TRAGEDY has a strange effect on countries. In America, its main effect is to unify—to make the most diverse country in the world suddenly feel like a very small town. Twice now in barely two decades the space shuttle has prompted a period of national mourning—flowers, tears, prayers and much fighting talk from the country's politicians. “The American space programme must go on”, said George Bush. “Exploration is not an option we choose, it is a desire written in the human heart.”
The shuttle programme seems peculiarly and admirably American. There is the sheer technological achievement, of course. But, as with so many of America's strengths, it has more to do with a state of mind. The concept of the frontier, long dead in other countries, still matters in America—particularly its sunbelt states where NASA has its main bases. “It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons,” another adoptive westerner, Ronald Reagan, explained to the American people in 1986. “The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted. It belongs to the brave.” The crew, whose casual diversity also typified America (see article), knew exactly the risks that they were running.
Yet it does no disservice either to the memory of the dead astronauts or to the ambitions of those keen “to slip the surly bonds of earth” to re-examine the shuttle programme. The first set of questions revolves around this week's accident. The causes have not been established, but many Americans already find it odd that, once the shuttle had taken off, the astronauts had no means to mend any damage and no escape-route. The shuttle's technology is quite old. There are also accusations that the accident was linked to cutbacks at NASA. These seem implausible—the programme still chews up $7 billion a year—but they need to be rebutted.
The second, broader, set of questions concerns the shuttle's rationale. It was conceived as a frequent taxi service, making cheap ($5m) weekly flights into space and carrying huge cargoes. Now that the shuttle makes only five flights a year, each at a cost of $500m, NASA has justified the project in terms of benefits to science (see article). This does not stand up. Much of the science that the shuttle crew does could equally well be done by robots: for instance, one astronaut on the Columbia was, it transpires, an unneeded photographer for a dust experiment. More generally, the money spent on the shuttle might be more productively spent on unmanned probes or even on earthbound experiments. The questions that intrigue us all about space—Is there life on Mars? How do comets work?—will not be answered by manned spacecraft in the foreseeable future. And the argument has hardly been improved by the International Space Station, a permanently manned hotel parked just above earth that was invented largely to give the shuttle a purpose.
So science and economics demand a substantial rethink. That rethink probably means putting far more money into unmanned spacecraft. But it should not automatically mean that manned spaceflight be scrapped forthwith. For in the end, as Mr Reagan understood, the shuttle is about more than science, economics or perhaps even logic. Sending people into space—no less than climbing Everest—is about national greatness and human ambition. Rather than inventing false prosaic reasons for its mission, NASA might do better to name a boldly poetic target: putting a man on Mars, say. America will get there in the end. And all of us will be proud of it.