New Mars

“As a 16 year old space fanatic, I watched the maiden flight of Columbia in a state of breathless anticipation and excitement…” Stuart Atkinson, a lifelong space enthusiast and long time contributor to New Mars gives us his thoughts on the Columbia disaster and where we should go now.

As a 16 year old space fanatic, I watched the maiden flight of Columbia in a state of breathless anticipation and excitement. I remember it as if it was yesterday… Sat in front of the TV, inches away from the flickering screen, with my baffled family members behind me wondering why I was getting so excited, I followed the oh-so-slow countdown to the accompanying thump-thump of my heart, which was pounding in my chest like I’d just run a half marathon. Then the billow of snow-white steam from beneath the stack, the sudden flaring of the main engines - and Columbia was pushing upwards, reaching for the sky, a sparkling white cathedral spire propelled towards the clouds on a pillar of spitting white flame…

Jump forwards in time two decades. I’m older, maybe not wiser, but my excitement for the space program still burns as brightly as Columbia’s main engines did on that spectacular April day in 1981. Saturday night I returned home from an all-day shopping trip with my girlfriend, over on the east coast, so hectic a day that we hadn’t managed to catch a news bulletin. In the kitchen, making the first cup of tea of the evening, I turned on the radio just after 9pm, just in time to hear a studio guest saying what a “tragedy it was for the astronauts’ families…” Dashing through into the front room, heart pounding again, I pulled up the teletext news service - and there it was, the awful, awful news. Columbia was lost, and all her crew too, dashed across the sky over Texas in a trail of fire. I sank into a chair and couldn’t speak. Those poor astronauts, I thought, they’d been so close to home… they must have been feeling so high after such a successful mission, celebrating the completion of their experiments, feeling disappointment at having to leave space, but looking forward to hugging their friends and family again… To be taken from us within sight of the Earth’s blue and green surface, it just seemed so cruel, so damned unfair.

When the TV news eventually came on I watched the pictures, now burned into our memories, with a heavy, weary heart. I’d always had a special place in that heart for Columbia. I’d watched her fly over my house several times, a spark of light skating across the icy pond of the heavens in perfect, serene silence. She was probably my favourite of the fleet, not just because she was the first to fly, but because she was different - with those unique, triangular black blocks on the leading edge of her wings she was instantly recognisable on photos even when her name was obscured by an open payload bay door or cloud of smoke at launch. Now she was gone, that sleek, noble craft of gleaming white and inky black, reduced first to a Mir-like trail of sparks and flares smeared across a poster-paint blue Texan sky and then reduced to countless pieces of smoking, gnarled debris strewn over fields, roads and hillsides. It was - yes, an undignified way for the Old Lady of the fleet to end her days.

When I saw the image of the empty, charred helmet lying on the scorched grass, I could watch no more.

Days later, the inquest is in full swing. The newspapers are full of tributes to the crew; their now-familiar faces smile out at us from every front page, beneath images grabbed from TV screens of Columbia’s final moments. On radio and TV news programs, countless doom-merchants are predicting that the age of manned spaceflight is over, that the death of Columbia and her crew heralded the death of the spaceflight dream itself, that robots are cheaper and smarter than people, that people don’t belong in space, etc. etc…

They’re wrong. Something died with Columbia alright, but it wasn’t the space program. It was - I hope - our complacency. The loss of Columbia, and the snuffing-out of the lives of her brave crew, is a wake-up call to all of us - NASA, space enthusiasts, all of us - and a chance to reach for, and shape, a future worthy of their memory.

Some say we should stop exploring space, that the cost in human lives is now too great. But Columbia’s crew wouldn’t have wanted that. They were onboard Columbia because we can’t stop exploring, anywhere; forests, the ocean floor, space, they all call out to us because it’s in our nature, in our blood, encoded in our very DNA, to Discover and Learn. We are a breathlessly curious species, we always want to know what’s over the next hill, around the next corner, on the next island. We’ve been that way for tens of thousands of years, evolution has programmed us that way, and we’re not going toe reprogrammed now.

