I have, at last, the official report on the Columbia disaster. It is almost 250 pages (the insane 10MB of the download is due mostly to the color illustrations and background graphics which replicate the printed layout) and I have only skimmed it; but I have not hit any real surprises so far — only sad to say, confirmations. Nearly everything about the incident was known or guessed at accurately in the earliest days, despite official declarations of uncertainty. The only "surprise" is that those whose vested interest lies in fixing known problems, with ample time and opportunity to study, and solve them, chose to hide their heads in the sand and trust to luck to keep them safe.¹ Again.

There is also a problem that the citizenry — and this is not limited to our nation by any means — tends, by and large, throughout history, to want to trust the Earthly Powers That Be to know what is going on, to be responsible, to take care of things that need to be done. And therefore, to not investigate, not maintain oversight, except for brief periods after a crisis. (This is similar to the passivity and willingness not to get second opinions, or to press for answers when faced with unsatisfactory physicians, which so many exhibit towards their own health. Another common human trait, regardless of nationality or century, is the impulse to say "Someone should do something!" without ever stopping to ask, —Who? And where is the money to pay for it going to come from? other than rhetorically. This is also a contributing factor in the present crisis.)

But this is foolhardy. Governments, like all human organizations, are made of people, and people are lazy, and greedy, and proud, and cannot be simply trusted to be responsible and honest without some sort of serious accountability. Just look at the recent massive electric blackout — it wouldn't seem possible that it was caused by the same sorts of issues that caused the last major blackout over twenty-five years ago — but it turns out that the problems which were there a quarter-century ago, are now worse today, due to the combination of buck-passing, apathy, and greed on the part of those with the power, and the obligation, to fix the system.

The material cause was a piece of frozen foam — though this was dismissed hastily by many in NASA, those early interviews in February with the NASA management set warnings going off in my mind, even before the existence of emails documenting internal concern among those who actually worked with the ships was revealed. Any time someone starts saying, as was said back after Challenger, "don't let's finger-point," my first instinct is to ask: So what have you got to hide? Why are you anxious to suppress investigation? And the "absurdity" of it, in those early days of dismissal, did not strike me as so very absurd, even before we knew it was a fairly large, heavy, and also frozen piece: any aviation aficionado worth her salt knows that small birds, massing well under two pounds, can cause catastrophic damage to aircraft, and even destruction and crew loss.

The underlying causes, however, were several, and those are the subject of the bulk of the report. Partly it was due to money issues: NASA has by its own admission been playing strange legerdemain games, worthy of Arthur Andersen, with its budget, sliding money back and forth from the shuttle program to the space station until even they do not know what amounts went where, by their own admission. But money would not have saved Columbia, of itself, because money (or the lack of it) was not responsible for people being unwilling to hear about problems from those they deemed lesser sorts, mere hands-on flunkies, far less outsiders, or for the foolishness that assumes that because a known problem has not caused a catastrophic failure yet, it won't ever. Imagine the sort of irresponsibility that would think that of a leaky gas tank, and go on driving the car, and you have the wishthink "organizational culture" of NASA which is vivisected and set on view, in the panel's report.

Now, you cannot run a serious, sustainable venture on guesswork, lies and luck. You can carry out a project that is essentially irrelevant, whose success or failure has no material impact outside its own venue, but not something so expensive in so many regards, of which money is only a fraction, for any prolonged duration.

The chiefs at NASA apparently never realized the significance of that old saying, "If wishes were horses, then beggars would ride," — which though bad in anyone, is inexcusable both in engineers and those responsible for the safety of others. They, of all people in America, should have known better, and have no excuse whatsoever for saying "we didn't know." This is willful ignorance, and criminal negligence, bluntly put. By closing their eyes to unsavory truths and the implications which they did not know how to deal with, they made the disaster — that is to say, a disaster of some fatal nature — inevitable. 

Moreover, they surrounded themselves with those who did not dare to contradict them, creating a culture more appropriate to that of an effete, corrupt imperial court, where bowing, scraping sycophants dare only speak the praises of their superiors, than to a functioning organization engaged in critical high-risk operations.

