3/12/2023 0 Comments Russian space shuttle![]() ![]() The MiG 105 was nicknamed "Lapot" ( Russian: лапоть, or bast shoe (the word is also used as a slang for " shoe")), for the shape of its nose. It was a visible result of a Soviet project to create an orbital spaceplane. That examines emerging technologies, public policy, and society.The Mikoyan-Gurevich MiG-105, part of the Spiral program, was a crewed test vehicle to explore low-speed handling and landing. One day not long from now, an Artemis crew will send back video from the moon, where no one has been since before I was born, and in moments like that, we will forget that it was a compromise and a kludge, and Artemis will be the most beautiful thing in the sky. And as with shuttle, I suspect that after feeling Artemis’s rumble in my chest, I will come to love it. Few space insiders would dispute any of this slander, and yet-just as with shuttle in my childhood-it’s what we have now. (No one wants to be the leader who canceled the future, so lawmakers tend to keep big space projects limping along rather than putting them out of their misery). I have insulted SLS many times, calling it not so much a space vehicle as a space-vehicle-shaped excuse for politicians to avoid responsibility for having no space program at all. I’ve been grumbling about SLS for years, just as most space fans I know do. “Space Launch System” is a name maybe even more boring than “space shuttle,” but the crewed moon project that will constitute its first missions has been given the pleasing name Artemis: twin sister to Apollo. In August, the week I turn 50, NASA has scheduled the first launch attempt for its newest rocket, the first capable of going to the moon since Apollo. What to Know About Twitter’s Bizarre New Two-Factor Authentication Policy Netflix’s Password-Sharing Crackdown Is Part of Something Much Bigger It was a compromise and a kludge, sure, but it was also a beautiful space plane, and the things it did were important and awe-inspiring. I was fortunate enough to see the space shuttle launch in person four times I got to meet people who helped design it, maintain it and launch it, people who have flown it themselves, and family members of people who have died on it. Like many space fans of my generation, I regret the decisions made in 1972 to shelve the dream of Mars, but I also dearly love the space shuttle, the only spacecraft I have ever known. And we have never swung back toward exploration. But there have been plenty of times in the intervening decades when the nation has been flush. There is always an implication that at some point in the future maybe we’ll be able to afford another Apollo-style mission-for exploration, for science, for all mankind-someday, but not right now. But at the end of Apollo we needed to justify the expense of spaceflight by implying it would be good for business and could somehow pay for itself, or even be profitable. Space historian John Logsdon describes this moment in human spaceflight as a turn from exploration to exploitation: We went to the moon in order to discover a new world (ostensibly-there was also the whole Cold War thing, though that exigency had mostly died out by the time American boots actually hit the moon’s surface). This is the moment when space policy in this country changed from the “we choose to go to the moon” era to the “this is all we can afford right now” era-the space shuttle era. No Mars transport, no orbiting space station-just the shuttles. The White House directed NASA to present Nixon with some more affordable choices, and of those, Nixon chose the very cheapest. The plan was well thought out, achievable, and massively expensive. Not long before that press conference, in the euphoric afterglow of the first moon landing, the prevailing proposal for the next step in human spaceflight had been much more ambitious: an orbiting space station with a reusable launch vehicle to service it, a lunar base, and a crewed mission to Mars. If that sounds like bragging about cheaping out, rest assured it sounded that way to a lot of folks at NASA as well. “It will revolutionize transportation into near space,” he said, “by routinizing it.” He promised the space shuttle would “take the astronomical costs out of astronautics.” It’s odd to think of a technology being 50 years old, because technology always thinks of itself as being brand new. The hopeful tones in which Nixon announced to the nation how great the new shuttle was going to be, at the press conference where he unveiled the design in January 1972, now fill me with a combination of nostalgia, envy, pity, and faint embarrassment. ![]()
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