Goodbye to a 'Good Old
Girl'
By HOMER HICKAM
HUNSTSVILLE,
national asset called
graphics artist for Rockwell, the
shuttle's builder, back in the 1970s. I
came on board with NASA in 1981,
the first year
represented for me the culmination
of so many of the hopes and dreams I
wrote about in my memoir
"Rocket Boys" and in the movie adaptation, "October
Sky."
I was on the training team of many of her crews. I was on
the pad with her
at the
reliable and steady. She also
carried my National Science Fair medal into
orbit in 1997, and in 1998 carried
a small bolt from one of the rockets I
built as a teenager back in Coalwood,
that took John Glenn back into
orbit. Oh yes, she was a good old girl and,
my God, I'm going to miss her.
I'm retired from NASA now, a full-time writer, and my books
are mostly about
small town life and family. After
five years away from the agency, I think I
can look objectively at it. I
learned from my coal mine superintendent
father that dreams and hopes don't
hold up mine roofs or dig coal. It's
necessary to be hard-headed and
tough when it comes to running a coal mine.
One of Dad's management points was "Don't be afraid to
tell a man he's no
good. A man can't get good if he don't
know he's bad." He also said, "When
things go wrong, don't hunt for
someone else to blame. Fix it and get on
with business."
Every day, most NASA employees wake up and say to
themselves, "Oh boy, I get
to work for NASA." Few do it
for the pay which, in any case, isn't all that
wonderful. My dad would have liked
them. He would have also liked Sean
O'Keefe, the new NASA Administrator.
I know I do. He's hard-headed and tough
like my dad. Mr. O'Keefe was
baptized by fire on Saturday and he's going
through a period of mourning right
now. But he's a straight-shooter and a
pragmatist. I believe he's going to
take a clear-eyed look at where we are
as a nation in terms of human
spaceflight and make some changes. In fact,
even before this tragedy, he had
already asked for an Orbital Space Plane
(OSP), a machine much simpler than the shuttle to carry
astronauts to and
from low earth orbit. The OSP sits
on top of an expendable rocket such as
the Delta IV or the Atlas V. It
also has crew ejection seats, is much
lighter than the shuttles, and
designed for only one purpose, crew
transportation.
Although it's not in the present budget, I think it also
makes sense to
build Apollo-like capsules to serve
as rescue and resupply vehicles for the
Space Station. They're relatively
cheap to construct and would also fly
aboard expendable rockets. An OSP
plus rescue/supply capsules would give us
tremendous flexibility. This
doesn't mean that the shuttles should
immediately go away, but it does
make sense to go forward with machines that
allow us to do all that the shuttle
does without being completely grounded
when there's a mishap.
This will also give us a very nice side benefit, the support
of the American
commercial launch industry which
has to compete with heavily-subsidized
European, Russian, and Chinese rockets.
The assembly lines at Boeing and
Lockheed-Martin would hum if we used their launchers to send
up the OSP and
rescue/supply space capsules. A
vigorous American aerospace industry means a
better overall economy so there's
value all around.
My dad mined coal because the country needed coal. He used
to say, "If coal
fails, steel fails. And if steel
fails, the country fails." Coal and steel
were more than symbols of our power
and might as a nation. They were the
elements of our industrial success,
the basic raw material of the "arsenal
of democracy," as President
Franklin Roosevelt liked to call us. Human
spaceflight is the modern
equivalent. It is the shining symbol of our
national technological capability,
but it also has a more practical side.
Unlike robots, humans carry with them a persistent curiosity
and return with
subjective impressions as well as
objective data. The combined information
from astronauts and robotic
spacecraft feed into the collective
technological, informational, and
industrial data base of our nation.
The result has been stunning technological achievements not
only in
aerospace, but also in medical
technology, communications, energy, and other
diverse fields that sustain our
civilization. We delete human spaceflight at
the risk of stifling a major factor
in technological innovation. It's a
subtle concept, but that doesn't
mean it's not important. If human
spaceflight fails, technology
fails. And if technology fails, the country
fails.
When Columbia first flew, it didn't take long before her
image became part
of the national consciousness. Go
into any school today and you will most
likely find her shape somewhere, on
a bulletin board, or in a science
classroom, or simply glued to a
backpack. She is our metaphor for
excellence. In 1986, when the
Challenger went down, I was in Japan, training
the first Japanese astronauts.
Everything was put on hold and I came home.
Thirty-two tough months followed but we swore we'd never
have another
accident, not if hard work and
sweat meant anything. I went back to Japan
and finished my job while the
shuttles flew perfectly, one after another.
For over 14 years, we in the NASA family believed we had
kept our promise.
Perhaps one thing we've learned from Saturday's disaster is
something we
always knew in our hearts. The only
way to be completely safe is not to fly
at all. That, of course, is
unacceptable.
But now seven wonderful men and women have been lost, along
with our sweet
Columbia. Sadly, she'll never have her place of honor in the
Smithsonian
alongside the Wright Flyer or the
Apollo 11 mooncraft. Fortunately, her
three sisters remain. They're true
national assets. Unless there's some
unlikely fundamental flaw in their
design, I think we should get them back
to work, doing what they're
designed to do, even with some risk. The
astronauts, all volunteers, are
willing. I'd go with them if I could.
But let's also state forthrightly if a part of the
spaceflight program needs
to be improved. After all, to paraphrase
my dad, how can we get good if we
don't know where we've been bad?
Then we should follow another of his
guidelines. Let's not blame
somebody else for our problems. Let's fix what's
wrong and get on with business.
I think that's exactly what Sean O'Keefe has in mind.
Mr. Hickam, a retired NASA
engineer, is the author of "Sky of Stone"
(Delacorte Press, 2001) and the
forthcoming "The Keeper's Son," to be
published this fall by St. Martin's
Press.
Updated