Part of this is due to the strange, nebulous state of NASA. It is not a military organization, but it has military connections; it is not a strictly civilian organization, as it is a government agency. It is not entirely independent of politics, the way a privately-endowed research and development facility can be; politics is involved in its budgetary struggles and in its appointments to high-ranking positions. Financial issues concern it in somewhat the same way as a civilian aerospace industry — but one so large that real practicality in terms of nuts-and-bolts bean-counting does not matter. (Despite all the noise about them not having enough money.) And it has no real purpose, except its own existence. (But more on that problem in part II.) In short, it combines all the vices of the military, the government, and big business: excessive layers of management, bureaucracy as an end in itself, petty chieftains eager for their own prestige interfering with the common good, lack of a sense of coherence and connection between its divisions, all things which destroy communication, flexibility, and accountability. 

And all things which are disastrous to a program which needs to be nimble, responsive to situations-on-the-ground, and aware of its surroundings in order to be thus responsive to them. I am not at all surprised about the prestige-concerns, the arrogance of management, and the disproportionate emphases placed within NASA, given my own small experience dealing (at a remove) with that organization. Anecdotal evidence, to be sure, but all evidence starts out as anecdotes, until enough anecdotes are amassed for patterns to be discerned and then analyzed. 

The experience, which was so disheartening, both in a practical way and for anyone interested in the space program, was this: I worked for a while at a print shop, where we handled some printing over the course of a couple of years, which was for NASA. Actually, it came to us through a freelance designer, who was doing it for an ad agency in another state, who was doing it for a NASA office halfway across the country. (Some of the problems should be already apparent.) All of these layers of management added costs — just the shipping of boxes of paper and oversize display boards halfway across the continent was significant. Then there was the problem of the layers of communication. Innumerable type changes were made, rounds of proofs, and always something missed — and delays waiting for the engineers and managers on the NASA end to finish their copy, followed by nagging impatience for the printing process to happen to deadline, followed by recriminations when there were mistakes (as there always were) and rounds of finger pointing, time-wasting checks to exonerate whoever had not made the mistake, and redos, followed by more haggling and arguing over the cost/time overruns. And rush charges for shipping overnight, and so on. 

And all of this was for an update newsletter to be passed out to a few hundred people, and some display boards, on the status of a reactor being decommissioned, over several years' time, and surely the recipients of it were not going to know or care if some engineer's name had been spelled with a lower-case letter in one paragraph, or if the shade of red in the swash of the "meatball" was one shade off from the specified Pantone color of the logo, but the inter-office rivalries and fussiness of the bureaucrats would not allow any sort of realistic production schedule, and it honestly seemed as though the pushing of paper were by far the most important thing on their minds — at least as important as the decontamination and reclamation of the site! Now, granted, this was not any part of the shuttle program; but still the amount of financial waste that went on despite vocal concern for costs, and nitpicking over matters of obscure protocols that I myself witnessed in this one division of NASA was not a confidence-inspiring sign.

So when the report says, "By the eve of the Columbia accident, institutional practices that were in effect at the time of the Challenger accident – such as inadequate concern over deviations from expected performance, a silent safety program, and schedule pressure – had returned to NASA," I for one can only sigh and shake my head, and think: Yup, that figures.

Now, one thing which impressed me was the fact that they placed a retired naval officer at the helm of the investigation. This made a great deal of sense, on both counts, though initially somewhat surprising due to the fact that the longtime associations between NASA and the military have historically been USAF, not USN. The distance itself is beneficial, as is the fact that Admiral Gehman is no longer on active duty. At the cost of sounding very cynical, that reduces the number of levers that could have been used to pressure him into a more favorable report. More importantly, the Navy by its very nature has more in common with space travel than does the Air Force, because the Navy operates in an environment that has more in common with space. Water is not breathable to us, a ship in the middle of the ocean (even on the surface) is largely on its own when it comes into trouble, and submersible craft encounter the problem of no breathable atmosphere and lethal pressure differences to boot. 

