Rockets into space come and, as the United States has sadly learned over the decades, rockets sometimes go.
But the saddest thing about the loss of the (happily unmanned or -womanned) SpaceX vehicle late last month at Cape Canaveral was surely not the delay in getting the water-filter replacements or new food up to the astronauts on the International Space Station. NASA insists there are still plenty of supplies up on the orbiting barge, and that the Russian mission that went up this past month will ensure that no one up there in the heavens circling above us goes hungry or thirsty.
No, the saddest thing seems to be seeing student experiments, including one from Damien High School in La Verne, blown to smithereens after all their hard work.
The experiment created by five students was meant to study the effects of long periods of low gravity on tiny, hardy little animals known as tardigrades. Now, they say they will try, try again.
But what in a larger sense does this failure, the third unmanned mission to the station to blow up in the past several months, say about Americans’ confidence in the ongoing safety of trying to leave these earthly bounds?
Yes, it always was a risky business. But wouldn’t someone imagining the future from the vantage point of the Sputnik launch in 1957 or John Glenn orbiting the Earth in 1963 have thought that we would have had it down pat by now? Why don’t we? NASA is at least for the present without launch vehicles of its own, using instead Russian and private-company rockets to get into space. Do you worry about scrappy, small for-profit companies, or foreign governments, building our space hardware rather than the old public-private partnership, with so many Southern California aerospace giants no longer involved?
Do you wonder, in fact, about the entire future of the American venture into space with so many rockets going kablooey? Our Question of the Week for readers is: Is the U.S. space program too risky a business?
What do you think?
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