Shuttle mistake -- what should have been done?

The fundamental problem with the shuttle concept is that -- the big cost
is getting material into orbit, and once it is there it is foolish to
return it (other than, say, humans or processed goods). Every time the
shuttle launches, the effort puts a huge orbiter up there, plus an
external tank. And then, stupidly, it is all brought back down (or the
tank is let burn up, but SSI showed could be saved and used in space). All
this to return a few people back to earth? Stupid, stupid, stupid, given
the energetics of building a space infrastructure. What goes into space
(Even poop) should stay in space -- to be used as the raw material of
future development efforts. But NASA keeps bringing it all back down. So,
what makes sense is an Apollo like big lifter, with a very small crew
return capsule. That makes sense energetically and cost wise. Sure, in
some ideal world we would all use Star Trek shuttle craft with
anti-gravity thrusters, but for the technology we have had for the last
forty years, rockets and capsules were what made sense. It was politics
and organizational dynamics that built the shuttle and kept if flying,
while it crippled NASA by sucking up all the money that could have gone to
R&D on self-replicating automation, mass drivers, comet & asteroid fly bys
and landings, and so on.

I think it is a false analogy to bring up the airport cost thing (though
people do all the time, and not to say there is no merit in it, but it is
misleading) -- because products carried and the value of the airliner
don't increase 100X - 1000X in value just because an aircraft travels from
the USA to France. But they do when a spacecraft goes from the Earth's
surface to LEO or GEO or L5. If the same economics held for aircraft, if
say a 7474 worth US$1 billion was worth US$100 billion after being flown
to France, everyone would say it was stupid, stupid, stupid to fly the
whole thing back to the US instead of just sending the aircrew back to the
US on a lifeboat. And people would also say it was stupid, stupid, stupid
to fly that airplane from the US to France just to pick up some other
thing (machinery) previously brought to France (Where it was worth 100X
what it is in the US) just to bring it back to the US in the airliner --
as opposed to just bring up a new one (yet, returning satellites for
repair was one argument for the Shuttle and you can see it is stupid idea,
energetically and economically, as that mass and technology should be kept
in space and further used in space).

The ISS -- even before it was built people were saying what a boondoggle
it was. How it would go into cost overruns (it was a first costed out at
only a few billion, ignoring lots of operational costs). And at the time,
there was a working Skylab concept which had the same size crew more or
less than the ISS has ever had. Plus there was Mir, the Russian space
station, which had a fantastic record (despite mishap after mishap) of
just being there and working. So what benefit did the ISS provide to be
able to house a few people when that had been done before? None whatsoever
(unless you see it as a subsidy to keep Russian engineers out of making
weapons or such). $100 billion was GK O'Neill's price tag more or less
on giving us an entire space habitat. Now the ISS is to be abandoned and
probably de-orbited in a few years. Can it show $100 billion in innovation
as a result? Anything of lasting permanence? What a waste.

And all this was known (or shoudl have been known) before both projects
got going. I won't put all the blame on NASA, a lot of it has to do with
the US economic system and politics -- but the end result is a huge waste
compared to what could have been possible with that much money.

So between ISS and the Shuttle, NASA could never invest in real innovation
(or only in very tiny amounts). And it stagnated as an institution after
Apollo -- and became something about managing large industrial complexes
(as opposed to incidentally doign that) and not about R&D and design and
breakthroughs and imagination and risk taking. Which is why SSI itself was
formed after all -- partially in response to NASA's failures to invest in
imagination and basic R&D to get people living in space on a permanent basis.

--Paul Fernhout