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Subdued Anniversary

April 12, 2006 6:04 PM

Twenty-five years ago this morning, the Shuttle Columbia lifted off for the first time.  Nobody really believed shuttles would still be going in the 21st century.

It was the first of 114 launches, and along the way there have been some great successes.  Shuttle astronauts, for instance, repaired and serviced the Hubble Space Telescope.  But tragedy has loomed larger.  It is 20 years since the loss of Challenger, and three since Columbia.

"Exploring space is a hazardous line of work, always has been and always will be,” said John Young, the commander of that first mission in 1981. "But if you're going to make progress in aerospace you've got to accept some risk." 

“The shuttle has carried more humans to orbit than any other vehicle,” said Wayne Hale, the Shuttle Program Manager.  “It is a technological revolution of the first order.”

   

(STS-1 on the pad.  NASA picture.)

April 12 is a fabled day in space history.  It is also the forty-fifth anniversary of the flight of Yuri Gagarin, the Soviet cosmonaut who became, on this day in 1961, the first man ever to fly in space.

His flight, of course, is what prompted John F. Kennedy to commit the U.S. to land astronauts on the moon by decade's end.  There has not been such energy at NASA since.

NASA has an anniversary page HERE, but aside from a few news conferences and in-house events, it's been a pretty quiet day.  The headline, really, is that NASA is celebrating the shuttles while it works on their replacements. 

There is anxiety reported in Houston and at the Kennedy Space Center that the White House would pull the plug on the shuttle program now, if not for the Space Station.  The U.S. has contracts with 15 other countries to finish the station, and the shuttle, with its large cargo bay, is the only launcher that can deliver the remaining components to orbit. 

But 25 years ago, NASA was talking about shuttle flights every two weeks.  They've averaged four to five a year, and there's been only one flight since Columbia was lost.

(Crew Exploration Vehicle in lunar orbit.  Computer image for NASA by John Frassanito & Associates)

The replacement ship, the Crew Exploration Vehicle, is supposed to be simpler and more reliable (it's no accident that it looks like Apollo), but the first flight with astronauts is no sooner than 2014. 

There's a lot of NASA stuff on the CEV HERE, but note the careful language...returning to the moon "before the end of the next decade," with no mention of a target date for flights to Mars.

I talked about this with Elizabeth Vargas on today's WNT Webcast, which you can watch HERE.

April 12, 2006 | Permalink | Share | User Comments (1)

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Posted by: chuck | Apr 13, 2006 9:15:41 AM

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