Now, this advantage, the fact that survival in a hostile atmosphere is a matter of life and death to a lot more people in the Navy than in NASA, and that so much more individual, collective, and long-term experience has gone into perfecting systems to cope with the problems of that survival, is not itself a water-tight guarantee. I do tend to think that the running of NASA could hardly be hurt by making it entirely a Navy concern, but then there is the case of the USS Greenville as a
cautionary tale. 

Some readers might remember the Greenville as the nuclear submarine which in February of 2001 off Hawaii, collided so tragically with a civilian fishing ship full of high school students from a tech program. The similarities between that incident and the Challenger loss are instructive. First of all, there were civilians aboard the sub, which instantly brought out the superficial "analysts" in the news and at large making cracks, half humorous, about how they had caused the incident. (Remember the "What's that button?" jokes?) Then there was the rush of those in higher levels to declare that it was a random, ergo inevitable incident and those responsible should not be made scapegoats.

There was also a lot of jingoistic garbage spouted due to the fact that the fishing trawler Ehime Maru happened to be of Japanese registry, but although that itself is worthy of examination, it falls outside the purview of this article. But it is instructive to compare the unwillingness to offer sympathy (with the acceptance of responsibility which that would have entailed) due to the ethnicity of the victims, with what would have followed if they had hit a ship full of American tourists instead. For one thing, there would likely have been a fiercer public investigation with much stronger teeth…which in turn might have prevented the Greenville's subsequent accident.

For, yes, the Greenville did have another navigation blunder not too long thereafter — one which never made it into the public awareness, but should have, because although it caused no casualties, it did cost the US taxpayer a staggering bundle. I happen to know this, because a) I do research on things which pique my curiousity, beyond what the news media report, as did the entire Greenville-Ehime Maru situation, and b) because it did make it into official Navy reports, and the results of the investigation — down to the cost of paying scuba divers by the hour to go and recover the top-secret stealth tiling materials from the sea floor where they were scraped off — are all matters of public record.²

And — like the Ehime Maru collision — it was an avoidable accident, and it was caused by sheer negligence on the part of the officers responsible for the Greenville. Who should have been hung up to dry the first time around, along with their commanders who knew, and tolerated, their slovenliness. 

The reports are online, and the links are at the bottom of the page in references, but I will give a summation, as it is, again, informative of how safety systems, in life-threatening situations, can break down even when elaborate procedures are in place to prevent it. Reading through the timelines, as well as the assessments of the investigation panels, in their minute by minute breakdowns of each accident, will reveal clearly what was happening — and wasn't, and should have been. All the talk in the papers and on the nightly news about how unfair it was to crucify Greenville's captain, were partly right. He wasn't the only one responsible, and people under and over him should also have been put through the wringer. But none of this came out in the news, partly because it was too subtle, I am sure, but also partly because the problem is clearly too big for any quick fix. The problem was never the allowing of privileged civilians onboard — they caused no part of the disaster, and they are routinely allowed on as guests of the government in a kind of low-key cadieux system. This may well reflect a deeper problem, but it did not cause the death of the crew and trainees of Ehime Maru, and there were no civilians aboard when the Greenville hit a reef at least once off Saipan in August of 2001, little more than six months after it sank the Ehime Maru.

The problem lay in the fact that Greenville's senior officers were sloppy. (And who knows, how many other subs' officers are as careless?) The first accident was primarily caused because of multiple mistakes in reading and assessing the available information as to relative position of ships in the area, due to Captain Waddle's haste and overconfidence. As the official report says, 

208. The OOD and the CO did not visually detect the presence of
EHIME MARU. The factors which combined to prevent detection:
a. Sea state;
b. White, haze conditions;
c. EHIME MARU’s white color scheme;
d. EHIME MARU’s angle on the bow;
e. The CO’s assumption at the beginning of his visual
search that there were no close contacts to be observed, and;
f. The CO’s abbreviated search procedure.

