There’s a lot going on in the United States right now. We have ‘leadership’ that is authorizing federally-funded masked goons to disappear people and kill innocent protesters. That same leadership has all but declared war on friends and allies across the world. With all that going on right now (and much more), I’m willing myself to recall a more innocent time 40 years ago, when we were still capable of being shocked to our cores by the destruction of the space shuttle Challenger on live TV. As our shock subsided, we learned through official inquiries that a leak in the solid rocket booster’s ‘O-ring’ seal ignited the shuttle’s massive external fuel tank, which killed all seven astronauts aboard, including the first schoolteacher selected to fly into space. For Gen Xers like myself, we thought this would be our “JFK moment,” a traumatizing event that defines a generation. That was in those seemingly innocent days before 9/11, of course…

I have been (and always shall be) a huge space nerd, since the age of nine or so, when I saw those first images of the Martian surface returned from the Viking landers in the summer of 1976. I was a bit too young to remember the grand heyday of Apollo, though I do vaguely remember the final lunar landing, as well as the Apollo-Soyuz docking of 1975. While the exact purpose of the US space shuttle was never entirely clear, it excited me because it was a cargo plane that could fly in space! I mean, how cool was that, right? It would be NASA’s ‘space truck.’ Before the shuttle’s launch, Hollywood got in on the act, too. The first orbiter prototype was named Enterprise after the iconic fictional starship of TV’s Star Trek. Unfortunately for Trekkies like myself, the Enterprise orbiter was designed to study the ship’s aerodynamics within the Earth’s atmosphere, and would never fly in space. Bummer…

The space shuttle also featured heavily in the 1979 James Bond movie, “Moonraker,” which was the first Bond movie I saw theatrically, at age 12. I also remember building a Revell space shuttle model kit that I got for Christmas as a 14-year old in 1980. I used the kit’s decals to name my space shuttle Discovery (I personally liked that name more than Columbia, even though Columbia was slated to fly first). The space shuttle Columbia would lift-off in April of 1981 as the program’s inaugural flight, and it was timed to coincide with the 20th anniversary of cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s first orbital spaceflight aboard Vostok 1. Even on that first shuttle flight, there were concerns about the ship’s thermal protective tiles, which were strategically bonded to the skin of the orbiter to protect it from the fiery friction of reentry as the craft de-orbited and hit the Earth’s atmosphere at thousands of miles per hour. On that first flight, some tiles on the engine pods peeled off, though NASA’s PR team assured skittish civilians like myself that those missing tiles weren’t a problem. The orbiter Columbia landed safely at Edwards Air Force Base in California two days later, and dozens of incrementally ambitious flights followed.

For the American public at least, confidence in US manned spaceflight capability grew quickly. Five years later, the 25th space shuttle flight would carry schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe, and she would conduct lesson plans from orbit. The previous month, US senator Jake Garn flew aboard the Discovery. Despite the obvious danger of humans flying in spacecraft mated to a tank of rocket fuel in proximity to a pair of ignited solid rockets, space shuttle flights seemingly became less eventful. However, the complacent public didn’t know of private concerns by Thiokol engineers who were worried about the seal integrity of their solid rocket boosters, which, like fireworks, had no capacity to throttle down once their solid fuel was ignited (unlike conventional liquid-fueled rockets on the orbiter itself). Those solid rocket boosters were necessary to haul the extremely heavy orbiter and its massive external fuel tank into orbit.

Questions were raised about the enormous complexity and high cost of the space shuttle, which was falsely pitched as a reusable ‘space truck’ which would assemble orbiting space stations, and perhaps massive spaceships that could send astronauts to Mars (even in 1986, manned missions to Mars were always “twenty years away,” just like now). After much design haggling, the International Space Station wouldn’t see its orbital assembly begin until 1998. Until then, the space shuttle had no readily definable mission to justify its great expense. Sending astronauts into low Earth orbit was already being done on Russia’s Salyut space stations (and on the American Skylab space station back in the early 1970s). Nevertheless, the space shuttle program pressed ahead for five years after its inaugural flight…

I was 19 years-old that morning of January 28th, 1986, and I remember helping my parents shop for a TV cart at a local department store when the TV salesman hurried through his showroom, turning all TVs to the same news channel. The clearly anxious salesman told confused customers, “The space shuttle just blew up!” Hearing that news, I doubled over and felt physically nauseous. This was a literal nightmare I’d been having for several months until that point, as I repeatedly dreamed the shuttle’s engines suddenly cut out moments after launch, and its huge launch configuration came crashing back to Earth (which is not at all how the real disaster unfolded). Along with other horrified customers at the store, I watched the repeating video footage of the shuttle exploding. In an instant, Commander Francis Scobee, pilot Michael J. Smith, along with payload specialists Judith Resnik, Ellison Onizuka, Ronald McNair, Gregory Jarvis and schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe were doomed. Even if any of them survived that massive fireball (doubtful), there was no way for them to escape after the ship disintegrated. The blown-out crew compartment impacted without any means of braking into the Atlantic. Some Challenger pieces wouldn’t be recovered from the ocean floor until years later.