But what about the financial cost? Inevitably, some people are screaming about the expense of space exploration. This morning I heard someone on the radio declare that the amount of money spent on space was “obscene”. Well, on Saturday I watched seven good people burn up before my eyes because the craft they were flying in was repaired and flown on the cheap because NASA wasn’t given ENOUGH money. Now that’s obscene. So don’t anyone dare grouse to me about the cost of spaceflight. I know the True Cost of Spaceflight - it’s scattered across a dozen Louisiana fields and Texan schoolyards, marked by fluttering yellow tape.

But this isn’t the time to talk about money, or at least it shouldn’t be. That will come, I’ve no doubt, especially when the focus of the enquiries turns on NASA’s poor management practices and obsession with budget-slashing. No. This is the time for everyone to pull together - and to pull the different strands of the space program together, instead of everyone pulling everything in different directions.
And while it’s hard to believe we can even do such a thing when accusations are flying in all directions and images of smoking debris and body bags are playing non-stop on our TV screens, there is a way.

We start by supporting NASA. I don’t just mean the management, I mean everyone within NASA, the behind-the-scenes people who, somehow, keep the huge organisation running despite the best efforts of its penny-pinching political masters. And we start with supporting the men and women who fly into space, the astronauts; we have to give them back the respect which has been slowly but surely evaporating away from them over the past complacent years. If we’re honest with ourselves we’ll admit that we’ve been taking the shuttle and its occupants for granted. Looking inside myself I realise that I’ve been doing that too. When I finally caught up with the news on Saturday I realised with disbelief that I didn’t even know the names of Columbia’s crew, the mission had blended into the background of my life, other things had held my attention. I knew that Israeli Ilan Ramon was onboard, and that the mission was historic for that reason… but I had no idea that Kalpana Chawla was flying again until I saw those beautiful dark eyes of hers staring out at me fromn the TV screen. I feel rather ashamed about that.

It’s time we stopped taking the shuttle astronauts for granted. It’s time we reminded ourselves that they’re flying on our behalf, they’re our representatives. They put their lives on the line to add to our knowledge of Earth, the universe, and our place in it.

Supporting NASA means supporting the International Space Station too. We must get behind it, wholeheartedly, casting aside our doubts about its worth and future. We mustn’t abandon ISS in orbit as some are suggesting, we absolutely mustn’t. That would be admitting defeat. Even if it means paying the Russians for seats onboard their Soyuz’s we have to keep ISS permanently manned. That might mean astronauts would be little more than “house-keepers” while the shuttle fleet is brought back online down on Earth, but so be it. If we abandon ISS there’s a good chance it would never be manned again, the politicians would just find a way to ensure its airlock doors stayed permanently shut, you know they would. So, although it wouldn’t be a glamorous crew assignment, and it would mean riding inside cramped Soyuzes instead of roomy shuttle orbiters, we have to keep people up there. If NASA was to ask for volunteers for such a house-sitting mission I’m sure they’d be shoulder-deep in application forms within an hour.

Down here on the ground, we have to welcome ISS into our hearts too, make efforts to go outside and see it whenever we possibly can and not just take it for granted. Maybe someone with far more brains than I could come up with a way for communities to show their support for the ISS crew on one special day, to say “hello” by flashing torches, lighting beacons or flicking on and off the lights of buildings beneath the ISS’s flight-track..?

And while we nurse the ISS along, it’s unarguably time to start seriously developing a successor to the shuttle itself. Shuttle is still a fine spacecraft, I won’t hear a word said against it… but we need to move with the times and let our men and women have a new, reliable, safe vehicle to go to work in, just as military and civilian pilots do. It will cost a fortune, but it’s time to bite that financial bullet and stop messing about. Administrator O’Keefe, who I believe to be a good, sincere man, needs to get everyone around a table in a dark room lit by a single lightbulb, lock the door behind them, look them in the eye and say “Design it, build it, make it safe, and we’ll fly it.”