In other words, there were outside physical conditions which made the intersecting vessel hard to see — but what made the situation a tragedy was that the superior officer "knew" there were no ships around, and so didn't bother looking for any. — Only he happened to be wrong, in part because nobody had been paying proper attention to the sonar data, either. And those officers who felt some concern that things were rushed and corners being cut, didn't dare to say anything about it, or trusted that "the people in charge" knew what they were doing. And they too were lethally wrong. And as with the shuttle losses, those who paid that fatal price were not the ones who made the bad calls. (They seldom are.) 

The only extent to which the civilians on board as part of a Distinguished Visitor Cruise were in any way responsible, is that the sub's captain was by his own admission rushing his officers, some of whom were inexperienced, through processes because he was running late and wanted to get in all the operations to impress the guests who might be able to influence various earthly powers on the Navy's behalf, and by virtue of the fact that a sub's bridge is a crowded place not meant to hold so many people. 

But the Navy Court itself said of them: "Additionally, the large number of civilians in Control created a physical barrier between watchstanders and equipment displays that hindered the normal flow of information among members of GREENEVILLE’s contact management team. It was the commanding officer’s responsibility to set the conditions for them to observe safely...While the civilian guests conducted themselves appropriately at all times, it is apparent that GREENEVILLE watchstanders did not work around them. The responsibility for doing so, however, rested entirely with the CO, the OOD, and other members of the contact management team.")

The second accident, following an investigation which should have had all Greenville's officers in a reformed and alert state (given the fact that they had just months before committed vehicular homicide with 9 deaths resulting), is really rather comic to read, since there were no fatalities. The officer responsible for navigation had not kept up with his duties, one of which involved updating the maps of the vessel. Harbors change shape, and it's the responsibility of a navigator to keep current on where safe channels, deep enough for their ship's keels, presently lie. 

But Greenville's officers hadn't done that. This sloppiness and sloth could have been much less expensive, if they hadn't compounded this with the same arrogant certainty that had caused the former captain to make a mistake that has caused many a lane-change accident on the freeway: not checking the blind spot before moving. They were offered a pilot to lead them in via the safe routes by the harbormaster. Greenville's captain turned that offer down — even though they didn't know this port. And they didn't even properly understand the international buoy marker system which designated the safe areas, as it after proved. (This could perhaps be taken as symbolic of the chronic monolingualism problem of our nation.)

The repair bill? An estimated $174,150.03 — all of which is carefully itemized in the report of the Admiral's Mast. 

Greenville came in fat, dumb and happy, didn't pay as close attention to the depth readings as she should have, missed the channel dredged for large ship passage, and hit a reef …all of which could have been avoided if they'd bothered to follow regulations and keep their charts, and their navigational training up to date. Then, trying to get the sub off, they ground her belly back and forth over the snag until they were able to push free — and rubbed off a sensor system and the stealth plating (along with the paint) in that area as well. This is not like dinging the paint on your car — though that's expensive enough. 

There was an official investigation…which revealed, like the first one, a culture of carelessness and negligence aboard this huge nuclear submarine, product of the greatest military-economic power in the world. Now, the question remains, if the problem in the second crash was at its root the problem of the first crash, why wasn't it fixed then, and has it been fixed now? Yes, the people responsible were reprimanded, and the ship's skipper removed from command yet again. That's what they did last time. The prognosis doesn't inspire confidence.

And this is the general feel out there among aerospace experts regarding NASA and the shuttle program. The right noises will be made — just as they were before. And "Same Old, Same Old" will remain the unofficial motto of the organization. As the Greenville's experiences show, all the good policies in the world don't mean a thing without the will to carry them out.

And — assuming the shuttle program is not killed by this, that Columbia does not prove to be the asteroid to the NASA brachiosaur — sooner or later, we will lose another ship, and her crew. Because the elements cannot be bullied, or bribed, or deceived, nor can gravity, inertia, nor the melting points of metals. And there will be public shock, and horror, and recriminations, and investigations, and promises to reform…

Again.

Let us, however, assume that this is not going to be the end, automatically, for either NASA, the space shuttle, or the manned spaceflight initiative itself. Whatever happens, however, it is time for a serious assessment of all of the above. Now this is a smolderingly hot-button issue, and I know that some readers are going to have knee-jerk reactions to the very idea of considering whether or not manned spaceflight is "worth it."

