The Shuttle's Achilles Heel: Ideology (re-post with update)

The space shuttle Discovery, now in orbit, shook loose some chunks of insulation from its fuel tank as it took off from Cape Canaveral on July 26. This debris, the consistency of pumice stone, caused scrapes to the fragile tiles that protect the shuttle vehicle from catastrophic heating as it re-enters the earth’s atmosphere. Ominously, this is the type of damage that doomed the shuttle Columbia. NASA spokesmen say Discovery’s damage is less severe. They haven’t said explicitly what everyone is thinking: that it would be very nice if Discovery didn’t catch fire and explode on its return, as Columbia did in 2003.

The astronauts’ space-walk surgery of some protruding heat-shield fabric was skillful and heroic. But what can’t be addressed from space is that for some reason, the space shuttle's insulation-shedding problem has not been successfully corrected more than two years after Columbia's destruction, which killed all seven members of its crew in temperatures that reached more than 2,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

The ultimate cause of the Columbia crew's death may prove to have been environmentalism.

Environmentalism? Back in 1997, a report on shuttle wear and maintenance by the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., stated that shuttle vehicles’ fragile insulating tiles were suddenly sustaining many more scrapes and dings during missions. The damage was occurring during the launch: Chunks of hard protective foam were coming loose from the shuttle’s fuel tank. Why? The engineers suggested that it was because the formula for making the tank insulation had been changed. For the sake of environmental "friendliness," NASA had stopped using Freon in the insulation’s production. This was in deference to a politically correct but factually unproven theory that aerosol cans on earth were depleting the protective layer of ozone around the earth. The propellant in the cans contained Freon, which reacts with ozone.

After the Columbia disaster in 2003, Robert Culp, a "space debris and re-entry expert" at the University of Colorado told space.com, "Taking the Freon out made that stuff more brittle and created what became known as the 'popcorn effect,' with pieces of the insulation popping off and knocking chunks out of the tiles. They did not have problems with that insulation before they made that change," Prof. Culp said.

According to engineers, the insulation made without Freon peels off the shuttle and hits the tiles at a rate about 11-times greater than the Freon-based insulation. At the time, even such environmentalist stalwarts as The New York Times made the same point. But for some reason, NASA has not put Freon back into its formula, and has not even mentioned the "F-word" since Discovery was found to have lost insulation over its fuel tank last week.

The old U.S. Space Program, fighting a war against the Soviets for the high frontier, would not have troubled itself over Freon ethics. The military ethos is actually more respecting of human life than the civic-minded one, because at least it is about life: saving the people in your own civilization against invaders. At today’s civilian NASA, you would think being Environmentally Correct were more important than the lives of the crew.

And environmentalism is not the only ideology to make its way into NASA and compromise its military ethos. Feminism came from the civilian sector claiming to be supremely sensitive and human, but always seems to produce a crass result: The commander of the Discovery on this flight is Eileen Collins (USAF), who has a husband and two young children waiting on the ground. Since the days of the late New Hampshire schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe, it seems that an essential part of the shuttle program has been to give young mothers the opportunity to sit on top of a stack of explosive rocket propellant while we as a nation gallantly light the fuse.

Like the goal of proving that the sexes are the same, protecting the environment is not a legitimate military mission. The only excuse for the risk inherent in military operations is that a soldier "lays down his life for his friend."

The expression "Greater love hath no man" is not about making the ultimate sacrifice for the ozone layer.

…is the ultimate explanation for this:

MELBOURNE, Florida (Reuters) - NASA's efforts to resume shuttle flights were tainted by some of the same problems that caused the 2003 Columbia disaster, seven members of an oversight task force wrote in a minority opinion attached to the panel's final report released on Wednesday.

"It is difficult to be objective based on hindsight, but it appears to us that lessons that should have been learned have not been," wrote seven of the 26 members who oversaw how NASA implemented the recommendations of Columbia accident investigators.

"NASA needs to learn the lessons of its past, lessons provided at the cost of the lives of 17 astronauts," they wrote.

(Do read the rest!)

http://reuters.myway.com/article/20050817/2005-08-17T222437Z_01_HO780584_RTRIDST_0_NEWS-SPACE-SHUTTLE-DC.html

The commander of the Discovery on this flight is Eileen Collins (USAF), who has a husband and two young children waiting on the ground. Since the days of the late New Hampshire schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe, it seems that an essential part of the shuttle program has been to give young mothers the opportunity to sit on top of a stack of explosive rocket propellant while we as a nation gallantly light the fuse.

Lost me here. If it is objectionable to have a mother go up on the shuttle, then why should it be any less objectionable to have a father go up? What...we're only supposed to send up childless, unmarried orphans? C'mon.

And FYI: Christa McAuliffe was on the doomed Challenger mission not because she was a woman, but because Reagan-era politicians wanted civilians on the shuttle and she was the most qualified candidate for the role.

Actually, in WW II, we exempted draftee fathers with children from combat. That does not at all appear foolish or wrong minded to me, nor does it appear so to me to avoid risking that young children today suffer the loss of their mother on a shuttle flight. As a rule, young children suffer more from the loss of their mother than from the loss of their father. Not the least of nature's inconveniences for the gender feminism crowd is that men and women are not fully interchangeable or of the same value when it comes to child-rearing.

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