You wrote a long essay. Not a word of it untrue. Every word of it deserving to be read by every American school child (not to mention his parents and teachers).
When I heard about the tragedy this morning, I had three reactions: immediate sorrow for those seven cream of the crop people whose lives were lost in this tragedy; sorrow for their families (both families by blood, and their NASA family); and a realistic bracing for what is to come.
What is to come is pretty much predictable, and unpalatable :
There will be the over-reporting by a ghoulish media, who want to leave no stone unturned and leave no question unasked in an effort to prolong a story which will keep them (as the omniscient interpreters) in the focus of the national consciousness.
In the leave no question unasked category, there will be three most offensive tactics undertaken:
(1) They will consult with hand-picked (by them, of course) ‘experts’ in order to tell us how we should best attempt to cope with this national tragedy. Leftist psycho babble will rule the day (week, month), and we will be treated as if we were unable to breathe in and out, or place one foot in front of the other, without their kind assistance.
(2) They will attempt to interview the families and friends of the deceased in order to prolong their (the interviewer’s) day in the sun. They will ask all manner of inane questions, certain to include, ‘How did it feel as you stood among the families at Cape Canaveral and began to suspect that something was wrong?’
(3) They (and their leftist accomplices in congress, and on campus) will begin to second-guess, and finger-point (at best) those who designed, built, and maintained the space shuttle. They may even be so arrogant as to dig into the history of the missions, and finger-point at past designers/builders/maintainers. And what will make this particular behavior especially obscene is the fact that most of them are probably intellectually incapable of comprehending the higher mathematics and science over which the people they will be accusing of incompetence have an expert grasp. Nor do they have any comprehension of the work ethic, dedication, honor and patriotism represented by the people they will be accusing of having a lack of such. People in glass houses shouldn’t sit in judgment of those who built them their houses.
When I worked as a fuel element designer at an atomic power lab in the early seventies, we were periodically besieged, on site, by hordes of useful, placard-carrying, idiots. I generally walked right by them into the lab. Once I stopped and talked with them, only to find that there was no talking with them. They knew nothing about that which they were protesting. All they knew was that it (the design of nuclear power plants) had to be discredited, and the plants had to be dismantled. Ignorance (especially ignorance which receives national attention, and national acceptance) is a very dangerous thing.
Now, thirty years later, the same kind of people will continue to attempt to destroy the space program. They will ghoulishly use every tragedy to their ideological, anti-American benefit.
I am not saying that there weren’t fatal errors made on this mission. Obviously there were. (A good FReeper friend e-mailed the following to me today, in part: Why [didn’t] someone step up and say these crafts will experience the same kind of fatigue as did the first jet liners during the early sixties when jet powered aircraft were a relatively new item? It's painfully obvious one or both of the bay doors or some other structure entry point failed on reentry due to fatigue.) He may well be right. I respect his opinion. It emanates from a mind that genuinely wants to know why – not one that wants to turn tragedy into fodder for globalist propaganda.
One needs only consider the fact that, in order to free itself from the earth’s atmosphere, the amount of power needed is mind-boggling (6.6 million pounds of thrust at lift-off alone). But, as was so eloquently pointed out by Jim Lovell today, the shuttle must deflect an equivalent amount of power upon re-entry. That, too, is mind-boggling. And the reality is that, just a minor error in one of millions of calculations or physical/mechanical elements, could account for today’s tragedy.
As has probably been said ad infinitum on this thread, the fact that there have been so few human tragedies in the shuttle program (or in the forty-year history of humans in space) is evidence of its incredible success. I know that the friends and families of those who died in Apollo I, Challenger, and Columbia surely find little personal solace in that fact (and understandably so), but I can’t help but wonder how many of them would like to see the space program slowed, or dismantled, as a result of their personal loss. My guess would be none of them.
Get back on the horse!
And soon. Your words need to reverberate among the scientific community, and the American public in general. It’s the only sane reaction to this tragedy. To allow the ghouls and second-guessers to call the shots would be a fatal mistake.
Your yankee ingenuity has been responsible for the greatest scientific/industrial progress (in the shortest amount of time) that humankind has ever known. And it has been fueled by courage, vision, and determination unparalleled in the history of mankind. Yet we have allowed it to be smothered by the leftists/globalists on so many fronts. And, to the degree that we continue to capitulate to them, we will find ourselves held hostage to a class of people who hold humanity, and human liberty, in contempt.