Unfortunately, knee-jerk reactions are exactly what will not help the situation at all, any more than a continuation of the former "policy" of not thinking about it. Interestingly, this is a case where SF — and thinking about the questions raised by science fiction — provides not answers, but alternatives and insights into those pathways. The first question is Why manned spaceflight at all? Assuming that we do have a need for some sort of space program, if only to lift and maintain our current telecommunications structure, that still doesn't prove that we need a) people out there on a regular basis, or b) the specific vehicle structure that we currently are using. So — why do we need humans in space?

The old reason — the old, jingoistic motivation that we have to do it before the Russkies can — has long been meaningless. We did it. And it was a dead end. It wasn't ever, considered coldly, any kind of a sustainable motivation because once accomplished, there was no further point in carrying it out. It was ultimately a purely negative aim, with some positive ones tacked on for justification — we will deny this triumph to them. There was no long-term constructive aim involved in the Space Race. The most positive thing in it, sad to say, was totally cynical: it gave Americans something to "feel united" about, distracting them from the real, pressing problems of social justice and economic instability at home and abroad.³

And yes, there were lots of scientific advances, increases of knowledge and useful things to come out of it. But they were not the point, and it's difficult for me to argue that the byproducts of the Space Race were either a good ROI, or sufficient to extend the present evolution of the Space Program in hopes of garnering more.

And the current iteration of it, and its erratic course, and the fact that there is really no one helming it, whoever's name is on the top of the letterhead, is what has to be examined.

Now, it is a terribly complex problem, and so many people are so passionately for or agin the shuttles and what they stand for, on an emotional level, that it's difficult to find anyone willing to stand back and say — this is how I feel, but this is the objective state of things — and not have it degenerate into political name-calling. So I will say this: I have a romantic and sentimental attachment to the space shuttle, from the first time I saw it piggy-back on its jet plane in the test flight, not unlike that which I have for canvas-strut biplanes, cast iron machinery, and sailing ships. But the question of whether or not it is a practical endeavor must be considered objectively, regardless of how emotionally attached I am to the program. 

Wooden biplanes are grand artifacts, but they belong in the hands of the pilot-hobbyists who restore them, not in commercial use. Cast iron machinery is sometimes more than adequate to do an idiosyncratic job, and should not be replaced merely because it isn't modern — but that does not by any means make it ideal for all uses. Sailing ships were once practical as well — and could be so again, with a sufficient infrastructure; I can easily see a scenario in which a fleet of fast clippers, built of advanced materials, using refined fuel only for backup, could be used for shipping cargos at a competitive rate — if anyone was willing to front the costs for building, maintaining, training and crewing the ships. 

But the shuttle program, I am forced to admit, is not practical, because it does not have a clear purpose, and just as there is a good chance that the air travel/transport industry as it exists today is not really practical venture, we must examine the implications of that and know exactly what it is we are signing off on if we decide to go ahead with it regardless. Very few things that are done are really practical, or done for that reason primarily, after all.

There are several reasons for the shuttle program, some of them acknowledged, others not.

The public-relations ones are firstly, that it creates scientific benefits in the form of research, and access to research (as in repairing the Hubble), which make it worthwhile. I would have to see some hard numbers, on how much the shuttle really costs, and how much it gives back that couldn't be gotten any other way. It could well be that the things we get back, in terms of mapping data, zero-gee experiments, and spacewalk platforms, are so beneficial that it ought to be subsidized, regardless of how expensive and potentially expensive it is. But then it should be
acknowledged that this is a terribly risky operation, not a routine one, and that we still have not progressed much beyond the days of "spam in a can." 

And this should be acknowledged not only to the public at large, but to all involved in the program — for although, indeed, the NASA astronauts are trained professionals aware of the inherent danger in their vocation, it's been made clear each time we have lost a shuttle that the extent — and causes! — of those dangers was not ever revealed to them and to their families. We are long past the days of the hotshot daredevil test pilots of The Right Stuff.⁴ There would probably — certainly — still be those willing to fly the shuttle, with such full disclosure; but they have the right to know, and to make informed decisions, not to be sent to their deaths by the obtuseness of ass-covering midlevel bureaucrats.

