The space shuttle, too, has a successor waiting in the wings. The Ares rocket and Orion capsule, modeled on the Saturn rocket and Apollo module from the 1960s, should begin crewed flights in 2015. (Between 2010 and 2015, all manned American flights into orbit will take place aboard Russian spacecraft.) Ares and Orion will not have wings and will not be reusable, but they will be designed to carry humans beyond Earth’s orbit, as part of NASA’s planned return to the moon.
NASA’s future depends heavily on this month’s Atlantis mission. If the shuttle flight goes awry, Hubble is doomed and the already-precarious support for Ares and Orion might evaporate. (Last fall Sen. Barack Obama suggested delaying NASA’s next human space adventure to focus funds on more practical problems.) To ensure success, the astronauts have logged long hours in the Shuttle Mission Simulator at Johnson. In a nearby building, the spacewalking part of the team has practiced 13 rounds of Hubble repairs underwater in the NASA Neutral Buoyancy Lab (NBL). And over at the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, the training has continued on a Hubble mock-up in the center’s 1.3-million-cubic-foot clean room.
In the practice sessions every step is plotted, every contingency accounted for. Yet space history is full of sad proof that humans cannot always master the complexities of their own inventions. Two of the space shuttle’s 123 flights have ended in fatal catastrophe; the Columbia disaster happened just a year after the previous Hubble repair mission.
One of the reasons Massimino and the rest of the Atlantis crew look so relaxed is that they know success does not ride on them alone. Everywhere they go they are supported by thousands of others—suit technicians and rocket engineers, NBL scuba divers and Johnson flight engineers—busting their behinds to make sure that the last great shuttle flight is an unmitigated triumph. The fate of the Hubble Space Telescope and the destiny of the next generation of space explorers lie in their hands.
