The Space Shuttle Endeavour apparently has a worrisome gouge in its heat shield, according to an AP report. Teacher/astronaut Barbara Morgan, who had been Christa McAuliffe’s backup on the doomed Challenger mission, is apparently helping to assess the tile damage, documented by the crew of the International Space Station when Endeavour did the now-customary backflip after arriving on orbit.

While I appreciate the vision of Werner von Braun and others more than 2 decades ago, that vision, and the whole Shuttle/Space Station plan just seem to me to be more and more pointless. A big part of the Shuttle’s mission is now inspecting it for damage: the equipment itself is starting to get very old, and one can presumably expect more problems to begin cropping up. It’s hard to point to anything happening on the Space Station that is advancing science in a signifigant way.

Robotic missions have proven to be vastly more cost efficient than the manned space effort: Phoenix, should it succeed, has the potential to completely dwarf the entire Shuttle program in terms of the importance of the science it might return from Mars, at some almost-infinitesimal fraction of the cost. We’re hopeful for a good outcome for Endeavour, but I think it’s time to re-think the whole Shuttle program…

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