The second "PR" reason is that it is important that we have a manned spaceflight program to continue in order to inspire young people to be interested and go into science. Now, I agree wholeheartedly that it is important to have generations inspired to learn and discover. But the shuttles are a damned expensive way of doing it — and not the most foolproof, especially if we are going to keep losing them in (avoidable) accidents. I do not think anyone has studied the damage that witnessing the Challenger explosion — and the consequent foolishness, and helplessness, of all adults around them — did to an entire generation of those who were schoolchildren then. I know that it was staggering, and that it did not simply create bad associations with spaceflight and science, but also destroyed confidence in the wisdom, judgment, and authority of those "older and wiser" who were supposed to have been in charge.⁵

The third PR reason is the same as that used to justify the International Space Station — as a kind of combined symbol of and opportunity for, idealized human togetherness. But — like the Olympics — it's a rather tawdry and threadbare symbol, with nothing much under the pretty lights. It doesn't work at accomplishing that, and the money used for it — if that is to be the primary reason for its existence — could be better used for many other things, scientific or otherwise. And I wonder how those whose lives are hazarded in such a symbolic gesture, and their families, would choose. 

Now, the reason that individuals vie for the rare privilege of going into space is, first and foremost, love of the deed itself. Like mountain climbing, or other forms of flight, or sailing (or riding), people don't become astronauts for practical reasons. That's why I said that the dangers — if they were openly and forthrightly acknowledged — would not dissuade many, in all likelihood. It's not even a matter of courage in the sense of doing something dangerous and unrewarding that you dread, like soldiers going over the top: it's a decision that the joy and good of it, itself, is worth any risk. "I know that I shall meet my fate somewhere in the clouds above...the years to come seemed waste of breath, a waste of breath the years behind, in balance with this life, this death." 

But it is a terribly rare, and expensive privilege — one of the tragedies of our space program as it has always been set up, is that so many of those who give their lives in training for it, never even get to orbit as passengers. It cannot be subsidized merely as a hobby for an elite few, at the expense of the populace at large, if there is no other point in it.

Another, more logical reason, for a space program not in itself practical but with a practical potential in it and thus worthy of being subsidized, is that it is itself a practice endeavor, an experiment working up to a more advanced program. And other reusable landing craft have been put on the boards over the decades, often with impressive schematics and ambitious write-ups…but all of them have quietly and without fanfare died, withering on the vine due to lack of will and most of all a good enough reason to commit the massive resources required to fund such initiatives. At present, our space program, very simply, is literally and figuratively going around in circles.

So what could make manned spaceflight viable? Based on comparison to oceangoing ventures, there are only two real reasons. One is commerce, the other is defense. And the greater part of that defense, itself, historically has been of trade. Now, it's hard to argue that we need a space fleet to defend us against invasion/annihilation. I won't rule it out, but we don't have any overwhelming reason to think that an Independence Day style invasion is likely, and the current space program wouldn't do us any good if it were. It would make more sense to be working on a counter-asteroid program — but I don't imagine we will start until/unless we actually get hit by another one (assuming that there is enough left of human civilization to build anything, and we don't just figure the odds against a second one any time soon are so high that we might as well put it off, just like the power grid repairs.)

There are some fairly limited (as far as I know — of course, if there really are a lot of secret military intelligence things being done on the shuttles, we wouldn't know about it) DoD uses for the shuttles as launching platforms for spy satellites and the like, but most satellites go up on rockets (which themselves are not very practical technology, but they're what we've got, and they work okay most of the time and they're comparatively cheap and at least nobody's likely to get killed if something goes wrong any more.) 

Now, let us get one thing straight. Until and unless someone invents a hyperdrive or a working stargate system, we are not going to be colonizing worlds outside our solar system and trading with them. Not gonna happen. That's all there is to it. I could spend a lot more time explaining why, but the simple reason is that there wouldn't be any fiscal incentive to do it, because of the fact that hundreds of years going by before there could possibly be any ROI is not going to make any CEO start writing checks to bankroll a risky expedition that might possibly benefit her great-great-grandchildren. So any commercial application of manned spaceflight is going to be in-system, for the foreseeable future, and probably no farther out than Mars. (Due to the considerable turn-around time involved.)

