A Rocket to Nowhere
An excellent and depressing post at Idle Words about the US Space Shuttle and how we got here. (via Anil Dash)
Future archaeologists trying to understand what the Shuttle was for are going to have a mess on their hands. Why was such a powerful rocket used only to reach very low orbits, where air resistance and debris would limit the useful lifetime of a satellite to a few years? Why was there both a big cargo bay and a big crew compartment? What kind of missions would require people to assist in deploying a large payload? Why was the Shuttle intentionally crippled so that it could not land on autopilot? 1 Why go through all the trouble to give the Shuttle large wings if it has no jet engines and the glide characteristics of a brick? Why build such complex, adjustable main engines and then rely on the equivalent of two giant firecrackers to provide most of the takeoff thrust? Why use a glass thermal protection system, rather than a low-tech ablative shield? And having chosen such a fragile method of heat protection, why on earth mount the orbiter on the side of the rocket, where things will fall on it during launch?
Maciej Ceglowski goes on to detail the broad history of the decision making and funding process that led to the current state of the program, and highlights the conflicted goals and politics around US space exploration:
The people who work at and run NASA are not cynical, but the charade of manned space flight is turning NASA into a cynical organization. For all the talk of building a culture of safety, no one has pointed out the inherent contradiction in requiring that a program justified on irrational grounds be run in a rational manner. In an atmosphere where special pleading and wishful thinking about the benefits of manned flights to low earth orbit are not just tolerated, but required of astronauts and engineers, how can one demand complete integrity and intellectual honesty on safety of flight issues? It makes no sense to expect NASA to maintain a standard of intellectual rigor in operations that it can magically ignore when it comes to policy and planning.
Incremental compromises and shifting customer requirements for a major program are all too common in the business world as well. A series of “reasonable” or “expedient” changes are made over a period of time, and eventually the official plan becomes nothing more than wishful thinking. Forcing rational people to operate with irrational assumptions then leads to inconsistent, unexpected, and sometimes disastrous outcomes. Unfortunately, in a large organization, programs (or official strategies) can take on a life of their own, and can be nearly impossible to change or shut down, short of replacing the management or restructuring the company.
Tags: space, shuttle, management