God knows that I'm a wreck at times, but I cannot see the point in making political, what is scientific. You don’t embrace the lying, power-hungry (at the expense of human industry and dignity) bureaucratic mindset. Thank you for that. :)
You forgot to include ignorance and pandering. One interview I saw between one of the talking faces on CNN and a former NASA engineer absolutely disgusted me. The engineer, who was trying to give a little background on rudimentary mechanics and aerodynamics of suborbital flight, was continuously cut off by the face who haughtly said, "you just lost most of the audience." What did the audience get lost over, you ask? Oh, just a couple of things most folks should have learned in high school: F=ma and KE = 1/2mV2.
Apollo I occurred in 1967. The Challenger was lost in 1986, and now the Columbia is lost in 2003.
I hate to me clinical about this, but we should probably be prepared for a catastrophic event like this every 15-20 years.
Even worse -- it should be noted when these incidents occurred. Launch pad, then take-off, and now re-entry. At some point there is going to be a harrowing disaster of this sort right on the landing strip, and another one in orbit itself.
The most heart-wrenching one would be an incident in orbit in which everyone on the ground and in the spacecraft was aware of a catastrophic event that would unavoidably unfold over the course of many hours. My understanding is that NASA was prepared for such a thing in 1969 on the first lunar mission, and their protocol at the time would have been to cut all contact off with the crew members even if they were expected to survive for many more hours.
When I worked as a fuel element designer at an atomic power lab in the early seventies, we were periodically besieged, on site, by hordes of useful, placard-carrying, idiots. I generally walked right by them into the lab. Once I stopped and talked with them, only to find that there was no talking with them. They knew nothing about that which they were protesting. All they knew was that it (the design of nuclear power plants) had to be discredited, and the plants had to be dismantled. Ignorance (especially ignorance which receives national attention, and national acceptance) is a very dangerous thing.Joanie, this evokes an indelible memory. You know how they say we all remember that moment we learned of remarkable events? Three Mile Island is one for me. It came of an hysterical face, a lost, happy desparation I encountered on the backyard escape route while skipping class in High School. As I slithered away from math class, I encountered one of the school hippies. He came up to me, shaking with excitement. "Haven't you heard? Haven't you heard?" He held my shoulders and shook me with his convulsions. "Three Mile Island blew up!"
I didn't know how many miles to that island, or to which island, anyway, but I did know that whatever it meant, whatever happened, however bad, this dope-happy moron was damned pleased with it.
A life-defining moment for me -- the making of a conservative, right there in Bethesda, MD, Montgomery County, Liberal-Central. I knew immediately it wasn't the stench of pot that was wrong that day. Or Three Mile Island.
PS Saw another of your posts: Dammit, Joanie, I'm gonna raid your keyboard and remove the "9" and "0" keys. You used a double parenthesis -- you've outdone yourself!
When I came back from breakfast at about 8:15 EST yesterday morning, I flipped on Fox News and said to myself "Oh cool! The Columbia is going to land". The first thing I heard was that "communication and RADAR CONTACT was lost at approximately 8:00". I knew then that they were gone.
I immediately popped T-160 tape in the VCR and hit record, then called a friend of mine, and my wife at work.
After spending all day listening to Fox, it struck me that they were just as incompetent as the networks when it came to the space program. They just don't have a clue about anything technical and, like the rest of the media, default to asking the "how did you feel?" questions over and over again.
I let the VCR run for about 8 hours, but in all that time there really wasn't one single piece of information that I didn't get first from FreeRepublic, and most of the good stuff on FR, they didn't even mention. Fox really embarassed themselves, and they're continuing on with the same crap this morning. You would think that they could find some new information from somewhere after eight full hours!
Well, I'm going off on a tangent again...
I'm not betting on the survival of the US manned space program after this. Mike is right. The left can't allow the shuttle program to succeed - it accuses them by it's success.
Did you know that the NASA budget is determined by the Health and Human Services/Veterans Affairs Committee or something like that? It used to be that Mikulsky [sp?] woman in charge of it...
Homeland Security has an unlimited budget, but America has no money for a manned space program...sheesh...