Maciej Ceglowski has written an oustanding piece on what’s wrong with the US manned space program. No argument here.

But NASA dismisses such helpful suggetions [about discontinuing manned space altogether] as unworthy of its mission of ‘exploration’, likening critics of manned space flight to those Europeans in the 1500’s who would have cancelled the great voyages of discovery rather than face the loss of one more ship.

Of course, the great explorers of the 1500’s did not sail endlessly back and forth a hundred miles off the coast of Portugal, nor did they construct a massive artificial island they could repair to if their boat sprang a leak. And we must remember that space is called space for a reason – there is nothing in it, at least not where the Shuttle goes, save for a few fast-moving pieces of junk from the last few times we went up there, forty years ago. The interesting bits in space are all much further away, and we have not paid them a visit since 1972.

A couple of thoughts on the emergency repair of the shuttle tile fillers that will take place soon.

This kind of unrehearsed response to a potential calamity is precisely the kind of thing we need to be comfortable with if we are ever going to leave Earth orbit again or go to Mars. So, on the one hand, I feel that there is a bit of overreaction from NASA at play here — that filler fabric has come undone thousands of times before and it was not the result of any impact at launch. But this could also be a sign of a new risk-tolerant NASA, the “old” NASA so to say. Not a NASA that accepts risk cavalierly but one that has confidence that a task that has not been dissected from every angle and rehearsed for months might still be worth the effort. Jim Lovell (of Apollo 8 and 13 fame) has suggested that one of the problems with NASA post-Challenger has been a reluctance to embrace the unknown, to push boundaries where the risk seemed worthwhile. Certainly NASA has attempted first-of-a-kinds since Challenger, but this statement rings true. Conducting this ad hoc repair is a good thing for NASA’s confidence, even if not 100% necessary.

Good luck, Stephen Robinson!

NASA

Space.com notes:

Atlantis is already mated to its own external tank-solid rocket booster launch stack, and was slated for a Sept. 9 liftoff before today’s foam find. NASA also tapped Atlantis to serve as a rescue ship for the STS-114 crew in the remote chance Discovery was too damaged to return home and its astronauts forced to take shelter aboard the space station. That contingency rescue mission is known as STS-300.

No one is faulting NASA for reacting with such care to the news that foam insulation did in fact shake loose during launch. The images of the divots and missing patches are eerie reminders of Columbia, scars of an ignorance we thought we’d overcome. But one has to wonder if the dozens of new cameras trained on the shuttle during ascent is making the problem seem worse than it is. Stuff shakes loose in the tug-o-war with gravity. Always has. In whatever we build to fly us to space next we need to attempt to prevent debris and harden whatever critical surfaces might be compromised by that debris.[*] This kind of protection was not added in the post-Columbia changes, to my knowledge.

The clock is ticking on the shuttle transportation system. My bet, we won’t make 2010.

Re-entry is going to be tense.

[*] The heat shield on the Apollo capsule was safely sheathed until very close to the beginning of re-entry, for example.

Associated Press / NASA TV

I’ve been known to bad-mouth the shuttle in these parts — mostly a tough love thing — but I gotta admit that I got a little choked up to see it leap off the pad this morning. Bravo, NASA.

Eileen Collins and the crew had what looked like a flawless ascent. CNN noted that her voice before the solid boosters peeled off was shaky, but c’mon she’s on top of 6.6 million pounds of thrust. Like trying to have a phone conversation sitting on the roof of a locomotive.

NASA’s launch announcer always has a brief prepared tag line right when the countdown goes from minus to plus. This time he said “… beginning America’s new journey to the Moon, Mars, and beyond.” This is interesting because none of that journey involves the shuttle. NASA is looking forward, so much so that they used the return to space of the shuttle to reaffirm its retirement. I like this.

And the camera on the external tank! I’ve seen other launches from this angle, but never from the shuttle. That was damn cool. I’m scrounging for footage of the separation of the tank from the orbiter — something no one had ever seen previously. Amazing how smooth that was and to see the orbiter engines direct it to orbit.

No word on the fuel sensor gauge, but, as a friend who had a flaky gauge on his Wagoneer noted, the key is just to jot down your mileage as you tank up. Isn’t that what mission specialists are for?