“Space is hard.”
U.S. astronaut Scott Kelly reminded his many Twitter followers of that historical axiom with a tweet from the International Space Station following Sunday’s explosion of a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket.
It would be easy now for some in Congress to use the loss of the rocket as an argument to scale back or even abandon NASA’s plan to use private contractors, including SpaceX, to carry astronauts to the station. Easy, but terribly shortsighted.
The history of the U.S. manned space program is a long string of triumphs punctuated by a few devastating failures. Those failures involved NASA-operated vehicles. Fortunately, members of Congress at those times had the good sense not to give up on the program, and U.S. astronauts went on to walk on the moon and build the space station.
SpaceX had an impressive record before Sunday’s explosion: 18 successful Falcon 9 launches, including six cargo missions and one test flight to the space station. Clearly, the company and NASA must do a thorough investigation to determine what happened Sunday, so it can be fixed. But it’s unreasonable to expect rocketeers, public or private, to be perfect. Space flight is inherently hazardous.
Fortunately, the explosion didn’t kill any astronauts; there were only supplies in the Dragon capsule carried by the Falcon 9. But had there been astronauts on board, they probably would have survived, said SpaceX CEO Gwynne Shotwell. The different capsule model that SpaceX has designed to carry crew includes a launch escape system intended to activate in emergencies and spirit astronauts to safety.
Since NASA’s space shuttle program ended in mid-2011, U.S. astronauts have been stuck hitching rides on Russian rockets to reach the space station. A round-trip ticket now costs more than $70 million.
NASA has awarded contracts to two companies, SpaceX and Boeing, to take back the job of carrying U.S. astronauts from Vladimir Putin’s Russia. That plan is already two years behind schedule, because Congress has consistently failed to provide enough funding. The latest House and Senate budget proposals, at more than $200 million less than NASA has requested, would push back the launch date another couple of years, according to U.S. Sen. Bill Nelson, a Florida Democrat who flew on a shuttle mission in 1986.
It’s unlikely Congress would zero-out the commercial space program, but it’s more likely lawmakers might propose to reduce funding by going with a single private contractor for manned missions. That would be overlooking an obvious lesson from Sunday’s explosion: When an accident grounds one contractor, it’s critical to have other options, as NASA does with cargo missions to the station.
As they mull their decisions about America’s future in space, members of Congress should keep in mind another piece of popular wisdom: Nothing worthwhile is easy.
