Posted 11:26 AM by Gene

"AWFUL EVENT." The New York Times could not think of better words to lead on Lincoln's assassination, and so I will use them now. I was asleep when the Challenger exploded, so I missed that one. Thankfully I missed this too, although the omnipresent TV cameras appear to have caught little more than streaks in the sky. (I won't be tuning into TV, either, wall-to-wall speculation and replays, as always.) At least this happened instantly. Let us pray the astronauts were spared the agony of the Challenger crew of descending in their cabin, perhaps not entirely unconscious. (Something I remember well: The shuttle was planned so that a parachute would be stored in the nose and deploy in event of an accident. Cost cutting took it out. One wonders whether that would have made any difference.) The understandable first bit of speculation -- given an Israeli astronaut was on board (the Israelis must be taking this quite hard) -- is that holy cockroaches did it. This strikes me almost totally unlikely: The vehicle and the launch site were exceptionally well secured prior to launch, by all accounts, and the Columbia was flying at an extremely high altitude and I doubt that the evil geniuses would have anything to take a spacecraft down. Let us go to the only likely cause: the shuttle just conked out. Face it, how many times did Columbia go up and down, up and down in flight? How long was it in service, close to two decades? If airplanes have disintegrated in flight, it makes sense to think a space shuttle could, enduring as it does tremendous G-forces and terrific extremes of heat and cold. Columbia could not take one more landing.

We should not stop sending people into orbit, that's a given, but with NASA marching in place for so long it's dug a hole for itself with its marching boots. Now is the time for a thorough top-to-bottom scrubbing of our space program. If it's in business to do high-PR school-kid experiments, and to kill people in flight, it serves less than a useful purpose.

The disaster also puts the space station at risk; it looks more like an orbiting pork barrel than ever. Are we going to build a replacement for Columbia, or wait for the much vaunted "next generation" of space vehicles? And how much will either option cost? Were we still cannibalizing the shuttle fleet for repairs? We shall soon learn, I guess.

A further thought: I remember the late, great Mike Royko, in one of his rare lapses of judgment, expounding with intensest vitriol that the idiots who launched the Challenger should be tried and convicted. No. That would have been scapegoating. Launching a shuttle is a huge collaboration, and no one person should have taken the blame for that, nor now. (Although Morton Thiokol's culpability is coming back to me.)

A further further thought: Was it space junk? Did it hit debris before reentering the atmosphere? There are a lot more metal shards up there than there were in 1986. I doubt it, but that's a further further thought.

One last observation: I HOPE NO ARABS ARE CELEBRATING.

Update: Columbia was in service for twenty-two years. Some civilian aircraft are retired long before that. Discovery and Atlantis are almost as old. This is unacceptable.

Update 2: I'm trying to find information on the life expectancy of airplanes; this is proving difficult. I found one piece indicating the lifespan of the Airbus models A330 and A340 is twenty years, so I may not be wrong.

Update 3: Here's something I didn't know (as if I know anything): Boeing and Lockheed Martin manage the shuttle fleet. Their joint venture, United Space Alliance, was formed in 1996 to consolidate NASA contracts. I wonder if this was in any way a consequence of Challenger.