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By Jean-Michel Salvator

August 10, 2005

Le Figaro - Home Page (French)    

With the return of the Space Shuttle Discovery, NASA took a small measure of revenge. Roundly criticized after Columbia exploded in February 2003, the American agency demonstrated its know-how, which was accompanied, as always, with the true purpose of the spectacle: we could watch the last week’s do-it-yourself space repairs of astronaut Stephen Robinson. He became the first to exit the shuttle and repair two strips of the thermal shield on the belly of the space airplane.

NASA 'Boss' Mike Griffin

Stephen Robinson Shoots a Self-Portrait During Historic Spacewalk

Beautiful images, but also a confession of impotence. The billion dollars spent by NASA was not enough to make the heats shield tiles safe, which was at the root of the Columbia accident. While NASA’s boss [Administrator Mike Griffin] proclaimed in vain that Discovery was in perfect health, the mission that ended yesterday seemed rather like a swan song. The Americans remained adamant that the mission was not a setback. But paradoxically, the return of Discovery undoubtedly portends an end to the shuttle program in 2010. France and Britain had the same reaction after the Concorde accident at Roissy [Roissy Charles de Gaulle Airport]. For a few months, the supersonic jet again took to the air before its ultimate demise.

The success of yesterday will change nothing there, the American space shuttles will remain a good idea that failed: after Kennedy and the Apollo program made it possible to send six crews to pose on the Moon, Nixon dreamed of easy space flight that was almost like air transport. The shuttle, because it is reusable, was to make it possible to reduce the cost of launching satellites or transporting crews tenfold. The Americans had begun to envision a fleet of shuttles that would launch into space at the rate of two per month. A clever idea, but ahead of its time. The technology, which dates from the 1970s, was not quite advanced enough to achieve this level of dependability. These limits were again on display yesterday, when Discovery landed in California rather than Cape Canaveral, in Florida, due to bad weather. During this time, normal airliners had no trouble landing normally  in Miami …

Shuttle Lands at Edwards Air Force Base, California

More serious still for NASA, the price tag for launching the shuttle has reached or exceeded the costs of traditional rocket-launched missions, especially after the Challenger accident in 1986 and Columbia in 2003. Europeans were the first to benefit from this. The Americans having bet everything on the Shuttle program, ARIANE could fill the gap and garner for itself a good deal of commercial success.

In the adventure, NASA has lost much money, a share of its prestige and its dreams of conquest. This explains its impatience to close this chapter and resume the space adventure more vigorously.  There is much wasted time to recover. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter is to be launched – today, to be precise. It is the next step in plans to put mankind over the horizon of Mars by 2030. George Bush seems to want to associate his name with this new frontier.