The Space Shuttle As A Work Of Art

FYI.

This story is over 5 years old.

Tech

The Space Shuttle As A Work Of Art

"Houston, we are the problem," someone scrawled last week on Space Shuttle Independence, along with other awful things.
Photo by Robert Pearlman, Collectspace.com

Houston, we are the problem, someone scrawled last week alongside the right fuselage of Space Shuttle Independence, which now sits in a lot outside the Space Center in Houston.

"The graffiti included a racial slur, and though I didn't see it, reportedly a reference to the President," said the space historian Robert Pearlman, who has been chronicling the display of NASA's retired shuttle fleet, and who visited the scene of the crime on Wednesday before it was cleaned up. "The remainder of the graffiti is visible in the photo [above] with the exception of what was written on the wing, which said something to the effect of, 'I'm sorry, the drugs made me do it.'" Be that as it may, the Houston police are investigating.

Advertisement

To some in Texas, the newly-christened Independence has been a sore point since 2011, when NASA's ministers, having overseen the closure of the program, announced that Houston would receive not an actual orbiter but a realistic mock-up orbiter that for years sat on display at the tourist park at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Meanwhile, Discovery and Endeavour went to Virginia and California, respectively; New York City, which has more tenuous links to the Shuttle program, at least received a flying Shuttle trainer, Enterprise.

The fake Shuttle riled up corners of Texas; in Houston, the home of NASA's Shuttle training program and mission control, NASA's decision has been described in local papers as a kind of consolation prize. The sense you got from reading some of the commentary on blogs was that space dreams were born in Houston, and that's where they would go to die.

Today, the Space Shuttle looks like a relic of the future. It was meant to make spaceflight easy and fast and cheap, and it did, I guess, by the standards of the 1960s. But the '60s had pizzazz and moonshots; by the time of the Shuttle, which could only go about 300 miles up, the project was starting to look like a boondoggle. In 2011, the cost of each launch was estimated at $847 million to $1.5 billion each, about 500 times more than NASA had originally expected when design begun in the 1970s, and a cost that put a dent in other valuable space programs, like sending people to Mars.

Advertisement

The political pressures to keep the Shuttle running smoothly—born out of late Cold War politics—may also have contributed to critical miscalculations, which resulted in catastrophes that only further set the program back. "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled," Richard Feynmann famously told the commission investigating the Challenger disaster. The shuttle may not have been foolish. But if SpaceX and Virgin represent a future of democratized (and privatized) spaceflight, and the Mars Voyager is a glimmer of our robotic future, the Space Shuttle can by comparison look like a technocratic bore.

Shuttle concept art from 1981 (San Diego Air and Space Museum Archive)

None of this is to say that space is less important in the scheme of science. It's never been more so, and it's likely that the Space Shuttle helped maintain the world's interest in space (not to mention global cooperation, and American dominance there). But space science has undergone a kind of Copernican revolution of sorts: In the enormous universe, humans are not as essential to exploring it as we might have once thought, at least not now. Now, space scientists need new probes and cheaper satellites, more funding for basic science and theoretical research, and better communication with the public. There are a lot of voyages that can be done from Earth, however unexciting that may sound.

Even if we don't need any more space nostalgia, it's hard not to get wistful for the glory days. In recent years, the Space Station has become a kind of laboratory-slash-motel. Humans are still doing some interesting science up there, but it's somehow not as grand as, say, a robot blasting open Martian rocks with freaking lasers or a robotic asteroid lasso. NASA's practices for landing people on an asteroid—made up of gloriously futuristic astronaut playtime at a unique underwater sealab off the Florida Keysare dead in the water after the House Science Committee reviewed next year's budget (it also rejected new funding for climate science). It seemed fitting that the space agency celebrated its 55th birthday this year by furloughing most of its 18,000 employees, as the government shutdown took effect on October 1.

Advertisement

But all that is prologue, as they say. Last month, NASA invited companies to propose a new crew vehicle to replace the Russian Soyuz route that American astronauts currently take to get to orbit (SpaceX, the Boeing Co. and Sierra Nevada Corp. look like the front runners). And cargo deliveries to the space station are already privatized: SpaceX and Orbital Sciences Corp. have won contracts from NASA to fly 20 robotic flights for $3.5 billion, or $175 million per flight, a fraction of the space shuttle.

Meanwhile, the agency is working on its own plans for a heavy-lift rocket and a new crew capsule called Orion, at a cost of $30 billion, with the first manned flight scheduled for 2021, with Mars its eventual destination. By then, private upstarts—the New Space cadets from places like west Texas, southern New Mexico, and Mojave—may be starting to mine asteroids or shipping packages around the globe in half an hour.

Vandalism of a mock-up spaceship may not say much useful about the place of space or space history in the country's astronaut heartland. But it can be a reminder of how special these early, groundbreaking spaceships are. They have failed, tragically, heart-wrenchingly. But they are also some of the most incredible machines we've made, built painstakingly and exactingly by humans to bring us into orbit, help us build things up there, and then glide back to Earth at blistering speeds and dizzying angles. They're mirrors of a moment in time, when people on Earth dared to push technological envelopes and go up to space somewhat routinely, for all kinds of reasons.

Advertisement

Space Shuttle Atlantis. Via NASA

And even if they're no longer launching in the most amazing fireworks display I've ever seen, the space shuttles are magnificent to look at as things. In 2007, Craig Couvault of Aviation Week and Space Technology described looking at the shuttle inside the Vehicle Assembly Building, as it hung like a giant sculpture from the ceiling, as enabling "one to see it as much as art form as flight hardware." After visiting NASA in 2007, the photographer Thomas Struth saw the "scale of human endeavor, belief, organisation and also possible hubris" when he looked at that hulking but elegant glider. He photographed the perfect, painstaking application of heat-shielded tiles on its belly—each one a matter of life or death.

"There is something epic in the work of the space shuttle program as there is in the building of a medieval cathedral," Struth wrote at the time. "They are both complicated structures made by human beings by hand."

Space Shuttle Columbia, date unknown (San Diego Air and Space Museum Archive)

The shuttle is a technological work of art, and it deserves to be presented that way and protected that way. Independence may be different—it's a mock-up, so next year it will be plopped on top of a 747 Space Shuttle Carrier plane and turned into a spectacular hands-on exhibit. But the other shuttles aren't designed to enter or play with; they're for looking at. Can the curators of Space Shuttle exhibits come up with new, interesting ways to display them?

Advertisement

USIA collection NARA.

Perhaps the racist Shuttle vandals, whoever they are, didn't care about Space Shuttle Independence; just another high profile wall. Or maybe they hate the Shuttle and its stupid dreams and technology and politics. Whatever drugs they were on, and however ignominious the graffitti was, the Shuttle, as an object, has reached a new stature.

The Times recently asked David Freedberg, a professor of art history at Columbia University about art vandalism. "What is it about a work of art that arouses such passions?" he responded. "As I've always said, love of art and hate of art are two sides of the same medal."

-@pasternack