I should say, "Everything bad about the Shuttle was entirely predictable, even by people who later turned out to be not very smart." Which I know, because it was, by Gregg Easterbrook of all people. Easterbrook is well-known to science bloggers as the ESPN football columnist with a special knack for inserting his opinions about science into his columns, and getting it wildly wrong every single time. It's an intimidating resume of wrongness, on a wide swath of topics: global warming, anti-hydrogen, extra dimensions, evolution, cosmology, atheism, and consciousness. But at least he tends to recycle the same claptrap in multiple venues, thus saving us from different varieties of his craziness. Which leaves me honestly astonished at stumbling across this 1980 Washington Monthly story on the space shuttle program. The shuttle program had been running at NASA since the early Seventies, when the agency was looking to take the next step after the Apollo missions. They explored an ambitious list of possibilities, before budgets and technology forced them to narrow it down to a partly-renewable shuttle vehicle and (to give it something to do) a modular space station. The burden imposed by these bad decisions is crippling NASA's science program to this day. The first shuttle launch wasn't until 1981, and in 1980 almost everyone was in cheerleader mode -- this was going to be a momentous step in humanity's move into space, a cheap and reliable way to bring low-Earth orbit to the masses. It didn't quite work out that way, but very few people bothered to poke around in what was going on to read the tea leaves effectively. But this 1980 article did -- and it was written by none other than Gregg Easterbrook! Or somebody with his name, anyway. It's an extraordinary piece, extremely well-researched and detailed, and it lays out with unblinking specificity everything that will proceed to go wrong with the shuttle program in the years to come. The shuttle can't reach past low-Earth orbit, so conventional rockets will still need to be used. It's vastly more expensive and complicated than would be necessary to make frequent flights feasible. It was bloated in size in response to Defense Department demands. It will be subject to continual delays. It didn't have anything specifically to do that couldn't be done better by other means. It was rickety and fragile and would undoubtedly blow up or crash. Easterbrook examines individual problematic issues in detail, from the infamous refractory tiles to the engineering challenges of building engines that have to operate in unprecedented extremes of heat and cold, pressure and vacuum -- and then be used again. In retrospect, parts of the article are tragically prescient:
Some suspect the tile mounting is the least of Columbia's difficulties. "I don't think anybody appreciates the depths of the problems," Kapryan says. The tiles are the most important system NASA has ever designed as "safe life." That means there is no back-up for them. If they fail, the shuttle burns on reentry. If enough fall off, the shuttle may become unstable during landing, and thus un-pilotable. The worry runs deep enough that NASA investigated installing a crane assembly in Columbia so the crew could inspect and repair damaged tiles in space. (Verdict: Can't be done. You can hardly do it on the ground.)
And this was in 1980! By Gregg Easterbrook! Did something happen to him in the interim? I get all my best technology news from football blogs.
