So, the guys and girls up at the space station are gonna pull over onto the orbital shoulder and check some hoses on shuttle Discovery... so to speak. Astronaut Stephen Robinson is going to spacewalk out to the underside of the orbiter and fix or remove some material that may reduce the shuttle’s aerodynamics when it reenters Earth’s atmosphere, with potentially diastrous results.
This kind of repair has never been done before, and it made me think of SF author Allen Steele’s novels and short stories
And in that free-association way that Web surfing sometimes produces, I found Steele’s Web site, on which he has the entire text of his early-2001 testimony before the House Subcommittee on Space and Aeronautics about the new direction our efforts in space should be taking. The whole thing is interesting reading, and I found myself nodding in agreement throughout. Isn’t this all just basic common sense?:
This hypothetical agency, which I'll call the Commercial Space Administration (CSA), would be much like the present Federal Aviation Administration. Its primary purpose would be to foster private space enterprise; unlike NASA, it would have no launch facilities of its own, nor would it actively engage in research and development. It would probably be organized under the Department of Transportation, with major support from the Department of Commerce and the Department of Defense.
The CSA would have two major functions. First, it would serve as the primary regulatory agency for commercial space exploration. Private enterprise currently has to gain approval from several different federal agencies before it can launch a spacecraft, thus has creating a bureaucratic maze which inhibits the development of commercial carrier. The CSA would streamline this process, making it easier for a company to put a project on the fast track to full operation.
Second, the CSA would award federal grants to private companies that wish to develop new spacecraft for commercial use, with an emphasis on second-generation passenger-rated craft. Right now, small firms have to raise funds from individual investors before it can hope to bring its ideas from the drafting table to the launch pad; this is a major obstacle to commercial space development, since investors are wary of putting money into projects which may not pay off for many years.
By offering "seed money" to such fledgling companies, the CSA would assist private industry in developing advanced launch systems. Instead of having NASA pick one design over another -- such as in the case, several years ago, with the government-sponsored competition among four different major aerospace companies to build a second-generation shuttle, which in turn led to the ill-fated X-33/VentureStar being selected while the three competing designs were left to wither and die -- the CSA would encourage many different companies to build their own spacecraft without having to rely on NASA as its primary customer. In this way, free-market competition would drive the development of the advanced spacecraft.
Geeks are influencing the course of history. Savor the power.
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