After that sickening explosion on the morning of January 28th, my childhood fantasies about the space shuttle and its dubious directives died, too. My youthful romanticism about seeing a crewed mission to Mars died that day, as well. Even 40 years later, humans are barely any closer to touching the sands of Mars than we were in 1986. Switching gears a bit, I remember going to see “Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home” theatrically that November of 1986, and I was gratified to see the movie open with a dedication to the late crew of the Challenger spaceship “whose courageous spirit shall live to the 23rd century and beyond…” It was a lovely gesture on the producers’ part. Star Trek offered comfort during a period of national mourning.

Despite the space shuttle’s eventual return to service in 1988, the space shuttle remained a very dangerous, expensive and impractical means of sending humans into orbit. Despite all of this, there were some genuine achievements made with the space shuttle program, such as the 1993 repair mission of the Hubble Space Telescope. Correcting Hubble’s faulty optics would revolutionize modern astronomy. In 1998, original Mercury astronaut and then-current US senator John Glenn returned to orbit as a crew member aboard the space shuttle Discovery. Construction also began on the International Space Station (ISS), and would be completed in 2011 with the final shuttle flight. The ISS remains in orbit at the time of this writing, and is expected to de-orbit sometime after 2030.

Between these accomplishments however, there would be another space shuttle disaster. On February 1st, 2003, some 17 years after the loss of Challenger (almost to the day, in fact), the space shuttle Columbia (the first orbiter built in the series) disintegrated upon reentry. Large ice shards from the external fuel tank broke off during its violent launch and struck the orbiter on its reinforced carbon-carbon wing. Launch acceleration and increasing g-forces allowed those ice shards to impact with piercing force. The compromised hull integrity allowed super-heated plasma (generated by friction with Earth’s atmosphere during reentry) to penetrate the airframe and destroy the orbiter. Communication was lost shortly after reentry began, and ground controllers soon realized that Commander Rick Husband, pilot William McCool, mission specialists Kalpana Chawla (who was born in India), Michael Anderson, David Brown, Laurel Clark, and Israeli astronaut Ilan Roman were lost.

Unlike the Challenger disaster 17 years earlier, news of the damaged wing was made public shortly after liftoff, but nothing could be done for the crew. The still-nascent ISS was in the wrong orbit to be reached by the Columbia, nor could its limited life-support and supplies accommodate seven more crew members. In a cruel bit of fate, the Columbia’s final mission was one of the space shuttle missions after 1998 that didn’t involve docking with the ISS, as most others did. With that knowledge, the Columbia crew were more or less resigned to their fate, and completed their life-sciences mission aboard the European Space Agency’s (ESA) portable Spacelab module, which was nestled inside the shuttle’s large cargo bay. I still remember a friend of mine calling me early that morning of February 1st to tell me the news of Columbia’s loss. The news was less gut-punching this time, since I’d heard ongoing debates about the damaged wing’s safety on NPR for days before the orbiter was due to return. I even heard some bullshit cable news speculation that the damage might’ve been sabotage to kill Israeli astronaut Ilan Roman. The loss of Columbia was perhaps less shocking, though it was no less tragic.

In 30 years of operation, the space shuttle program killed 14 astronauts and lost two of five orbiters. Originally there were four orbiters (Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis), with the late Challenger’s replacement ship, Endeavour, rolling out in 1991. Despite my youthful dreams for it, the excessively complex, dangerous space shuttle was unsustainable.

Past is Prologue

The 21st century would see the United States returning to capsule-based spacecraft to send humans into orbit, with private space companies such as SpaceX competing for NASA contracts to ferry astronauts to the ISS, or competitors like Blue Origin, who take several wealthy passengers on wildly expensive suborbital hops to the edge of space. Taking one lesson from the expensive space shuttle program, most of these capsules and their rocket boosters are now fully reusable. However, capsule-based spaceflight is certainly not without its own inherent dangers, as we saw in the earlier days of the US and Russian space programs…

On January 27th, 1967, the United States was in a heated race to beat the Soviets to the moon. To that end, the Apollo 1 spacecraft was undergoing a ‘plugs out’ test on the launch pad, resting atop its massive Saturn booster, with astronauts Virgil “Gus” Grissom (one of the pioneering Mercury/Gemini astronauts), Edward H. White II (the first American to walk in space on Gemini 4) and ‘rookie’ Roger B. Chaffee (a pilot who photographed secret Russian missile installations during the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962) aboard. This was only a test. The crew were supposed to go home later that night. Ratty communications, a troublesome escape hatch, and a pure oxygen atmosphere aboard the Apollo 1 capsule created a recipe for disaster. A spark ignited the pure oxygen of the cabin, and the three astronauts were burned to death, unable to escape. After a thorough review, the troubled Apollo command module underwent many significant design modifications. The Apollo program yielded a total of eleven spaceflights, including six successful landings on the moon, beginning with Apollo 11 in July of 1969,and ending with Apollo 17 in December of 1972.

