hyalineskies

It was just last week when I was on the phone with my mother complaining about our lack of “cool” innovation. After watching too many ’60’s Bond movies, researching Kalashnikov-action rifles, and reading about the Space Race, I had become quite sick of the push-button, microprocessor-heavy world around me. I told my mom that the Space Age would have been a much cooler time to be in college, an era when American-Soviet political tension led to the creation of ultra-cool, spacelike military aircraft such as the F-104 Starfighter as well as the aerospace wonders of Sputnik, Explorer I, and eventually the Apollo and Soyuz programs. The Cold War did wonders for military and extraterrestrial exploration technology.

I compared that engineering to today’s. Now we have more sophisticated microcomputers as well as this thing we call the Internet, but personally, our technology is quite lacking in any type of fascinating aesthetic. It seems like manned space exploration and huge engineering advances stopped with the fall of the Soviet Union - after all, the United States has no direct competitor in the world at this point - and we’re forced to watch our government squander away money on rather useless projects and [pre-emptive] endeavors that add nothing to the creative imagination or, more importantly, enthusiasm for engineering. There was a time when engineering (and government work, for that matter) was cool. There was a time when people adamantly watched our capsules on live television from their local news networks.

Now, however, things have become too automated. Wars are now fought with the push of a button. Unmanned surveillance craft are armed with missiles to attack terrorist targets via remote control. Even the common firearm is becoming electronic and super-modular. I’m all for electronics, but there really isn’t any glory in government engineering work anymore. I worked at a government contractor on various military projects (that will go unnamed for matters of national security) which are being deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan, and every single one of them was so ridiculously automated that sooner or later, I had come to the conclusion that all the electronic devices used on the battlefield would probably smother the enemy before a bullet was even fired.

In the meantime, “research” projects have been relegated, for the most part, to building “cheap” fighter jets and small arms built more for modularity than revolutionary design. Where are the Eugene Stoner and Mikhail Kalashnikov of this generation? Where are the superiority contests between nations that spawn engineering marvels like the Space Race? I had decided that if they existed, their results are far from glorious and fascinating to anyone but the übergeeks. The most outstanding display of technology, in my opinion, was our Space Age; as of a week ago, I would have said that we’ve not been worried enough about recreating Apollo 11. I would have said that our current line of manned space vehicles, the venerable (and, at this point, rather obsolete) Space Shuttles, were built for Earth-orbit purposes thanks to decreasing public interest (as well as funding) for the space program, and politicians - as well as the U.S. populace - seem to be more geared toward terrorism-related paranoia than innovation.

I checked the New York Times on my Treo earlier today only to find a tidbit of rather surprising news. Now, due to the Space Shuttle program’s previous disasters, and Discovery’s current thermal gap-filler fiasco, it seems that NASA has decided to stop flying the Shuttle altogether, replacing it with a proposed Crew Exploration Vehicle. According to the image sourced from the New York Times at left, our new plans look surprisingly Saturn-like. I couldn’t believe that I’m probably going to see a “space capsule” in my day and not just some cheesy Earth orbiter.

Thanks to NASA (and, cynically, the tragic disasters of the Shuttle program) it seems that Bush’s Vision for Space Exploration may actually be realised within my lifetime. A manned flight to the moon by 2020? That means I’ll be able to see the Space Age things I “missed”? I love it. For me, today a dream came true.

It is somewhat disappointing that the new system is a hack-job of Shuttle components. I’ll admit that it is seemingly a “quick-and-dirty solution” to the Space Shuttle program, but maybe the real issue at hand here is the fact that the capsule system just works. Russia has been using the Soyuz capsules since 1967, launching them to the International Space Station as recently as 15 April 2005, instead of resurrecting the now-defunct Soviet Shuttle Buran project of the 80’s. After all, why build a delta-wing orbiter when the capsule works? From this perspective, it makes perfect sense to revise the capsule design. Scott Horowitz, an ex-astronaut, makes a very realistic point in the New York Times article:

Asked whether the new designs meant NASA was going back to the future, he replied, “You can say, ‘Hey, that looks pretty retro,’ ” but he drew an analogy to passenger jets from decades ago and those of today. “They look the same,” he said, “but are completely different.”

As far as I’m concerned, retro’s fine with me. It looks like my dream of seeing Apollo 11 is about to be realised, and I’m all for going back to the future.