Having witnessed all the high and low moments of the space shuttle's 30-year history, I feel like a whole period of my own life is ending with the shuttle's final voyage.
Indeed, I remember, mesmerised, the shuttle's maiden voyage on Sunday, April 12, 1981; I was a college student just getting into the physics of nature and space. Like a monarch butterfly, the shuttle flew elegantly up into space and came back to land as if it was coming from a nearby airport.
Twenty years to the day after Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, the shuttle's designers delivered a vehicle that could do dozens of (presumably cheap) round trips to space, taking up astronauts, satellites, and bus-size observatories. And to make history even more poignant, the shuttle's final return is scheduled for Wednesday, exactly 42 years after man set foot on the Moon, another moment I will forever remember.
But I also remember the shuttle's tragedies. On the morning of January 28, 1986, I was watching the live coverage of the shuttle launch; I was an astrophysics graduate student in the US. And although the shuttle trips had become somewhat ‘routine', that flight drew the attention of millions of people because a schoolteacher was aboard, part of the ‘Teacher in Space' programme.
But history can often be harsh: humans were made to pay (dearly) for vital management errors (deciding to launch when the meteorological conditions were imperfect and some small design flaws were ignored). The shuttle exploded live in front of the world.
Humans, however, have the great ability to learn from their mistakes and to pick themselves up and try again better than before.
And so, three years later, the shuttle not only resumed its flights, it delivered some of its greatest achievements: it placed in orbits the Hubble Space Telescope, the Chandra X-ray Observatory, the Compton Gamma-Ray Observatory, and many components of the International Space Station; it also sent away the Magellan probe, the Galileo Jupiter probe, and the Ulysses probe, to Venus, Jupiter, and the Sun, respectively, to name only a few of the great missions performed by the shuttle.
On each flight, everyone watched astronauts float in space for hours, performing repairs and maintenance tasks, doing what robots would have found nearly impossible to do. The space odyssey was playing live on our screens, and we had to be reminded that no special effects were added to the shows. Science and engineering were in full glorious display.
A lesson in humility
But tragedy struck again, in 2003, when a small piece of foam broke off the external fuel tank and punched a hole in one of the wings, enough to make the spacecraft catch fire and disintegrate upon re-entry into the atmosphere after a successful mission. A small piece of debris defeated an armada of engineers and burned billions of dollars — what a lesson for humans' humility.
An in-depth review of the whole shuttle programme concluded that not only was the technology obsolete and inadequate for future goals, but the whole concept of a large spacecraft that could carry both a team of astronauts (hence requiring special safety features) and bus-size payloads (hence requiring big rockets and tanks) was not the smartest, most efficient design.
Thus new goals and new spacecraft were called into development: new missions to the Moon and to Mars, and new rockets and spacecraft. And by now, the private sector got into the game, discovering a market of space tourism and commercial satellite deployment.
Unfortunately, the shuttle and the whole space programme have always been plagued by political considerations, from the Cold War and the race to ‘control' outer space (lest the other power place weapons and spying satellites above), to the congressional votes (often decided over how many jobs a given programme will generate in this or that state), to international relations (as for the space station), to budget considerations. And so while the shuttle is being retired, there is no clear programme to replace it. History is repeating itself: this is exactly what happened after the Apollo programme was terminated, following the epoch-making trips to the Moon. It took a decade for the shuttle to emerge as the new paradigm.
Now, humans are not suddenly being grounded: the Russian spacecraft Soyuz is still taking astronauts to the space station. But the goals for space, both for the US and the world as a whole, are fuzzier than ever. Some say we should focus our efforts here on Earth, where we have been making a mess, and not waste billions in vain pursuits, often reflecting political motives more than genuine goals.
So are there any good reasons for us to spend billions in space? I'll answer that some other time …
Nidhal Guessoum is a professor of physics and astronomy at the American University of Sharjah.
