You ask for it, you get it.

My new favorite photo 

I dedicate this entry to my good friend Drew Volturo who apparantly is the only one on God's green Earth who has not had enough NASA talk from me over the past month.

Seriously, though, this entry will be a nice little discussion on the future of NASA's manned space flight program and, more importantly, my job security. As you must know by now, the Space Shuttle launched last week and had experienced a few, let's say, anomalies that were discovered upon close inspection.

This would be a great time to interject a side story and a reminder to everyone who reads that of how freakin' cool my job is. As you can imagine, there are a number of people who sit in Mission Control, myself being one of them from time to time. Before the Shuttle can launch, every flight controlling discipline has to give a "go" to launch which is the equivalent of say "I see nothing wrong with my particular system and I'm giving the thumbs up for the bird to fly." Normally (and probably obviously) only the space shuttle mission controllers go through this ceremony. However, since this mission involved the shuttle docking with the space station, the station mission controllers also had to give a go, indicating that we were ready for the docking to occur. It just so happened that I was sitting console that day. The Flight Director started at the front of the room, passing from the thermal systems people to the attitude people to the computer people and so on. When she reached the back of the room she looked at me and I had the honor to say "BME is go for launch." Now I can tell people that the shuttle could not have launched if it wasn't for my permission.

Truth is, I would've gotten my head ripped off and probably lost my job if I didn't give a go. Not that NASA looks down upon people screwing up their plans, but my group has so little to do with launch that I would've needed an incredible reason to give a thumbs down for launch. So, although it was mostly ceremonial, I'm still really proud of the fact that I got to play such a pivotal role in the launch of the shuttle :)

But I digress. The shuttle is expected to touch down in just about 5 hours from now at 3:45CST on the 8th of August. Like everyone else around here, I won't be breathing my sigh of relief until the crew is out of that thing. There's a lot of talk about the shuttle being an unsafe vehicle with too many modes of failure. It helps to put this in perspective. The shuttle has over one million parts. Yes, that's 1,000,000 (or, if you're European: 1.000.000). Even if the vehicle had a 0.0001% failure rate, that still 100 things that will break. You won't find anything on Earth with that kind of reliability (apart from police radar guns which, apparantly, are never wrong...). So, I don't want to hear about unreliability because it's expected, if not guaranteed.

I think Michael Griffin, the NASA administrator, put it best when he said that the shuttle was built as an experimental aircraft designed to reach low earth orbit every few weeks and, frankly, it's failed it's objective. As a project, it has failed. No denying that. That doesn't mean it hasn't done incredible things for both science and man's dreams, but it's not doing what it was intended to do. What better reason to try for second generation vehicle? Unfortunately, I read an article which said that NASA is being smart about this and will be 1) using all it's existing contractors and 2) using existing technology from the shuttle to build the next generation craft. Can you understand why my money is with private industry?

I have an idea. I'm going to build something that works, but not really the way I want it to, and with a significant amout of flaws. Then I'm going to use a lot of the same technology (which includes a lot of the flaws) and build it's replacement. If you ask me, this is the fundamental problem with NASA. Because it is a government agency it's hands are tied when it comes to ingenuity and safety. If it's worked before, use it again because the amount of money and time it'll take to develop and certify something else is totally unreasonable, and potentially unsafe. As opposed to current technology, which is, well, potentially unsafe. My chair is potentially unsafe but that doesn't stop me from sitting on it. Yeah, unfair comparisons, but space travel is inherently unsafe and only by pushing the limits of technology and taking those risks are we ever going to make significant progress.

Did I say chair? I meant soapbox...

As for my job security, I'm good to go as long as the space shuttle is flying. Granted, I work for the station, but if the shuttle stops, forward work on the station stops and well, that's when the fun also ends. Truth is, I don't expect to be working here anymore at that point but you can never tell around here.

All things aside, though, my best wishes go out to the brave men and women currently on board the space shuttle. They've done some incredible things and have witnessed the Earth as I'll never see it. They are our under-recognized heroes and I'll be right there with them as they land. We'll never forget what happened to the Columbia crew, along with the Challenger crew and the men on Apollo 1, and I give thanks to the current crew for showing us that we can continue our dream.