Lost in Space: The Fall of NASA and the Dream of a New Space Age - Hardcover
In Lost in Space, Greg Klerkx argues that ever since the last human left the moon in 1972, the Space Age has been stuck in the wrong orbit—and NASA, the organization that once fueled the world’s space-faring hopes, has been largely responsible for keeping it there. With the loss of the space shuttle Columbia, there has never been a more critical time for anyone interested in the future of space exploration to ask two questions: Whatever happened to the Space Age? And how do we get it back?
In pursuit of answers to these questions, Klerkx goes behind the scenes to reveal how NASA devolved from a pioneer of new horizons to a blundering bureaucracy concerned mainly with its own continued existence. Klerkx describes how NASA became dependent on projects geared mainly toward the needs of its budgetary allies—leading contractors in the “big aerospace” community—while drifting ever further from the public that had once cheered on its efforts to explore humankind’s last frontier. Chief among his criticisms, Klerkx makes clear the misguided and expensive folly of the space shuttle—“the Edsel of space transportation”—and chronicles NASA’s clumsy development of the money-gobbling International Space Station.
A damning, eye-opening indictment of NASA, Lost in Space is filled with fascinating perspectives on the ideas and technology behind modern space travel. But above all, Lost in Space is a story of people: some who devoted their lives to NASA and continue to believe in its promise, and others who became embittered by NASA’s failures and have struck out on their own, thereby giving rise to the “alternative” space movement that may hold the key to the future of humans in space—with or without NASA.
In pursuit of answers to these questions, Klerkx goes behind the scenes to reveal how NASA devolved from a pioneer of new horizons to a blundering bureaucracy concerned mainly with its own continued existence. Klerkx describes how NASA became dependent on projects geared mainly toward the needs of its budgetary allies—leading contractors in the “big aerospace” community—while drifting ever further from the public that had once cheered on its efforts to explore humankind’s last frontier. Chief among his criticisms, Klerkx makes clear the misguided and expensive folly of the space shuttle—“the Edsel of space transportation”—and chronicles NASA’s clumsy development of the money-gobbling International Space Station.
A damning, eye-opening indictment of NASA, Lost in Space is filled with fascinating perspectives on the ideas and technology behind modern space travel. But above all, Lost in Space is a story of people: some who devoted their lives to NASA and continue to believe in its promise, and others who became embittered by NASA’s failures and have struck out on their own, thereby giving rise to the “alternative” space movement that may hold the key to the future of humans in space—with or without NASA.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
Greg Klerkx is a former senior manager of the SETI Institute, an independent space exploration and research institution based in California’s Silicon Valley. Trained as a journalist, he won numerous news-writing awards and now divides his time between London and San Francisco. Lost in Space is his first book.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Chapter 1
The Price of "Peace"
Our twin-prop Brasilia leapt off the runway like a startled bird, the turbocharged engines groaning as they struggled to pull the plane upward through the steamy funk that passes for air in the late-summer tropics. We had only a few seconds to watch the Fijian capital city of Suva-a hodgepodge of tin-roofed jungle, architectural brutalism-melt from view like a hazy ghost town. Then the world outside went white, and we became part of the clouds.
In the low-pressure turbulence the Brasilia popped and bobbed like a bathtub toy, but we sat in contented silence, happy to be airborne. It had been raining all day, sometimes in scattered wisps of mist, more often in pounding sheets of practically solid liquid. Our group, about thirty in all, had traveled for nearly three hours by bus from our base outside of the town of Nadi, a creaky tourist trap on the rounded curve of Fiji's southwest side. The rain had made for slow, treacherous driving on the island's snaking roads, which seemed to be losing the battle against the jungle's tireless campaign to reclaim them. In the end, the roads and the jungle had cost us time, a commodity we had only in the sparest quantity.
Nevertheless, here we were. We had traveled from all over the world and spent an anxious week in Fiji for a chance at witnessing two hundred seconds of history. As our plane roared through the late afternoon sky, none of us were thinking about the hoops we'd jumped through to shoehorn ourselves into a small plane buzzing southeast toward what one member of our group had dubbed the loneliest place on the planet. Instead, we were thinking about Mir.
The Brasilia was on course to a position where we could observe the aging Russian space station as it plummeted from the sky. For more than two years, space engineers around the world had done computer modeling and other scientific soothsaying to anticipate what Mir would do when it plowed into the upper atmosphere at seven times the speed of sound. As we took off from Suva that afternoon, there was general agreement that the models and predictions amounted to a collective shrug: Mir was a 140-ton Tinkertoy the size of a jumbo jet, massive and unpredictable. It was more than twice as large as the second-largest man-made object ever to return to Earth, the American Skylab space station, which in 1979 had skipped down from orbit slightly askew and accidentally rained debris across the Australian outback, mercifully scarring nothing but the landscape. Still, even Skylab offered only a limited precedent to Mir's reentry. The only certainty was that once Mir reached an altitude of about 130 miles above the Earth there would be no turning back. Mir would come home.
