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Moving beyond the space shuttle

The safe return of the space shuttle Discovery Monday was welcome news. But the mission, just the second to be launched in three years, raises questions about the value and usefulness of the aging shuttle system.

The space shuttle has been flying for a quarter-century now; the first launch, that of Columbia, was April 12, 1981. The shuttle system never realized the goals initially set for the program: to be a reliable, reusable and relatively inexpensive means of getting men and machines into low Earth orbit. It was to be a "space truck."

The shuttle, designed in the 1960s and built with the technology available in the 1970s, is an enormously complex system. It took two disasters and the loss of two shuttles | Challenger in 1986 and Columbia in 2003 and their 14 astronauts to remind us that complex systems, given sufficient opportunity, will always fail.

We accept the failure of much less complex systems such as the occasional crashes of jetliners and the loss of life that entails because of their enormous usefulness. They are indispensable in modern life.

But in what way is the shuttle indispensable? What is its vital mission that must go on? The construction of the International Space Station? That project was largely designed to give the shuttles something to do. The two or three people on the ISS at any given time are mostly repeating experiments done by the Russians a decade ago on their Mir station.

This mission, of questionable value to science, is also enormously expensive. NASA is notoriously difficult to pin down on costs. But one estimate by a University of Colorado researcher is that it costs $1.3 billion per launch to operate the shuttle. The total cost of the shuttle program through its expected end in 2010 is $173 billion.

There is value in putting people in orbit, in using a space station as a platform from which to reach to the moon and beyond. But the aging shuttle system is not going to get us there.

We need a more efficient, less glamorous means of getting into space. Perhaps separating people and payload is the answer, much as the Russians have done for decades. Heavy, automated rockets carry payloads into space while astronauts travel in smaller capsules fired aloft on expendable, less expensive boosters.

The shuttle has been a great technological achievement that never lived up to its potential. It's time to move on to the next generation in space travel.