Pyramid Scheme

Brad Delong has this link up to Maciej Ceglowski's trenchant analysis of the ongoing disasters that constitute the space shuttle and international space station programs. Among other things, it gave me some insight into how ancient Egypt could have wound up spending a major fraction of its GDP piling up rocks in the middle of the desert.

How did the space shuttle get to be such an engineering disaster?

Taken on its own merits, the Shuttle gives the impression of a vehicle designed to be launched repeatedly to near-Earth orbit, tended by five to seven passengers with little concern for their personal safety, and requiring extravagant care and preparation before each flight, with an almost fetishistic emphasis on reuse. Clearly this primitive space plane must have been a sacred artifact, used in religious rituals to deliver sacrifice to a sky god.

As tempting as it is to picture a blood-spattered Canadarm flinging goat carcasses into the void, we know that the Shuttle is the fruit of what was supposed to be a rational decision making process...

Ceglowski has a nice account of the bizaare features of the shuttle and of the political and bureaucratic constraints that produced this monstrosity.

Most of the really wrong design decisions in the Shuttle system - the side-mounted orbiter, solid rocket boosters, lack of air-breathing engines, no escape system, fragile heat protection - were the direct fallout of this design phase, when tight budgets and onerous Air Force requirements forced engineers to improvise solutions to problems that had as much to do to do with the mechanics of Congressional funding as the mechanics of flight. In a pattern that would recur repeatedly in the years to come, NASA managers decided that they were better off making spending cuts on initial design even if they resulted in much higher operating costs over the lifetime of the program.

Big government programs have ways of perpetuating themselves even when the original rationale fades or their failures become evident.

Having failed at its stated goal, the Shuttle program proved adept at finding changing rationales for its existence. It was, after all, an awfully large spacecraft, and it was a bird in the hand, giving it an enormous advantage over any suggested replacement.

For a while, the shuttle program limped along doing some mediocre science at collosal expense (e.g., studying the effects of microgravity on cockroach development) but eventually it found the perfect co-dependent in the international space station.

Launched in an oblique, low orbit that guarantees its permanent uselessness, it serves as yin to the shuttle's yang, justifying an endless stream of future Shuttle missions through the simple stratagem of being too expensive to abandon.

Sometimes the parody makes more sense than the reality. So it is with Ceglowski's ironical suggestion:

...we could accomplish our current manned space flight objectives more easily by not launching any astronauts into space at all - leaving the Shuttle and ISS on the ground would result in massive savings without the slighest impact on basic science, while also increasing mission safety by many orders of magnitude.

A couple more money quotes in an article that needs to be read entire.

The Apollo program showed how successful the agency could be when given a clear technical objective and the budget required to meet it.

... The people who work at and run NASA are not cynical, but the charade of manned space flight is turning NASA into a cynical organization.