If you look back at the Golden Age SF stories, a situation like our present one, with all space travel essentially controlled by NASA, was not what the authors envisioned. Granted, most of them were highly "unscientific" and impractical, and the idea of the cryogenic colony ships widespread, but in the classic books by Heinlein and Norton and Laumer, the envisioned future spacefaring economy was economically based. Big businesses, small businessmen, governments more-or-less-involved as with the East India Company — what all had in common in these stories is that spaceships are used as ships. They are not fragile, limited-use experimental platforms. They haul raw materials cheaply around from place to place. They carry expensive luxury items very quickly at high costs. They provide passengers dealing with those financial concerns, and the government issues surrounding them, transportation to field offices. They also do scientific work, and defense work, but the infrastructure is one of trade. That is, it is a working model based on that which actually has existed all through human history: people putting stuff in boats and taking it to sell to people somewhere else. The rest is just details.

The problem is, there's nobody out there to sell it too, right now. There might be stuff out there we could be selling on earth, but we don't have the shipping infrastructure in existence to go out, get it, and bring it back efficiently or safely. We don't, bluntly, have the technology for it yet, and we don't have the technology to make spaceports to handle the cargo on other planets or the moon. We might in principle have it, in the sense of the know-how and potential ability, but we don't have a simple, effective, systematized solution in place for building and maintaining secure habitats in a place where there are minimal natural resources and the most hostile environment to human life imaginable, aside from inside an active volcano or at the bottom of the sea in a thermal vent. 

To go back and forth in a place where there is no air, no air pressure, and no usable water (as far as we know) and work and live there, where even exploring to look for possible resources and those raw materials to mine and bring back, is not like anything we do on earth, not like Christopher Columbus, not even maintaining antarctic bases. And getting out of atmosphere is at present such a big deal — and coming back safely into it more so — that we would have to know there was something worthwhile before you could find anyone willing to commit the funds to make it possible. Space tourism, especially with it being so dangerous, is not going to foot the bill: I don't think there are enough high-risk-taking billionaires willing to do so, not after the withering-away of Concorde, both before and speedily after her first (and only) fatal accident. (Another lovely, impractical ship whose memory I will forever cherish.)

So to make in-system manned spaceflight practical (and unmanned launches more practical) we need someone to invent a means of getting out of atmosphere, and back in, safely and cheaply; and we need a means of flying around outside earth's atmosphere efficiently, and we need a way of connecting the two. There are a lot of possible solutions, some of which may be efficient. The one we have, using — fictively — one vehicle to do both, isn't. I say fictive, because actually the shuttle is a multiple-vehicle system just like Apollo was, with some of the vehicles, or segments, being disposable. Enormous amounts of resources are burned up and flung away every time something is launched into space, and I've never seen real figures on the cost of that. And trying to make a vehicle light enough to piggyback atop a roman candle, and sturdy enough to kite back through the atmospheric interface, is a venture which was always questionable and whose viability is seriously in doubt at present. 

It could be that the best system will be to create a rugged, shielded transport whose only job is
to bounce in and out of orbit, using monstrous engines, carrying things and people and stuff back and forth from earth's surface to a stable orbital spaceport (not a half-assed publicity stunt flung together on the cheap), from which small, light, relatively fragile craft can move back and forth in space, reaching other orbital spaceports around the moon and nearer planets, and then taking more heavy freight transports down to those surfaces. All this would require immense planning and even greater investment of resources, and who is going to foot the bill, and why? Trade and exploration, historically, were done at the behest of merchants (and even conquest, as in the annexation of Hawaii, or the use of the Royal Navy to enforce the needs of the East India Company.)