We were to fly parallel to a rectangular swath of ocean that stretched southeast from Fiji roughly toward Argentina. This was to be Mir's "debris footprint," a mostly empty patch of water with no populated landmasses, no shipping lanes and only a smattering of fishing boats whose captains had been duly warned of Mir's pending return. It was here that the Russians would try to dump what was left of Mir after it burned its way through the Earth's heavy blanket of air, which captures an astonishing one hundred tons or so of space junk each year and incinerates it before a trace can touch terra firma. Again, Mir was a different story. Because of its size, what was left of the station after reentry could be considerable; up to forty tons of metal that would be traveling faster than a rifle bullet, even after being slowed by the atmosphere.
This is exactly what we hoped to see. Our flight plan had been recalculated dozens of times, and the very date of Mir's demise-March 23, 2001-was finalized only two days before we took off from Suva. With real-time updates from both NASA and Russian space centers, we would be able to position our planes (a smaller Bandeirante would trail our Brasilia to increase the coverage zone) for an unsurpassed view of one of the most spectacular cosmic events of the century. We would be six miles up and only, at most, a few hundred miles away when Mir exploded in the mother of all modern fireworks shows.
The timing of Mir's final descent was bittersweet. Just the previous month, the station had celebrated its fifteenth year in orbit, three times its intended operational lifetime; undeniably, Mir was humanity's first long-term outpost in space. Yet it was hard to argue with Russia's decision to retire Mir. Pummeled by micrometeorites and even rammed by other spacecraft, Mir had come to be perceived as something of an orbiting death trap; a rickety, patchwork jalopy held together by hope, popular will and, famously, chewing gum. With the cash-strapped Russians committed as key partners in the NASA-led International Space Station, the official statement from the Russian government was that now was the time to retire Mir with grace and dignity.
But all of us on the Brasilia knew that Russia had not willingly decided to end its space station's career. In the year prior to Mir's termination, Russia had nearly succeeded in revitalizing Mir through an extensive capitalist makeover. The result would have been the world's first commercial space station. The possibility for such a stunning revival was tantalizingly real. There were signed contracts on the table, customers at the door and millions of dollars in the bank with hints of more to follow.
To anyone interested in the future of human spaceflight, the effort
to turn Mir into a privately run, market-driven human-spaceflight platform was something truly new and exciting. In time, hoped Mir's backers, a successfully commercialized Mir would spark other entrepreneurial ventures-passenger space travel, media events, perhaps even the establishment of orbital recreational facilities-that might lead to more such ventures, to better and cheaper access to orbit, and to yet more people in space.
In time, a thriving human marketplace in Earth orbit would create the foundation for more ambitious voyages-back to the moon and on to Mars, voyages that would almost certainly require public- and private-sector partnership and international cooperation. Gone were the days when interplanetary human spaceflight could be sustained on the back of a single nation. A different kind of popular buy-in was needed if something as grand as Apollo was ever to happen again.
But Mir would not survive to justify the optimism attached, perhaps too hastily, to the plans for its revitalization. Long before we headed to Fiji, it was clear that even if there had been millions of dollars more invested in Mir's makeover, money alone was never enough to save the station. Whatever else it promised, the possibility of a commercialized Mir also threatened a comfortable status quo. That fact spelled the station's doom.
In the wake of Mir's demise, however, the status quo would suffer body blows in the form of a diminutive California millionaire determined to fulfill a boyhood dream, the diminishing relevance (and growing expense) of the International Space Station, and the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia. Through it all, NASA-chief guardian of the status quo, and the binding agent that held the frayed threads of a fading Space Age together-would increasingly look less like an innovator of new frontiers than a desperate bureaucracy concerned, above all else, with its own survival.
For several days after our arrival in Fiji, there was little to do but lounge in the tropical swelter, nursing cocktails and conversation while waiting for the Russians to confirm the details of Mir's final descent. We were a mixed bunch; scientists, photographers, journalists and entrepreneurs. All of us, to a person, were space junkies. We asked one another what had become of the Space Age-that epic turning point in history whose ultimate legacy would not be one of petty nationalist squabbles but one of common adventure and discovery as we reached out to the stars toward new adventures and horizons. Convened on a tiny patch of humid paradise, we waited for the sky to fall-and wondered if our own Space Age dreams could survive the impact.
It took a lot of effort-economic, technological and most of all political-to kill the Mir space station. And whether talking over cool beers in the sweaty heat of a Fijian evening or on quiet morning walks along storm-clouded stretches of beach, we voiced the same question repeatedly, albeit in different languages and through the prisms of different agendas: was Mir's demise the result of euthanasia or of murder?
