political support and funding -- NASA has increasingly relied on experiments that sometimes carry a whiff of gimmickry, and on keeping human beings aboard.

While most shuttle trips focus on outfitting the station, Columbia's last mission was primarily popular science. Experiments -- some designed by schoolkids and 4-H clubs -- tracked how microgravity alters ant socialization, moss growth and the spinning of spider webs. The earlier shuttle experiment "Fun With Urine" was followed by "More Fun With Urine" -- determining how that human byproduct might be used to water plants or make paint.

There were other, more sober topics, such as how bone growth in low gravity might have implications for the treatment of osteoporosis. The Columbia crew also created the weakest flame ever generated -- a feat impossible in Earth's gravity, and potentially significant as a way to reduce soot, which is linked to 60,000 premature deaths in the United States.

The NASA publication "Spinoff" lists new commercial applications from shuttle research. Some certainly sound noteworthy -- creation of a miniature heart pump, for example -- but cynics scoff that others are a stretch. Example:

the sports bra made from a material used in shuttle spacesuits that reduces "mammary bounce."

Twenty times in recent years, Congress has voted on scrapping the shuttle- space station program. The year after it survived by only one vote, NASA redeemed it as a vehicle of international cooperation, and a post-Cold War strategy to keep Russian specialists busy doing something besides peddling their expertise to rogue nations. International space station astronaut Col. Daniel Bursch recently touted such cooperation as the space program's significant benefit, adding the Russians wouldn't be so helpful in combating terrorism "had we not had the international space station and been working closely with that country for several years."

But what really gives the space program its cache is the human drama -- the more human, the better. Space flight isn't just for astronauts anymore. Former NASA moonwalker Buzz Aldrin has argued that NASA could make billions selling shuttle seats that otherwise would go empty -- borrowing a trick from the new ubercapitalists of space, the Russians, who put Pizza Hut logos on their rockets and are on the road to giving space travel the commercialized look of a NASCAR race. The Russians have already transported into space a rich entrepreneur from California and another from South Africa.

A 1999 survey by the Space Transportation Association found 64 percent of Americans would be interested in taking a space trip if the spaceships were safe and the cost akin to that of an African safari. By last year, more than 200 people had put down money, some $2 billion in all, to reserve a seat on a future space flight. It's become such a rich guy's perk that even cartoon character Homer Simpson, after making a crank call to NASA complaining about its "boring" launches, won the right to rocket into space in an episode spoofing NASA's "citizen astronaut" plans.

Meanwhile, our best information about space comes from unmanned probes and rover robots, which beamed back striking photos from the planet Uranus and a wealth of data about Mars. These unmanned missions have one other inherent advantage: They are expendable.

It's costly to send humans, and of course you have to be able to get them back down. The risk of catastrophe flying on a commercial airliner is 1 in 2 million. The record of the shuttle, conceived out of 1970s pre-Pentium technology, is 1 in 56. At that rate, a plane would crash every hour at San Francisco International Airport..

NASA critics such as Theodore Postol, professor of science and technology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and Alex Roland, a former NASA historian now at Duke University, contend that NASA has needlessly jeopardized human life and perpetuated a public relations "circus" by using astronauts in missions when robots and unmanned probes could do the job.

NASA acknowledges that it needs real heroes to keep the public engaged. And sometimes humans have made a crucial difference. A Columbia crew fixed a computer hard drive, salvaging data on a pulmonary experiment -- repair work requiring a human touch. And, of course, robots aren't romantic symbols. They don't embody our frontier spirit, or our yearning for the vast unknown. Had Thomas Jefferson had the option, he might have dispatched robots to explore the West. Instead, Lewis and Clark risked their lives and became models of courageous adventure for all time.

Former shuttle program director Byran O'Connor bluntly acknowledged, "When people say safety is our No. 1 priority, I always say if that were true, we would not fly."

This seems an apt time to re-evaluate whether the shuttle program, given its astronomical costs and astronomical risks, is yielding astronomical benefits. It's time to stop being cavalier about the cosmos.