Return of the Shuttle Brings Doubts and Anxiety
As the crew of the shuttle Discovery prepares to return to Earth tomorrow, a generation of Americans that has lived through two shuttle disasters is growing edgy. Instead of making a point to watch the event with their children, some parents say they are planning to shield them from what could be a traumatic experience.
"You never know what will happen when the shuttle re-enters the atmosphere," said Avian Clarke, a New Yorker who remembers watching on television as the shuttle Challenger blew up in 1986 and will not let her 4-year-old daughter watch the Discovery landing live.
In a nation where space exploration has long been linked to the collective self-esteem, the Discovery's engineering glitches have provoked a wave of self-doubt. Some Americans are questioning the cost of turning space fantasies into reality. Some are troubled by what they see as the declining state of America's scientific prowess.
Others are just plain puzzled.
"After all these years of being idle, I figured by now the shuttle would be in good shape," said Gilles De Pelteau, 63, a machinist who lives in San Francisco.
NASA, once a shining example of American ingenuity, is berated in Internet discussions for failing to avert a reprise of the problem that caused the shuttle Columbia to break up on re-entry in 2003. Space enthusiasts, meanwhile, bend over backward to defend the agency, worried that public dismay is jeopardizing plans for a human visit to Mars.
After more than a week in space, the Discovery astronauts are making final preparations for a landing early tomorrow.
As Margaret Auld-Louie follows the travails of the Discovery, she often finds herself flashing back to her excitement as a 10-year-old watching the 1969 moonwalk on television. Like many Americans, she has dreamed ever since about humans sailing effortlessly through space on sleek "Star Trek"-inspired starships.
"Instead we have these cartoons with big rolls of duct tape in space," said Ms. Auld-Louie, of Golden, Colo., referring to what seemed like a slapdash effort to patch up the shuttle. "It's pretty disappointing."
Jeffrey Liss, 62, a lawyer in Chicago and a member of the National Space Society, a nonprofit group that promotes human space travel, said many friends and acquaintances had expressed concern for the astronauts.
"All last week people were asking me virtually the identical questions: 'What do you think about the shuttle?' 'Are you worried about re-entry?' " Mr. Liss said with a sigh.
The popular disillusionment with the shuttle, Mr. Liss said, is due more to a public relations failure on NASA's part than to any engineering problems. Eager to make space travel seem like a natural extension of mass transit, the agency promoted the shuttle as a kind of Jetsonian space bus.
In reality, Mr. Liss added, "the shuttle is rocket science," and errors - including deaths - are to be expected.
Supporters of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration say the agency has had a string of successes in recent years, including the two rovers that are still scurrying around on the surface of Mars and the Cassini probe that is sending back stunning pictures of Saturn and its moons. Many argue that the agency should stick to sending robots into space, rather than risking humans for little scientific gain.
But it is human space travel, portrayed in Ray Bradbury's 1950 classic, "The Martian Chronicles," and movies like "The Right Stuff," that has most captivated the public imagination. President John F. Kennedy further coupled the American psyche to space-age success, historians say, when he declared that the nation would take on challenges like going to the moon "not because they are easy but because they are hard."
Over the last two weeks, many Americans have been left wondering what is so hard about ensuring that the same problem that led to the deaths of seven astronauts on the shuttle Columbia does not recur. "It's a blow to the national self-confidence," said Howard E. McCurdy, the author of "Space and the American Imagination" and a professor of public affairs at American University in Washington. "You end up saying, 'Gee, if we can't go into low Earth orbit, how can we beat Al Qaeda?' "
If the shuttle's problems have tapped into a larger cultural insecurity, historians say it may be for the best. To accept that America's technological power is no longer as invincible as it once seemed may be necessary to make rational decisions about the space program and beyond.
"People need to get used to the fact that the oceans don't protect us anymore, that shuttle equipment does get old," said John Staudenmaier, editor of the journal Technology and Culture. "Then they can begin to figure out how to fix it."
For Alex Brake, 12, who once wanted to travel in space, that means trading human space travel for high-tech probes, telescopes and robots.
"After Columbia it didn't seem like such a good idea," said Alex, who was traveling with her family in San Francisco. "I personally don't want to die practically in the middle of nowhere."
Still, Alex has followed the spacewalks the Discovery astronauts have made over the last two weeks, including one to remove two protruding strips of ceramic cloth known as gap fillers from the underside of the shuttle. She plans to watch the re-entry tomorrow from her home in Deep River, Conn., even though it is scheduled for about 4 a.m.
The problems that plagued the Discovery mission might have seemed large and numerous because, for the first time, they were made public in real time. For example, cameras that were installed to prevent another Columbia-like disaster provided an abundance of data on possibly hazardous damage.
"Maybe we didn't need to know about every little piece of foam," Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison, Republican of Texas, said Friday at a briefing at the Johnson Space Center in Houston.
For some, the Discovery's decidedly unromantic mission, to take supplies to the International Space Station and to haul away more than two years' worth of garbage, compounded what they saw as a senseless risk. Curt Cunningham, 40, a registered nurse from Rockville, Md., said that without the cold war space race he saw little reason to pour money into space.
"I'm not sure what the everyday benefits are from it, how it benefits the nation as a whole," Mr. Cunningham said.
But Jeff Berkwitz, a marketing manager in San Diego, said the nation had to be willing to take risks in order to stay on the cutting edge of space travel. In early 1967 three astronauts were killed in a training exercise, Mr. Berkwitz noted, but that did not stop the effort to land a man on the moon.
"Whenever you're exploring the frontier there's always an element of danger," said Mr. Berkwitz, 43. "We as a human race and particularly us as Americans can't shy away from this kind of thing."
Deborah Buck, 48, an antiques dealer from Manhattan, said she planned to watch the Discovery landing with her son, Sam, 11, and her husband, Christopher, simply because they are all space fanatics. Sam lived through the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, Ms. Buck said, and there was a bomb scare at his camp last week. If the Discovery crashes he is prepared, but he is hoping for a safe landing.
"I kind of see it as the first step to moon, Mars and beyond," Sam said. "I'm glad they're being careful."
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