Which brings me to the final, most cynical reason for the manned spaceflight program, and even for NASA itself: to keep paying the salaries of NASA's multitude of employees, and their contractors'. It could be, that the only practical reason for it all, and all it will ever be, is to provide a continuing economic setup for those who benefit by it. Whether it is all one monstrous system of pork barrels, spread across the country, or whether it is in fact more like the New Deal, and of sufficient economic benefit to warrant its extension, is something I do not have the numbers to determine, and I doubt that getting hold of those numbers would be an easy prospect. But given the string-pulling and factors involved in getting Congressional approval on keeping bases open or awarding military or other government contracts, the pragmatic aspect of this, as a real-world factor in NASA's "business as usual," has to be acknowledged.

Upon releasing his board's report, Admiral Gehman, in a grimly-humorous tone, described the problem as stemming from the fact that "…most accident investigations find the widget that broke. They find the person in the cause chain closest to the widget that broke, require that the widget be redesigned or replaced, and the person fired or retrained, and then call it a day. And they do not go far enough to find out why would this happen." ⁶

I would say that we have to ask that "why" on an even profounder level — what is the Final Cause, as Aristotle would say, the reason for creating the entire panoply which in turn created the budget situation and bureaucracy which created the sloppiness which led to the disregard of the damage to the shuttles' wings. We have to take responsibility for what we are doing. And I do say "we" because the government is supposed to be us, and nobody else is going to make things happen if there is no public will to either "make it so" or at least refrain from preventing it. And this may require us to ground the shuttles, and to give up manned spaceflight, because we don't have any really good reason for being outside earth's atmosphere right now. 

Or it might require us to ground the shuttles, and replace them with something much better. It might end up by giving us the opportunity to create a real spacefaring society, for the first time ever. In either case, it would result in NASA being destroyed and transformed phoenix-like into something presently unimaginable, and some people are going to be unhappy — though the latter scenario would certainly allow far more astronauts the chance to see that burning blue marble against the black of space. 

An impossible dream? Maybe. But we'll never be able do it, unless we stop being afraid to look at what's broken. We can't just keep fixing the widgets, like mindless robots.

27.August.2003

Those unfamiliar with military proceedures may be surprised by the frank and detailed and rather brutal self-analysis conducted in private by the armed forces; but it is, after all, in their own best interests to try to prevent things from happening again. There are similar Army after-action reports detailing the abysmal preparation and training given to US troops in the Pacific in WWII, for instance. And as long as there is no classified data involved, most of this information is available to the diligent civilian researcher at minimal cost; libraries maintain an extensive govdocs section, for example. (For one simple reason for the differences in voluntary investigation, note that all military officers can reasonably expect to be traveling in the vehicles of their respective services at some time or other, while none of the management at NASA ever has or likely ever will be obliged to use the machines they supposedly maintain.)

This is the most relevant set of documents pertaining to the Ehime Maru's sinking, the Navy's own Court of Inquiry findings:
http://www.cpf.navy.mil/cpfnews/coidownloadmain.html

The full report of the Columbia Investigation Board may be downloaded here:
http://www.caib.us/news/report/default.html

Recommended Reading
Cherryh, C.J.
The Pride of Chanur, Daw Books, 1987 (OOP)
Foreigner, Daw Books, 1994
These science-fiction series present portraits of spacefaring for commercial, exploratory, and defense reasons, from a much more realistic socio-economical and political perspective than nearly any commentary in the news media I have ever encountered. (They're not boring, either.)

Heinlein, Robert A.
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, Berkeley Medallion, 1966
This classic "Golden Age" novel is also interesting in its consideration of political and economical rivalries between Earth and potential colonies, from a variety of aspects, and not merely as a backdrop for milsf. (It's also a bit infamous, for its conjectured future social norms, scandalous when first published, but that's not the all of it by any means. (It's the source of the expression There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch, for one, which is always a good lesson to remember.)

McKee, Alexander,
The Wreck of the Medusa, Signet, 1975
This detailed nonfiction account of one of the most famous maritime disasters of history gruesomely illustrates what can happen when human obstinacy and incompetence fail to take into account realities like weather, decaying equimpent, inexperience and the loss of morale which follows catasrophic failure — things which political connections and family cannot overcome. Ends a bit abruptly, but overall immensely relevant when considering systems gone drastically wrong.