Russian roulette

U.S. Rep. Dave Weldon, a Florida Republican whose district includes the Kennedy Space Center, didn’t pick the best of days to debut a plan to keep the space shuttles flying past 2010.

Down the road from KSC’s Visitors Center where Weldon held court on Monday, NASA and its contractors were outfitting Atlantis with sensors to try to flush out a bogey electrical connection that scrapped two launch attempts earlier this month. If engineers can find the bad circuit and make repairs, NASA should be able to launch the shuttle around Jan. 10.

Flying the shuttle is an expensive and delicate dance these days. The only reason why the ships, which were designed in the 1970s, were brought back into service after the loss of Columbia was to finish building the space station, a task NASA intends to complete by Sept. 30, 2010. It’s a hard deadline, suggested by the board that investigated the fatal accident and later endorsed by President Bush, in what may be his legacy to the space program.

Flying beyond 2010, the Columbia Accident Investigation Board reasoned, would require NASA to recertify every system, every piece of equipment in the fleet. It’d be cheaper to build something new and that is exactly what NASA has been told to do.

But there’s a problem -- a gap of about five years between when the shuttles stop flying and when the new ships will be ready. There’s concern about job losses, but those are going to go away anyway, as cutting personnel is really the only solution to bringing down the cost of spaceflight. Weldon’s plan would keep the shuttles flying while the new ships are under development.

The proposal will not sit well at NASA, which after two fatal accidents, finally gets that the shuttle fundamentally is an unsafe vehicle.

Flaw 1: The part of the ship that needs to fly back through the atmosphere for landing is susceptible to damage from debris and ice falling off the fuel tank during launch. (That's what happened to Columbia.)

Flaw 2: With the shuttle perched alongside, rather than on top, of its booster rockets and fuel tank, there is no chance to fly the crew away from serious problems during the first few minutes of launch. (That's why the Challenger crew perished.)

After Columbia, the decision was made to risk another 19 flights to finish building the space station. A 20th mission was added as well to service the Hubble Space Telescope. NASA has finished seven shuttle missions since returning the fleet to flight, with 13 to go. The rationale for all the flights is that no other vehicles are suitable for the jobs.

That’s not the case for the extra missions Weldon proposes NASA fly. The U.S. has the option of buying launch services from the Russians, though it’s a very thorny issue. First off, Congress has a ban in place that prohibits NASA from buying space rides from Russia to punish Russia for allegedly helping Iran develop nuclear weapons technology. NASA got an exemption to the trade sanction to buy Soyuz vehicles until 2011. It plans to ask for an extension for additional purchases until the shuttle replacement, called Orion, is ready to fly.

Weldon isn’t the only one who finds it unseemly that the United States will be without transportation to fly its own astronauts to the space station after the shuttles are retired, but does that justify continuing to launch people on a vehicle that’s fundamentally unsafe?

Weldon argues that the shuttle isn’t going to become suddenly more risky on the morning of Oct. 1, 2010, the first day of the government’s new fiscal year and the first day after the shuttle’s official retirement. Ironically, that’s exactly the kind of thinking that led to both of NASA’s shuttle disasters: The faulty booster rocket seals shouldn’t have been a problem for the launching of Challenger, after all there had been close calls before and nothing really bad happened. Likewise, pieces of foam had fallen off the shuttle’s fuel tank lots of times, some even striking the orbiter, but no one was ever in any danger.

NASA already is counting on luck to get it through the remaining shuttle flights to complete station construction. After that, there probably aren’t too many takers for a game of Russian roulette.