Desert tragedy a blow for private space travel

The nation s space program is in crisis and it has little to do with drunken astronauts.

It s an issue for us regionally and within the far larger geopolitical arena. While the Apollo project of the 1960s was a national commitment, it was Long Island that put men on the moon. Those final critical feet to the lunar surface were all about whether Grumman engineers had gotten it right, because there were no second chances. Long Island will remain a permanent part of the record of how mankind left this planet and successfully traveled to the Sea of Tranquility.

Covering the space program 40 years later, the media s attention has been on NASA s dysfunctional and sometimes bizarre astronaut corps. The latest burp is over allegations that some shuttle pilots left the pad personally tanked. If true, their drunkenness sadly tarnishes a group whose members, over four decades, have put their lives on the line to get the job done. Yet buffoonish behavior does not impact the mission of the International Space Station, interplanetary exploration and other cosmic missions that seek to push out our understanding of the universe.

Far more catastrophic is the story that has received scant attention from the nation s media because it appears to be just another industrial accident. Late last month a rocket engine test stand accident at the Mojave Air and Space Port in California killed three Scaled Composites employees and injured three others.

This is the company recently purchased by Northrop Grumman because of the extraordinary work of its founder, aerospace engineer and visionary Burt Rutan. This is the company that successfully demonstrated that space entrepreneurs can create a combination air-space plane to safely put people into suborbital flight, thereby winning the prestigious X-Prize for space achievement. This is the company that has demonstrated that hidebound government bureaucracies need not have the monopoly on space flight. This is the company that has put the spark and spirit of private enterprise into the next chapter of civilization s space travel.

No small wonder that Northrop Grumman just took a 100 percent position with the company.

Now there is a stunned silence throughout the worldwide community of entrepreneurial companies. Their distant response infers, Can we continue?

If the accident does subdue the space business, it will have grievously set back this nation s ability to harness its historic strength and pacesetting leadership in aerospace technology. At a time when the Chinese are demonstrating every day their intent to own space in the 21st century, we simply can t afford to abdicate our role.

That is not say there aren t lessons to be learned from the Mojave explosion. In an interview with a trade industry reporter at Space News, one rocket researcher said it was a bad day on a lot of levels and a wakeup call for many folks. The skeptical interviewee said much soul searching would have to go into this field of privately funded space travel if it is to have any future.

One suspects it would not be surprising to find a similar quote from some expert after numerous aviation pioneers crashed and burned at Long Island s Roosevelt Field in the 1920s, marking repeated fatal efforts to travel nonstop by air across the Atlantic. Then some unknown airmail pilot from the Midwest got into his airplane and flew east, landing in Paris over 30 hours later.

http://libn.com/article.htm?articleID=39571

(This article appeard in the August 3rd edition of Long Island Business Week)

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