I would like to join thousands of other bloggers right now in offering a tribute to the crew of the Columbia,<\/b> and to all astronauts, and to the thousands of dedicated men and women who support our manned space exploration programs, both here, in Russia, and soon in China too. Seven more of your brave comrades have fallen, and we mourn their passing.<\/b> They were true pioneers, people who risked their lives to stretch the envelope of human endeavor. They won’t be forgotten.<\/p>\n
Let me throw out a few random thoughts about what happened, however. A few years after the Challenger explosion,<\/b> I recall reading an analysis in the NY Times saying that although the O-ring problem had been fixed, the Shuttle remains an extremely complex machine working in an extremely hostile environment, and the chances are quite high that there would be other disastrous events. In that light, what happened to Columbia this morning is not all that surprising. Space shuttles are like commercial airplanes in a way; no matter how hard you try, you can’t entirely eliminate the chances of a crash.<\/b> As with a 747 or 767, the most dangerous times are on takeoff (recall the Challenger) and landing (now the Columbia); that is when the machine is stressed the most. Things happen very quickly under those conditions, often too quickly for humans or even computers to react to. By contrast, problems that arise in mid-flight are generally slower, giving you time to find a solution. Apollo 13<\/b> was the prime example of that, although the crew and the ground people had to work frantically to stay ahead of the problem and bring the crew back alive. (Great movie by the way, but I think that Kevin Costner<\/b> would have been a much more convincing Jim Lovell; Tom Hanks<\/b> didn’t look like him at all).<\/p>\n
NASA has had about 140 manned space missions so far, with two disasters in the air, one on the ground, and another very-near miss. The Russians have had some fatal missions too. It looks like the fatal incident rate is about 1 in 50<\/b> (for commercial flights, the rate is closer to 1 in 2,000,000). Manned spaceflight is not a walk in the park. The public really needs to think about when the risk is worth it and when it is not. I’m certainly not saying that we should ban all manned spaceflight, and I agree that the more we develop it, the safer it will become. But the Shuttle is turning into an old buggy (how many of us still ride around in a 1978 automobile? Or would want to?), but NASA just keeps patching it up instead of sinking the money into a newer and safer manned space vehicle. Why? Because developing a new space vehicle will cost BIG TAX BUCKS, and US taxpayers want tax cuts, not tax increases.<\/p>\n
I think that the US should start limiting the use of the Shuttle, and should split the cost with Europe, Russia, China, Japan and India (all involved in space exploration) to develop a new generation of safer and more versatile manned space vehicles (for example, the Shuttle can’t go up much higher than 200 miles, whereby the most important satellites are up at around 20,000 miles). The US just can’t do it alone anymore. We need to end the “space race”<\/b> and work with the world in order to develop a more reasonable and useful manned space vehicle, one that would eventually lead to commercial space travel.<\/p>\n
One last thought: it’s ironic that both Shuttle disasters involved African-American astronauts.<\/b> I don’t have the stats, but I’d have to guess that the fatality rate for black astronauts is way higher than for whites. Not that I’m saying that this is somehow a function of racism; mechanical disaster knows no color. It’s just an existential irony that even in the space program, the African-American culture is shouldering a disproportionate share of our tragedy. (Not to belittle the Jews, who have also known tragedy and were represented on the Columbia; nor the children of India; nor any culture.)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I would like to join thousands of other bloggers right now in offering a tribute to the crew of the Columbia, and to all astronauts, and to the thousands of dedicated men and women who support our manned space exploration programs, both here, in Russia, and soon in China too. Seven more of your brave […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/747"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=747"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/747\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=747"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=747"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=747"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}