Men in Space?

In this follow up article to last weeks Danger in Space, Sir Martin Rees reflects on the recent space tragedy, and ponders the question of the dangers of men travelling into space.

Space is an unexplored frontier. The fate of the Space Shuttle Columbia reminds us that those who venture beyond the Earth confront real danger. The astronauts themselves have always been mindful of the hazards. I recall attending a lecture given, back in the 1960s, by John Glenn, the first American to go into orbit. A questioner asked him what went through his mind while he was crouched in the rocket nose-cone, awaiting blastoff. He wryly replied " I was thinking that the rocket had twenty thousand components, and each was made by the lowest bidder". Glenn survived to become a US senator, as well as an inspiration to elderly Americans when he ventured into space again, at age 77.

Other astronauts have been less lucky. There were probably fatalities in the early Soviet space ventures, though these were never publicised at the time; three of Glenn's fellow-astronauts perished while testing NASA's Apollo capsule; the near disaster that befell James Lovell and his crew in Apollo 13 is familiar to a younger generation through the excellent film starring Tom Hanks. An earlier shuttle, the Challenger, exploded, killing its crew, in 1986.

John Glenn was aware of the risk he was taking - so surely, would have been the astronauts who perished last Saturday. But their fate injects a dose of reality: space travel is not a routine exercise. We need to ask - as we do of any pioneering venture - whether the goals of manned spaceflight are inspiring or valuable enough to justify the hazards involved. The Shuttle's 98 percent success record - two catastrophic failures in just over a hundred flights - is actually rather good by space standards. Must unmanned rockets have a worse record. (The French Ariane V rocket had two catastrophic failures in less than a dozen flights). We don't yet know whether last week's accident could have been avoided by better maintenance. I suspect it could. But even with optimal precautions, the risks of going into space will remain high compared to those that most of us willingly and routinely accept.

When the Challenger exploded in 1986, the trauma was deepened because one of those killed was a schoolteacher, Christa McCauliffe. The American public had been falsely lulled into a view that spaceflight was 'routine' and that astronauts faced little more risk than passengers in a commercial jet. But the memory of that accident had faded and Americans had come to believe that space was a place for tourists. Publicly-funded astronauts are, in a sense, acting on our behalf. We feel uneasy about civilians bearing such risks, when the issues aren't of life or death urgency, but primarily science or exploration. Nonetheless, some individuals - wealthy amateur mountaineers who join guided parties to climb Everest, or test pilots - willingly do things that are at least as dangerous as a Shuttle flight.