And shake his head when someone asks “How much?”

While the engineers and techs are building things with their hands, we, the space enthusiasts and activists, have to play our part too, building with our hearts and minds. We have to get people interested in and excited about space exploration all over again, stop them taking it for granted and make them see the potential once more. We have to start with the kids. We have to take them to museums and planetaria and show them the wonders of the universe, explain them to them. We have to take them outside on clear nights and show them the craters of the Moon, the rings of Saturn and the ice caps of Mars through telescopes. We have to take kids outside and show them ISS as it sails overhead, make sure they realise that “There are people on that star,” and never, ever let them take it for granted again.

But all that’s just foundation - laying for the real work that needs to be done. ‘The real work’ can only be done by NASA and the US Government, working in partnership to re-energise public support for manned spaceflight with an ambitious project, a Big Project that has a valuable, practical goal at its heart.

Only one project would fit those criteria: a manned mission to Mars, to discover, once and for all, if there ever was, or still is, life on the Red Planet.

There are many reasons for going to Mars, practical, spiritual, political, all of them so well known to New Mars readers that I won’t go through them all here. But one important one is that although people are still excited and fascinated by the promise of space exploration, they are frustrated by it because they can see for themselves that we’re not actually exploring anywhere anymore. They’re not excited by ISS hardware delivery missions to low Earth orbit or by scientific flights, regardless of how useful and worthy ISS ops are. They want a more noble, more ambitious space program, something with an old-fashioned, easily-understood, beginning, middle and end. Give them that again, give them Mars, and I truly believe that public support for the space program will fly like a rocket on the 4th of July.

There’s an opportunity to light the fuse of that rocket in August. By the end of that month the various Columbia enquiries should have reported their findings, the shuttle’s fate will be understood, and NASA may even be considering resuming flights if the identified problems have been fixed. At the same time, the planet Mars will be closer to Earth than it has been for many thousands of years, and will be blazing in the summer sky like a flame-coloured lantern. Could there possibly be a better time for NASA to commit itself to an ambitious mission, than when the target of that mission is there in the sky for everyone to see?

But wouldn’t any Mars mission - Mars Direct or Prometheus - be ruinously expensive? Wouldn’t building a bigger ISS, or even sending astronauts back to the Moon be a better, safer and cheaper option? Perhaps. But if the loss of Columbia has told us one thing it’s that it’s time we stopped looking at ’safer’ and ‘cheaper’ as the only qualifying criteria for space missions, manned and unmanned. It’s time we puffed our chests out and shouted at the sky, “We can do this!”

After Columbia, there’s another reason why we should go to Mars: for the astronauts’ sake. We need to let the men and women of the astronaut corps do what they have dreamed of doing ever since they filled in their application forms - fly, and explore. For far too long now they’ve been risking their lives, strapping themselves into seats on top of 60m tall bombs, only to be stranded in Earth orbit, as hi-tech delivery truck drivers ferrying cargo up and down, up and down, all the time staring at the stars in frustration. They train for years to do it then work even harder up there, they give it their all, and do great science which has benefited us all… but god, imagine how frustrating it must be to peer out the shuttle’s scratched windows and see the Moon, and Mars, shining in the darkness, seemingly close enough to touch, but be unable to even think about travelling to them…

In fact, we don’t have to imagine that. The recently-published book “SPACE SHUTTLE, The First 20 Years”, from the editors of AIR & SPACE SMITHSONIAN Magazine, is full of not only breathtaking pictures but quotes from astronauts describing their experiences - and frustration.

“It has taken us just 90 minutes to cover the whole planet. Just 90 minutes! That phrase starts to ring like a mantra in my head. The realization that Earth is such a small planet is overpowering. It seems to me like a harbour, luring space explorers with the colour of life. I picture gentle waves lapping the shorelines, trees waving their branches in the wind. I feel we must search for another such harbour. Mars, perhaps?”

