HE HAS been rightly eulogised as an American patriot with an enduring optimism about the future of his country. But Ronald Reagan’s optimism sometimes caused him to see more promise in projects than clear scientific assessment suggested they deserved.
Take his ideas for a strategic defence: Reagan called on scientists to build an impenetrable shield that would make nuclear weapons obsolete. Military contractors thought it was a fantastic concept. And why not? Building such a system would assure their financial prosperity even if technical success proved elusive. But most scientists were sceptical. Today, the idea has given way to a far more limited defensive scheme that many still think far-fetched.
Then there was Reagan’s vision for the future of crewed space flight: the International Space Station. Initially intended as a launch pad for missions to the planets, today’s space station is a pale shadow of the research station that the Reagan administration promised.
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If scientists did cheer a Reagan science initiative, it was the Super Conducting Supercollider (SSC). Of course, most of the happy scientists were physicists. Biologists weren’t too crazy about a giant, multibillion-dollar project that was bound to suck resources from their research interests. In the end, legislators facing looming budget deficits decided that the SSC’s promise was not worth the price tag, and all that’s left of that project is a hole in the ground.
FOR years, NASA officials have used the Hubble Space Telescope as the quintessential example of why the US needs a crewed space programme. The agency put the telescope in a low-Earth orbit because that was where the shuttle could reach it, and astronauts could provide the service the telescope was designed to need. NASA administrator Sean O’Keefe liked to point out that because of a quirk of where the handholds were placed, only a left-handed astronaut could perform the necessary wrench movements to replace part of the telescope, but thankfully the human race was blessed with plenty of lefties, so that was not a problem.
But now that the Columbia accident has reminded everyone that space is a dangerous place, it is seen as too risky to send humans to repair the space telescope. Sure, repairs are needed, but human astronauts are needed for important scientific missions such as building the International Space Station.
So NASA officials had two messages for a US National Academy of Sciences panel that met earlier this month to consider whether the space telescope should be allowed to die, or whether a rescue mission of some sort was called for. The first was that a crewed shuttle mission to the telescope would be a bad idea. And the second was that the mission could be done just as well by a robotic spacecraft. NASA has even tested a robot that could do the job – not a left-handed robot, mind you, just one that could emulate a left-handed person.
