To no great publicity, the shuttle Columbia landed at Cape Canaveral the other day after setting a record for NASA's longest space mission - just under three hours short of 17 days.
The flight might have been longer had not a problem developed with a cooling line. And NASA's engineers are still wrestling with the problem of hot gases leaking through the seals of Columbia's booster rockets.Those glitches might be the expected norm in an enterprise of enormous technical complexity and, despite what many seem to think, anything but routine. But they might also be symptoms of old age. The shuttles were designed in the '70s, and the first one flew in 1981.
That's why it was critical that NASA finally let a contract for a prototype of the next generation of shuttles. The successful bidder for the $1 billion project, Lockheed Martin's famed "Skunk Works," faces a tall order.
The cost of building and launching the first fully operational reusable launch vehicle, or RLV, is said to be between $4 billion and $8 billion. We suspect that the latter figure is the correct one and, given the overruns these projects are prone to, maybe even on the low side.
America's interest in its space program waxes and wanes, rising with gee-whiz triumphs and the fortunately rare tragedies and dwindling when space flight is deemed routine. We have come too far in our space program to turn back, and the RLV is a necessary and overdue next step.