Where the proverbial human space odyssey is concerned, the date
the Soviet Union launched its tiny Sputnik satellite, October 4, 1957, was the day the Space Age began. The following year, a hastily crafted congressional mandate created the National Aeronautics and Space Agency, or NASA, which just over a decade later would engineer humankind's first footsteps on another world. That period, between 1957 and 1969, represents the most stunning rate of technological advancement the world has seen, before or since.
Few have dated the end of the Space Age. But it did end. The year was 1986.
On February 20 of that year, the Soviet Union launched the Mir space station. Beaten to the moon and Mars, the Soviets specialized in space stations, the single area of human spaceflight in which they had regularly trumped the Americans; the Soviets can claim the first space station, Salyut 1, launched in 1971, two years before the American Skylab (although the first Salyut mission ended in tragedy when the Soyuz capsule returning the crew depressurized during reentry, killing all three cosmonauts). Several more Salyuts would precede Mir as the Russians learned more and more about living in space.
Yet all of the Salyuts, and Skylab, were little more than stretched space capsules. Mir was something altogether different-an elaborate, multimodule orbital platform that could host sophisticated science experiments and serve as home to ...
The Price of "Peace"
Our twin-prop Brasilia leapt off the runway like a startled bird, the turbocharged engines groaning as they struggled to pull the plane upward through the steamy funk that passes for air in the late-summer tropics. We had only a few seconds to watch the Fijian capital city of Suva-a hodgepodge of tin-roofed jungle, architectural brutalism-melt from view like a hazy ghost town. Then the world outside went white, and we became part of the clouds.
In the low-pressure turbulence the Brasilia popped and bobbed like a bathtub toy, but we sat in contented silence, happy to be airborne. It had been raining all day, sometimes in scattered wisps of mist, more often in pounding sheets of practically solid liquid. Our group, about thirty in all, had traveled for nearly three hours by bus from our base outside of the town of Nadi, a creaky tourist trap on the rounded curve of Fiji's southwest side. The rain had made for slow, treacherous driving on the island's snaking roads, which seemed to be losing the battle against the jungle's tireless campaign to reclaim them. In the end, the roads and the jungle had cost us time, a commodity we had only in the sparest quantity.
Nevertheless, here we were. We had traveled from all over the world and spent an anxious week in Fiji for a chance at witnessing two hundred seconds of history. As our plane roared through the late afternoon sky, none of us were thinking about the hoops we'd jumped through to shoehorn ourselves into a small plane buzzing southeast toward what one member of our group had dubbed the loneliest place on the planet. Instead, we were thinking about Mir.
The Brasilia was on course to a position where we could observe the aging Russian space station as it plummeted from the sky. For more than two years, space engineers around the world had done computer modeling and other scientific soothsaying to anticipate what Mir would do when it plowed into the upper atmosphere at seven times the speed of sound. As we took off from Suva that afternoon, there was general agreement that the models and predictions amounted to a collective shrug: Mir was a 140-ton Tinkertoy the size of a jumbo jet, massive and unpredictable. It was more than twice as large as the second-largest man-made object ever to return to Earth, the American Skylab space station, which in 1979 had skipped down from orbit slightly askew and accidentally rained debris across the Australian outback, mercifully scarring nothing but the landscape. Still, even Skylab offered only a limited precedent to Mir's reentry. The only certainty was that once Mir reached an altitude of about 130 miles above the Earth there would be no turning back. Mir would come home.
We were to fly parallel to a rectangular swath of ocean that stretched southeast from Fiji roughly toward Argentina. This was to be Mir's "debris footprint," a mostly empty patch of water with no populated landmasses, no shipping lanes and only a smattering of fishing boats whose captains had been duly warned of Mir's pending return. It was here that the Russians would try to dump what was left of Mir after it burned its way through the Earth's heavy blanket of air, which captures an astonishing one hundred tons or so of space junk each year and incinerates it before a trace can touch terra firma. Again, Mir was a different story. Because of its size, what was left of the station after reentry could be considerable; up to forty tons of metal that would be traveling faster than a rifle bullet, even after being slowed by the atmosphere.
This is exactly what we hoped to see. Our flight plan had been recalculated dozens of times, and the very date of Mir's demise-March 23, 2001-was finalized only two days before we took off from Suva. With real-time updates from both NASA and Russian space centers, we would be able to position our planes (a smaller Bandeirante would trail our Brasilia to increase the coverage zone) for an unsurpassed view of one of the most spectacular cosmic events of the century. We would be six miles up and only, at most, a few hundred miles away when Mir exploded in the mother of all modern fireworks shows.
