A little more than 15 years ago, astronaut Garrett Reisman was among a crew of seven who launched into orbit aboard Space Shuttle Endeavour. The shuttle remained attached to the Space Station for nearly two weeks, but when the orbiter departed, it left Reisman behind for an extended stay.
During his time at the station, Reisman would often pass through the Harmony module, which serves as a corridor connecting laboratory modules built by NASA and the European and Japanese space agencies. Sometimes, he would look up and see a small placard that said, “To CAM.” The arrow, however, pointed out into space.
“When I was up there on the space station, there was still the sign that says, ‘To CAM,’” Reisman said in an interview. “But there’s just a closed hatch. It was tragic. It was just kind of taunting me when I saw that because I think that could have been one of the most important scientific discoveries that we made.”
The “CAM” was the Centrifuge Accommodations Module, originally built by the Japanese space agency. It was intended to provide an environment for artificial gravity experiments, from just slightly above zero gravity all the way to 2 gs. However, NASA canceled the final development and launch of the centrifuge module in 2005 due to budgetary concerns.
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This is exactly the sort of thing I’m referring to when I complain about the opportunity costs that come from the wild budget overruns that projects like the Shuttle, JWST, SLS, and so forth suffer from. NASA funnels billions of extra dollars into them and then they eventually limp out the door and everyone cheers, because they only see the thing that got built and not the dozens of other things that didn’t get built as a result.
I’m terrified of this with Mars Sample Return. If it holds the course, which other programs will get killed off for budget reasons?
Bring back Red Dragon!
Heh. I actually started typing a second paragraph specifically about Mars Sample Return being the next upcoming example of this pattern, but I decided not to include it because I didn’t want to spark off any strife. Back in the day on Reddit I got plenty of downvotes and acrimony from arguing that the JWST and SLS should have been cancelled at various points in their development.
My main hope is that SpaceX finishes getting Starship stood up as a commercial success, at which point I can only hope that sheer embarrassment will cause NASA to course correct.
Long term experiments at Lunar and Martian gravity would be really interesting, especially if an early Martian crew might stay for a full 2ish year cycle.
