NASA's grim 3-way anniversary

Every year, this is a peculiar week for NASA:

On Jan. 27, 1967, an unexpectedly ferocious fire aboard Apollo 1 suffocated Grissom, White, and Chaffee during a pre-launch test.

On Jan. 28, 1986, an unexpectedly brittle booster seal destroyed shuttle Challenger and killed Scobee, Smith, Resnik, Onizuka, McNair, Jarvis, and McAuliffe.


On Feb. 1, 2003, unexpectedly severe heat shield damage destroyed the shuttle Columbia and killed Husband, McCool, Chawla, Clark, Anderson, Brown, and Ramon.

James Oberg's 2005 commentary raises some thought-provoking points about these events and how they're publicly depicted:

"It has become easy to look away from these horrible space disasters -- and I never call them "accidents," a term that relieves the people involved on the ground of ultimate responsibility. NASA prefers to literally bury the wreckage in underground concrete crypts, to shove the investigation reports onto another bookshelf, and to allocate one day per year to honoring the dead while ignoring what killed them the other 364 days. But spaceflight is not easy, and that particular "easy way" is a roadmap to doom..."

He goes on to debunk the "73 seconds" we've all been told to associate with Challenger's last flight -- whose crew probably lived more than 2 horrific minutes longer, as they continued upwards, then arced down and finally crashed into the ocean. He writes,

"...enough of comfortable make-believe... whenever some space official who ought to know (and say) better uses the phrase '73 seconds', you have one more unintentionally self-confessed averter of eyes."

Randy did a nice riff on this last year. But what he didn't get into is how universal the willful delusion is. Oberg again:

"In space as on Earth, bitter experience teaches that a good 'safety culture' decays from a variety of causes. There is the lulling of anxiety through repeated success, or the loss of respect (or fear) for past experience. And sometimes it’s from the elevation of other measures of goodness higher than safety... Especially when the chain of cause-and-effect logic leads right back into one’s own heart and mind, the ugly consequences of such triggering actions are hard to contemplate."

Try replacing "safety" in that quote with any number of other concerns -- freedom, prayer, justice, sobriety, love -- and see how it reads. Then read Don Miller's Blue Like Jazz (*):

"The problem is not a certain type of legislation or even a certain politician; the problem is the same that it has always been. I am the problem. I think every conscious person, every person who is awake to the functioning principles within his reality, has a moment where he stops blaming the problems in the world on group think, on humanity and authority, and starts to face himself. I hate this more than anything. This is the hardest principle within Christian spirituality for me to deal with. The problem is not out there; the problem is the needy beast of a thing that lives in my chest... I was the very problem I had been protesting. I wanted to make a sign that read 'I AM THE PROBLEM!'"

OK, end of sermon. One more NASA-related post coming up (a really inane one!) and then I'll stop playing with fire w.r.t my employment.

P.S. Further reading if you're curious: Gregg Easterbrook's 1980 prediction, tirade, and concerns about the Shuttle and the Space Program. Teaser quote: "The space station was conceived mainly to give the shuttle a destination, and the shuttle has been kept flying mainly to keep the space station serviced."

(*) I'm (re)reading "Blue Like Jazz" now and leading a group study of it, so look for more quotes soon.