The timing of Mir's final descent was bittersweet. Just the previous month, the station had celebrated its fifteenth year in orbit, three times its intended operational lifetime; undeniably, Mir was humanity's first long-term outpost in space. Yet it was hard to argue with Russia's decision to retire Mir. Pummeled by micrometeorites and even rammed by other spacecraft, Mir had come to be perceived as something of an orbiting death trap; a rickety, patchwork jalopy held together by hope, popular will and, famously, chewing gum. With the cash-strapped Russians committed as key partners in the NASA-led International Space Station, the official statement from the Russian government was that now was the time to retire Mir with grace and dignity.
But all of us on the Brasilia knew that Russia had not willingly decided to end its space station's career. In the year prior to Mir's termination, Russia had nearly succeeded in revitalizing Mir through an extensive capitalist makeover. The result would have been the world's first commercial space station. The possibility for such a stunning revival was tantalizingly real. There were signed contracts on the table, customers at the door and millions of dollars in the bank with hints of more to follow.
To anyone interested in the future of human spaceflight, the effort
to turn Mir into a privately run, market-driven human-spaceflight platform was something truly new and exciting. In time, hoped Mir's backers, a successfully commercialized Mir would spark other entrepreneurial ventures-passenger space travel, media events, perhaps even the establishment of orbital recreational facilities-that might lead to more such ventures, to better and cheaper access to orbit, and to yet more people in space.
In time, a thriving human marketplace in Earth orbit would create the foundation for more ambitious voyages-back to the moon and on to Mars, voyages that would almost certainly require public- and private-sector partnership and international cooperation. Gone were the days when interplanetary human spaceflight could be sustained on the back of a single nation. A different kind of popular buy-in was needed if something as grand as Apollo was ever to happen again.
But Mir would not survive to justify the optimism attached, perhaps too hastily, to the plans for its revitalization. Long before we headed to Fiji, it was clear that even if there had been millions of dollars more invested in Mir's makeover, money alone was never enough to save the station. Whatever else it promised, the possibility of a commercialized Mir also threatened a comfortable status quo. That fact spelled the station's doom.
In the wake of Mir's demise, however, the status quo would suffer body blows in the form of a diminutive California millionaire determined to fulfill a boyhood dream, the diminishing relevance (and growing expense) of the International Space Station, and the explosion of the space shuttle Columbia. Through it all, NASA-chief guardian of the status quo, and the binding agent that held the frayed threads of a fading Space Age together-would increasingly look less like an innovator of new frontiers than a desperate bureaucracy concerned, above all else, with its own survival.
For several days after our arrival in Fiji, there was little to do but lounge in the tropical swelter, nursing cocktails and conversation while waiting for the Russians to confirm the details of Mir's final descent. We were a mixed bunch; scientists, photographers, journalists and entrepreneurs. All of us, to a person, were space junkies. We asked one another what had become of the Space Age-that epic turning point in history whose ultimate legacy would not be one of petty nationalist squabbles but one of common adventure and discovery as we reached out to the stars toward new adventures and horizons. Convened on a tiny patch of humid paradise, we waited for the sky to fall-and wondered if our own Space Age dreams could survive the impact.
It took a lot of effort-economic, technological and most of all political-to kill the Mir space station. And whether talking over cool beers in the sweaty heat of a Fijian evening or on quiet morning walks along storm-clouded stretches of beach, we voiced the same question repeatedly, albeit in different languages and through the prisms of different agendas: was Mir's demise the result of euthanasia or of murder?
Where the proverbial human space odyssey is concerned, the date
the Soviet Union launched its tiny Sputnik satellite, October 4, 1957, was the day the Space Age began. The following year, a hastily crafted congressional mandate created the National Aeronautics and Space Agency, or NASA, which just over a decade later would engineer humankind's first footsteps on another world. That period, between 1957 and 1969, represents the most stunning rate of technological advancement the world has seen, before or since.
Few have dated the end of the Space Age. But it did end. The year was 1986.
On February 20 of that year, the Soviet Union launched the Mir space station. Beaten to the moon and Mars, the Soviets specialized in space stations, the single area of human spaceflight in which they had regularly trumped the Americans; the Soviets can claim the first space station, Salyut 1, launched in 1971, two years before the American Skylab (although the first Salyut mission ended in tragedy when the Soyuz capsule returning the crew depressurized during reentry, killing all three cosmonauts). Several more Salyuts would precede Mir as the Russians learned more and more about living in space.
Yet all of the Salyuts, and Skylab, were little more than stretched space capsules. Mir was something altogether different-an elaborate, multimodule orbital platform that could host sophisticated science experiments and serve as home to ...
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- PublisherPantheon
- Publication date2004
- ISBN 10 0375421505
- ISBN 13 9780375421501
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
- Number of pages400
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