Former ASAP Chairman Richard Blomberg recommended the same thing in his testimony before the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, saying that installation of a crew escape system in the existing Shuttles -- if possible at all -- would likely take as much as a decade.

He recommended instead that NASA simply continue flying Shuttles for as long as the Space Station is operated, considerably increase spending on the manned space program to further raise their safety as much as it can be raised (which, he emphasized, is not much), building one or two additional Shuttle Orbiters, "...and when those come on line, maybe retire the oldest of the current ones." Adding in observation that it might be possible to incorporate a crew escape system into these new Shuttles, built from scratch.

"We're never going to have a perfectly safe vehicle...[The Shuttle] is a design... that the folks can manage well enough to keep the risk as low as is humanly possible for that environment.

"I think that's all you can ask for when you're dealing with a dangerous situation...If you ask me would the country be better served by not having human space flight until a Shuttle replacement is produced, I would vehemently say no.

"I mean that human space flight is important, we are learning a great deal from it, we are accomplishing things in space, and the Shuttle is fully capable of supporting that at an acceptable, albeit not perfect, level of risk.

"Now, would we have been better if we [already] had Shuttle 2 now or some other vehicle. Probably. But we didn't make that decision. So right now we have to play the cards that we're dealt...The only human-rated vehicles that we know of on this planet are Soyuz and Shuttle, and Soyuz can't do the job. So it's going to be Shuttle."

Blomberg elaborated on his belief that more Shuttle disasters are both inevitable and, on the whole, acceptable: "Whenever you have a human vehicle...[which] gets more and more complex, it is absolutely impossible to check out every interaction and every type of failure and every situation that the vehicle will encounter...

"Unfortunately, part of our operational experience in any vehicle is accidents. We hope it never gets to that, but it is part of the reality of operating, particularly in a high-risk environment."

Neither O'Keefe nor Blomberg have actually given any reason why manned spaceflight has such supposedly big benefits -- but they may very well get their wish anyway. As the Feb. 14 "Science" noted, "O'Keefe has powerful advocates on his side.

Three of his former bosses are now in influential positions": Vice President Cheney, OMB Director Mitchell Daniels, and Senate Appropriations Commitee chairman Ted Stevens -- all of whom enthusiastically support a continued major manned spaceflight program "carried out by a new generation of brave explorers".

And to underscore that 'commitment' the Bush Administration has announced its intention of actually increasing NASA's total spending level from $15 billion to $18 billion a year within three years.

However, that plan for an increase in NASA's spending hinges upon the Administration's and Congress' continued willingness to blithely continue expanding the federal deficit indefinitely -- if that bubble bursts, NASA's spending is not only likely to be limited to its present level but may actually drop somewhat.

Moreover, "Science" reports that Congress is already seriously skeptical about O'Keefe's desire to fund development of the Orbital Space Plane over the next decade at the same time that NASA continues to fund the Shuttle fleet:

"The idea [of the OSP] has won little support from many aerospace contractors, who fear it could replace the Shuttles -- and their lucrative contracts -- or from legislators, who question its feasibility and its price tag... 'You won't get a multibillion-dollar appropriation for this', a House aide says. 'It's not going to happen.' NASA declines to estimate the [OSP's] cost, but one industry official says that development costs could exceed $35 billion."

Thus, NASA may continue to fly Shuttles, four or five times per year, as America's only manned spacecraft through at least 2020 -- and simply accept as inevitable the destruction of one or two more Shuttles and their crews.

Unless and until an OSP is funded, NASA will have to continue paying Russia to provide Soyuz' as emergency rescue vehicles -- and unless it is willing to maintain the Station crew at three, thus allowing virtually no useful scientific research to be done on the Station, it will have to pay Russia to keep not one but two Soyuz' attached to the Station at all times to allow a full 6-man crew to evacuate the Station in case of an emergency.

This, of course, is assuming that we decide to retain the Station at all. During the same recent interview by "Space.com" in which he expressed his strong desire to start flying Shuttles again before the end of 2003, O'Keefe pooh-poohed the idea of aiming at any time in the near future for manned flights to the Moon or Mars:

"There are only two or three things, the space agency head contends, that motivate big goals as a national imperative: national security, economics, or expressions of sovereignty. Nothing on the space horizon is apparent in this regard...that might foster a big destination goal.

"So rather than sit, sweat, fret, and argue about which one of those destination objectives everybody could get around...focus all that attention, time and effort into all the enabling technologies that would make any of those goals feasible in the future. That's the logic.' "

The irony is that the Station itself is totally unjustifiable on any of those grounds. I have already expressed my belief -- which is also the belief of a landslide majority of space scientists. -- that maintaining the Space Station is totally unjustified on any rational grounds, even now that it's been partially completed. Nothing I've seen since my last article on this subject has persuaded me otherwise.

In March 1991, the National Research Council concluded that the Space Station "does not meet the basic research requirements of the two principal scientific disciplines for which it is intended: (1) life sciences research necessary to support the national objective of long-term human exploration of space, and (2) microgravity research and applications." Since then, its scientific usefulness has not grown one bit.

With one exception, every type of scientific experiment it can possibly carry out can be done vastly more cheaply -- and in many cases more scientifically effectively as well -- on much smaller unmanned satellites (including recoverable ones).

Any advantage from having a human technician immediately on hand near the orbiting experimental equipment is vastly outweighed by the fact that an experiment, if need be, can be rerun dozens of times on unmanned spacecraft for the cost of running it once on a manned mission, since the overwhelming share of the expense of any manned spaceflight is that of simply launching the crew safely into orbit, keeping them alive there, and returning them safely to Earth.

And the scientific usefulness of microgravity experiments is highly limited in any case. Zero-G does not provide much additional knowledge about the biology of living things; and the demand for crystals and other materials manufactured in 0-G is extremely limited and perhaps nonexistent, since virtually all substances manufactured in weightlessness can now be manufactured more cheaply in other ways back on Earth.

The only possible use for the Station is to study the health effects of prolonged weightlessness on humans themselves. But the only use for such information is for future long-duration deep-space manned flights. And -- thanks mostly to the Russians -- we already know with absolute certainty that prolonged 0-G has a multitude of seriously harmful effects, and that artificial gravity will be an absolute necessity for all manned deep-space flights. The Station can provide us with almost no additional useful information on this subject.

As then-Senator Dale Bumpers bitterly remarked in 1998: "A vast majority of scientists know the Station will be the most expensive and least efficient scientific laboratory in history. Each hour of Space Station research will cost an astounding $155,000.

"Instead of spending $1.3 billion a year to keep four U.S. astronauts in orbit, we could fund more than 5000 grants for research at universities and laboratories here on Earth."

Since then, the yearly cost of the Station by itself has increased to $1.7 billion -- and the cost of the Shuttle program now devoted almost entirely to maintaining it (a cost Bumpers didn't include in his calculation) is another $4 billion.

And the Station's crew, until its full crew rescue capability is available, has dropped from 6 or 7 to only three people -- reducing the number of man-hours per week currently devoted to American research down to only 11, at a staggering real cost of about $10 million per man-hour of research!

Moreover, until the Shuttle resumes flights and the Station can be returned to a three-man crew from its current emergency two-man crew, the number of man-hours of American research per week will be only 6 hours.

This is the sum total benefit we have gotten from a project which -- as the journal "The Scientist" points out -- has cost "almost 10 times as much as it would take to build the Panama Canal today."

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