On April 24th of 1967, the Soviets (nee: Russian) would experience their first tragedy with manned spaceflight as well, with the destruction of Soyuz 1–the first operational flight of the 59-year old, and still-running Soyuz (“Union”) capsule series. Cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov was the sole occupant of Soyuz 1 on its two day test flight around Earth. The capsule was designed for three occupants in preparation for missions to their as-yet-unbuilt space station, named Salyut (“salute,” or “fireworks”). The two-day orbital flight was successful, but the parachutes failed to deploy upon reentry, and the capsule impacted in Orenburg Oblast, Russia at a lethal speed of roughly 90 mph (150 kph). Vladimir Komarov’s fate was rumored to be one of several inspirations for the legendary David Bowie song, “Space Oddity,” aka “Ground Control to Major Tom,” about a doomed astronaut bidding farewell to his wife and colleagues from space, though this is somewhat apocryphal.

Another disastrous blow to the Russian manned spaceflight program would occur with the Soyuz 11 mission in June, 1971. Until its final day, the mission was a phenomenal success. Cosmonauts Georgi Dobrovolsky, Viktor Patsayev and Vladislav Volkov would be the first humans to dock with and occupy a space station (Salyut 1), where they would remain for 22 days, shattering all spaceflight endurance records until that point. The mission would be the Soviet answer to the Apollo 11 lunar landing. However, a pressure leak aboard their Soyuz 11 ferry vehicle, caused by a broken valve during undocking, asphyxiated the three cosmonauts during reentry. Successfully landing by automation, recovery crews on the ground attempted to resuscitate the three dead cosmonauts, but to no avail. Confident in their Soyuz capsule, the crew did not wear pressure suits during reentry… a simple step that would’ve saved their lives.

Robots Return

Gus Grissom, in a direct quote, once said, “The conquest of space is worth the risk of life.” While I agree that manned spaceflight is certainly exciting, and my heart will always skip a beat whenever I hear of a new first in crewed spaceflight, I do honestly question whether sending humans back to the moon or Mars just to plant flags and return a few hundred pounds of rocks is really worth human life. As we’ve seen in recent years, space robotics have progressed to technological degrees nearly unimaginable back in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s.

In the mid-1990s, I joined The Planetary Society, and turned my boyhood fantasies of human spaceflight into advocacy for robotic missions into space. These robots were going to far more exciting places throughout the Solar System, such as Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and beyond–even into the boundary of interstellar space itself. Currently, every planet in our solar system (even Pluto, for sentiment’s sake) has been visited by robotic spacecraft, along with 19 asteroids, and eight comets (!). Despite threats by the Trump administration to dramatically slash funding for most US robotic spaceflights, passionate appeals to members of Congress (no doubt boosted by space technology contracts within their own congressional districts) yielded some last minute reprieves. Current robotic space missions operating throughout the Solar System, including the nuclear-powered, SUV-sized Perseverance rover on Mars, will continue operating.

Along with ESA (European Space Agency) partners, the robotic Cassini mission to Saturn ferried the Huygens lander to Saturn’s frozen, densely-atmosphered moon of Titan in January of 2005. The Saturnian moon of Titan, with its extreme cold and distance from the sun, is a destination impossible to reach by humans with our current technology. While I certainly encourage human spaceflight whenever it can yield good space science and/or practical benefits (the Apollo lunar landings, or the Hubble Space telescope repair mission, for examples), I no longer look upon it with the same, wide-eyed optimism and innocence I did when I used to build space shuttle model kits as a kid in the early 1980s.

Artemis II

Next month, the Artemis II mission is scheduled to lift off for the moon aboard an Orion space capsule in a mission that will echo 1968’s Apollo 8’s lunar orbital flight. To that end, I sincerely wish astronauts Reid Wiseman,Victor Glover, Christina Koch, and Jeremy Hansen all the best. I actually met Victor Glover at San Diego Comic Con 2015, and I sincerely hope he and his crew return safely. I also hope Glover and his crew discover something entirely new about the moon. Challenger taught me that risking human life for spaceflight has to be for reasons more lasting and meaningful than good press, political flexing and juicy government contracts.

Above all else, I want Artemis II to mean something.