“We’ve got to look over their shoulder.”ĭeputy Administrator Pam Melroy said she expects human commercial spaceflight will flourish the same way commercial aviation did. “It’s a challenge, but it is the responsibility of us as the overseers even though we may have a partner in the public-private sector,” Nelson said. The field is growing, with projections of the number of people having flown to space - more than 600 in 60 years since the first person in space in 1961 - to more than double in the next decade.
Blue Origin’s New Shepard remains grounded after a booster incident last year sent its capsule blasting away to safety, although that flight did not have humans on board.ĭown the line, Sierra Space looks to develop its Dream Chaser cargo spacecraft, which could fly for the first time this year, into one that could fly humans as well.
NASA’s fatal accidents did not change NASA’s manned programs, but they sure set them back for a while.”Ĭommercial efforts closer to home have proven risky as well.īlue Origin and Virgin Galactic continue to pursue space tourism flights for short suborbital trips, an endeavor that has seen the Federal Aviation Administration already halt flights for safety concerns for both companies. The government might increase regulation of non-governmental spaceflight. I find it hard to predict how that will change the calculus.” I will be surprised if SpaceX does not experience a fatal accident before it attempts a Mars mission. “In my opinion, he is moving faster than NASA ever has. “I think (Musk) has an uncanny ability to achieve very difficult goals,” Roland said. Leave it to Elon Musk.”Įven for SpaceX, though, he foresees potential disaster. Sending people to Mars in any foreseeable future is a dangerous, expensive stunt. The spacecraft systems redundancies necessary to guarantee human survival of a Mars mission can only be imagined. “Don’t send people to Mars or the moon - yet,” he said, noting human missions are “unnecessary, inefficient and exorbitantly expensive. Later this decade, NASA will rely on SpaceX’s Starship as well as potentially a second commercial lunar lander to keep its astronauts safe during trips to the moon’s south pole, part of NASA’s plans to eventually send humans to Mars.Īlex Roland, a retired Duke University history professor and former NASA historian, warns the push to deep-space exploration could become deadly. Now NASA has multiple commercial partners with SpaceX’s Crew Dragon and Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner flying astronauts to the International Space Station while also working with its own Orion crew capsule for moon missions in the Artemis program. The times between NASA’s three major tragedies have been close to two decades each, and now NASA has gone the longest run without human loss of life in spaceflight.ĭuring those runs, though, the American space program featured only one spacecraft managed by the U.S. A question, even a simple question is more forgivable than a mistake that can result in a tragedy, and each of us has a responsibility to cultivate a work environment where every member of the NASA family feels empowered to voice doubt. The two shuttle accidents, particularly, led to changes in how NASA operates, with a safety-first mentality that can seem to slow down progress at times, Nelson said. “You’d look at the underside or the sides of the orbiter with those delicate silicone tiles, and he said it was like somebody had taken a shotgun and just shredded it,” Nelson said. Nelson’s mission’s shuttle commander, Robert “Hoot” Gibson, told Nelson how he would always inspect the orbiter in space during missions he flew in the time between the two shuttle disasters. The warning signs for Columbia on STS-107 were out there as well. “The management would not listen to the engineers begging them to stop the count, and that went up all the way to the top,” Nelson said. The cold was ultimately blamed for shrinking an O-ring that led to the explosion. NASA Administrator Bill Nelson, who as a member of Congress flew on the space shuttle on the mission immediately before the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986, recalled this week how engineers at one of the shuttle’s contractors told their managers to call off the launch because of the weather. 1, 2003, never making its way back home to Florida.īut with more spacecraft, more players and farther-flung destinations like the moon and Mars, the potential for another disaster has grown. “Never again” is the phrase echoed among NASA leaders recalling the last major tragedy in the space program that occurred 20 years ago this week, when Space Shuttle Columbia broke apart over Texas on Feb.
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