Space exploration must not fall victim to shuttle disasters

WHEN I think back to my early teenage years, only a few news stories remain implanted in my memory.

There was the horror of Enniskillen, the Anglo-Irish Agreement and Mrs Thatcher’s defeat of the miners’ strike. Further afield, one particular tragedy sticks in the mind.

It is 25 years ago this month since the space shuttle Challenger disaster. It was one of the first events of global interest to be broadcast live internationally through cable TV. As a result, it became a widely shared emotional experience, a kind of precursor to the kind of televised tragedy that is now common and which reached its apotheosis on 9/11.

Although I was only just into high school when the Challenger disaster occurred, I took a keen interest. I certainly don’t remember anyone then calling for the abandonment of manned space flight. Perhaps I was too young to notice but Ronnie Reagan declared, “The future doesn’t belong to the faint-hearted. It belongs to the brave.”

Public discussion of space exploration remained fairly upbeat, too. The New York Times argued, “there is no going back…in the end, there is an enduring optimism that technology’s benefits generally outweigh its ill effects and the disastrous moments that seem to make it undesirable.”

Despite these bold words, no space shuttle flew for almost three years, and new, bigger missions were stalled.

Still, the reaction was nothing like that to the loss of the space shuttle Columbia in 2003. That disaster marked the start of a high-intensity debate about the future of space exploration, with many suggesting that manned space missions pose an unacceptable risk.

After Columbia exploded, the public discussion was about whether the mission was another sign of American arrogance and overconfidence in the run-up to the Iraq war. Some on the misanthropic environmentalist left saw it as tantalising proof that ‘the empire’ as they like to call it was not invincible.

Where the reaction to the Challenger explosion expressed a strong sense of shock at this terrible event, much of the reaction to Columbia viewed it as just another thing gone wrong in our mixed-up world.

In April of this year, the space shuttle will blast into orbit for the final time. Now that President Obama has cancelled Nasa’s Constellation programme, which was developing new vehicles to send astronauts back to the Moon, the US will in future have to hitch rides with the Russians to ferry astronauts to the International Space Station. How much lower have our horizons become since the optimism of the 1960s? The first Moon landing was celebrated as a high point of human achievement. Now astronauts are as likely to be accused of polluting or raping the universe as to be feted for heroism.

Perhaps the shuttle programme was flawed from its inception. It was designed to be cheap enough to be fundable indefinitely, yet expensive enough to keep Nasa in clover. Its emphasis on human — often square-jawed, Top Gun-like — astronauts played to our sci-fi inspired vision of what spaceships and spacemen should look like.

But the shuttles were always fragile. In part, the fact that no astronaut has gone further than a few hundred miles into space, let alone anywhere near the Moon or another planet, since 1972 is in part a consequence of these inbuilt design weaknesses, of trying to run a space exploration programme on the (relatively) cheap using outdated technology.

One of the high points of the shuttle’s career was the successful in-orbit repair of the Hubble space telescope which made a profound contribution to our understanding of the universe. The shuttle couldn’t compete, however, with other launch services using much cheaper unmanned booster rockets.

But there are human factors at work too which are keeping us — or those of us from the Western hemisphere — grounded too. The great naval explorers took their lives in their hands to sail the unknown world, at a time when doom-mongers declared that they would fall off the edge of the flat Earth. When Columbus left Europe in search of the New World, his patrons at least knew that if he didn’t come back nobody was going to sue anybody.

Our attitude to space matters most as a reflection of how we see ourselves on Earth, not least in Ireland, where we apparently don’t have the capacity to keep the water running during a spot of cold weather.

We are in danger of creating a world where, while only a few of us are in the gutter, none of us is looking at the stars.

There can be no going back to the days of the Cold War — and to be nostalgic for that era because it was a more ambitious time for space exploration would be misguided. But one thing we can learn from the Cold Warriors of yesteryear is a more pragmatic attitude toward risk and disaster.

The fact is that there is no such thing as a free ride to the future, and the path of progress has often proved steep and bloody. The Chinese and the Indians understand this. Alas, many now consider it unacceptable to sacrifice so much as a mouse for the sake of science. They share a disdain for the grandeur of extra-terrestrial endeavour; for the scale of ambition involved.

But wasn’t it a testament to human genius that whatever the 20th century’s bloody shortcomings, it only took humanity 66 years from learning how to fly to putting a man on the Moon?

Yes, going into space is dangerous; that’s the point. As President Kennedy put it, “We choose to go to the Moon and do other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard.” Launching on a perilous mission to the Moon now seems so brave, so far beyond contemporary expectations of what humans working as a team are capable of, that conspiracy theorists argue that the whole thing was faked.

The amount and content of negativity about space has always reflected the pessimism toward progress here on Earth, an escape from problems of poverty, health and poor education. Rocketry has also been fingered as essentially an infantile male pursuit.

Of course, problems on Earth — including gender inequality — certainly need to be addressed. But to want to go into space is human. It is a good in itself, an expression of humanity’s desire to conquer the unknown, discover more about our universe, and work together to achieve monumental goals.

Perhaps it could all be left to robots. But even if there really were no scientific reason for sending people into space, our forays there should be defended on their own sake. Outer space is the true face of nature — utterly indifferent to us, and ripe to be explored. Leaving mankind’s footprints there is something that should be a cause of celebration, not a source of concern.

What tangible benefits are to be derived from space travel? Well, who knows and, actually, who cares? As Einstein is supposed to have said, “If we knew what we were doing, it wouldn’t be called research.”

Let us boldly go.