Oct. 22, 2007 -- Before the 2003 Columbia accident, NASA used the launch date of the cargo currently loaded into shuttle Discovery as a computer screen-saver. So relentless was the march to install what will be the final U.S. component to the International Space Station, that managers overlooked blatant safety issues, investigators determined after the shuttle's demise.
NASA insists it has absorbed the bitter lessons of Columbia and despite a presidential directive to be finished with space station construction in three years, feels no compunction to be driven by the calendar.
"We feel very confident we have a vehicle that's safe to go fly. We would not launch if we didn't think that was true," said LeRoy Cain, NASA's top shuttle manager at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
On Tuesday at 11:38 a.m. NASA hopes Discovery will launch and deliver the space station's final linchpin: the school bus-sized Harmony module, which will attach to new laboratories owned by Europe and Japan.
If the 14-day flight unfolds with few delays and no major problems, NASA plans to launch the first of its partners' laboratories on Dec. 6.
The flight can't happen soon enough for the European Space Agency, which has weathered launch delays with compassion and patience even while its bank accounts dwindled. ESA's Columbus laboratory was supposed to fly in 2002. Delays with the station's Russian-owned living quarters cost ESA two years' time, which managers handled by slowing development and payments to its contractors.
The second delay stemmed from the Columbia disaster. NASA halted station assembly for three and a half years while engineers overhauled the shuttles, designed new safety procedures and equipment, and conducted test flights. Throughout the hiatus, a cash infusion from ESA member countries kept the Columbus program afloat and its science and engineering teams employed.
ESA has spent 5 billion Euros on the program so far, with another 4 billion earmarked for operations once the lab arrives in orbit.
Despite the difficulties, ESA has no regrets about joining the station program.
"Would we want to join a program where we run the risk of having delays, or having disappointments, or having downs before we have ups? That's the normal business of space," ESA space station program manager Alan Thirkettle told Discovery News.
"If there were ever a program that runs totally smoothly we'd probably be bored," he said. "We work fairly close to the edge of capabilities of human beings, in engineering terms. It's cutting edge technology and you know you're going to get some problems with some things."
ESA has a full slate of basic science and technology programs planned for its module, which will become the second of four planned laboratories on the station. Already aboard is the U.S. Destiny module. Japan's Kibo complex is slated for launch next year. Russia is expected to build and fly the station's last lab, though no launch date has been set.
Thirkettle is clear about what must occur for ESA to feel its money and time on Columbus were well spent.
"It has to work," he said. "It has to be utilized. It has to produce results. It has to do what it was intended to do," he said.
Managers will know that has happened by gauging scientists' interest in using the lab, by monitoring how much money research institutes are paying for space station experiments and perhaps even by the number of Nobel Prize nominations that stem from station research, Thirkettle said.
"To me, the real payoff comes when the guy on the street who pays for all this stuff starts to have a better quality of life through this," Thirkettle said. "Space in general has improved the quality of life for people, with telecommunications, media all of these different things that we take totally for granted now just flat out wouldn't work without space research having been initiated in developing these things.
"There'll be materials, there'll be pharmaceuticals, there'll all sorts of different things that get developed. That will be the proof of the pudding. If it doesn't happen, we blew it and we'd better stop spending money on it," he said.
ESA also is looking toward Columbus to seed a new generation of engineers, scientists and researchers.
"We're not going to develop as a continent with financial services and tourism," Thirkettle said.
As NASA looks beyond the space station to developing spaceships and equipment to return to the moon, its station research program is much narrower and more focused than the programs planned by Europe, Japan and Canada.
NASA cut off funding for all experiments that are not directly related to the new exploration initiative, but its partners fully expect the United States to change its tune once the station is fully equipped and fully staffed with six live-aboard residents available to run experiments.
In exchange for providing the station's framework, support systems, communications, as well as the launch, assembly and maintenance services, NASA is entitled to a large share of space in all of its partners' modules and crew time to oversee experiments.
"The appetite comes with eating," said Columbus manager Bernardo Patti. "Once people find out what is doing on the space station, people will redirect their efforts. If good science is coming from ESA and the others, that might trigger interest and further cooperation."
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