And who wrote those beautiful words? Kalpan Chawla, who was onboard Columbia for its final flight.

Enough! Astronauts have been exiled in Earth orbit for too long. It’s time to open the wallet, design the ships and build them. Mars beckons. And we can answer its call right now if we are willing to take the chance.

And in doing so, we have a fitting way to honour the Columbia 7. Right now there are two robot rovers - the Mars Exploration Rovers - being readied for summer launches to the Red Planet. Let’s use them to pay tribute to the astronauts who have given their lives to get us this far. In a gesture of faith and gratitude, let’s place pieces of Columbia, Challenger and Apollo 1 perhaps, inside the rovers, so they travel to Mars. At the very least, the charred STS-107 crew mission patch found in that Texan field should be sent to Mars on one of the rovers, with a solemn, sincere promise that we won’t rest until we’ve sent people there, to Mars, to bring it back to the Astronaut Memorial at JSC before the 15th anniversary of Columbia’s final flight.

I remember, vividly, the aftermath of Challenger. I was only 21, but I sensed that Everything Had Changed. In fact, I was wrong, everything didn’t change. The shuttle flights resumed, satellites were deployed again, astronauts spacewalked, beaming for the cameras. The space station’s construction began. Apart from the enhanced safety features in the orbiters, it was business as usual. We were content to just loiter on the street corner of the universe, staring at the bright city lights in the distance but not daring to set off across the road to see them for ourselves.

Well, we can’t do that this time. We can’t just sit on our hands and go back to where we were before Columbia. We are at a fork in the road, and the choices we face are stark but clear.

We can give up. We can decide that it’s just not worth the loss of life, and the vast expense, and turn our backs on manned spaceflight. The remaining shuttles could be towed into hangars, covered with tarpaulins and left for the spiders and flies to enjoy. ISS could be evacuated and abandoned, the present crew brought back home in a Soyuz capsule like the last lifeboat dropping down the side of the Titanic. We could spend the next 5 years watching ISS drifting through the sky, silent, empty, mocking us for our lack of vision, and guts, from above, until one day it fell to Earth in a display of fireworks shown to millions live on CNN, heartbreakingly-reminiscent of Columbia’s last moments. All we’d have left then would be shelves of glossy, National Geographic coffee table books about spaceflight, and the Kennedy Space Museum full of relics of the lost Space Age, like something from one of Stephen Baxter’s alternative future books, its dusty hangars decorated with space artists’ visions of dramatic Mars landings and space stations with glittering, dragon-fly wings…

Or…

Or we mourn, grieve, honour the fallen - and then do whatever we have to to move forwards, with purpose and resolve, to ensure that they didn’t give their lives for nothing. We design and build a reliable, safe shuttle replacement. We make ISS the incredible asset and solar system “gateway” that it could be. We give an honest, cleansed NASA our full support and respect again, and give it an identity, a purpose, once more - to lead a bold but realistic and integrated space program with a manned mission to Mars as its ultimate aim. Not simply for national prestige, or superpower politics, but for the advancement of science.

If we do that, if we pull together, then in just over a decade a man or a woman will be standing on the red, dusty plains of Mars, holding that mission patch from Columbia and looking back at Earth blazing in a Martian sunset sky. Then they’ll turn around and look longingly towards Jupiter, or Saturn, or the stars beyond, and feel restless and impatient to push onwards once more…

The choice we face today is simple. We can either curl up into a ball and hide from the universe, or we can stand up, stare it in the eye. And push on.

I don’t know what will happen now. That depends on national and international politics, finances, things I don’t understand. But I do know this. No matter how much pain we feel, we must never be satisfied. We must always feel hungry for knowledge. If we falter now, if we lose our nerve now, then Kalpana, and the rest of Columbia’s final crew, really did die for nothing… and there really was no point in us climbing down from the trees in the first place.

Filed under: Articles on February 6th, 2003