Posted on 02/01/2003 4:45:09 PM PST by MadIvan
The last early-morning Texan television viewers saw was a beautiful shot of the Shuttle Columbia streaking across a clear blue sky over Dallas, caught by the cameras at WFAA-TV. It sums up the marvels of the age - not only the extraordinary technology that enables man to return from a trip to space, but the ordinary everyday technology that lets a cameraman from a local television station capture the scene as it is happening overhead at 12,000 miles per hour. It's not just that most countries can't do the former, they can't manage the latter, either: everything about the moment sums up the remarkable pre-eminence of America.
Four decades ago, the space programme was the only romantic thing about an unromantic war - the competition between two high-tech superpowers to put a man on space, and then on the Moon. Now there is no one to compete with, and for America's new enemies in a new war "victory" means no more than American failure.
You can't take down a spaceship at 200,000 feet with a shoulder-launched missile. Even the Americans would have difficulty blowing the Shuttle out of the sky, though the missile defence system currently under development will be able to do it. Al-Qa'eda can't, and nor can the French or anyone else.
These days, American technology has to pace itself. But you don't have to believe, as NASA fretted in the weeks before launch, that this Shuttle could be a terrorist target to marvel at the almost perfect symbolism of Saturday's tragedy: the Columbia's crew included the first Israeli astronaut, Colonel Ilan Ramon; better yet, he was an Israeli who had participated in the successful raid on the Iraqi reactor at Osirak, back in the 1980s in those dark days before the policing of Saddam's nuclear programme was entrusted to Hans Blix; and, of course, the Shuttle came down over Texas, home state of the President and in the European press the favoured shorthand for what they see as the swaggering cowboy braggadocio of the US.
Indeed, you don't even have to be some Islamist death-cult loser in Ramallah to be dancing up and down in the street. Within an hour of the Shuttle's loss, a Canadian Broadcasting Corportation interviewer was gleefully asking her alleged expert whether the failure was due to American "arrogance", the same "arrogance" the Americans are currently demonstrating in the Middle East. The "expert" - a sci-fi writer - said no, it wasn't "arrogance". But an hour later the CBC was apparently citing mysterious "space experts" who thought "over-confidence" arising from Iraqi war fever had led Nasa to go ahead with the flight.
What happened yesterday is a personal tragedy and a symbolic disaster - in 42 years of manned flight, Nasa has never lost a crew during landing or the return in orbit. It is also a setback for Washington, which had plotted this week as a projection of American resolve: the State of the Union, Bush's meetings with Silvio Berlusconi and Tony Blair, all working up to Colin Powell's presentation to the United Nations Security Council. Now, instead of steely determination, the television screens will be filled with funerals, elegies, interviews with neighbours, mounds of flowers and teddy bears: it enables the networks to slip in to their preferred mode, of America as victim, weak and vulnerable, which is why ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN were so good on September 11 and, for the most part, so bad in the months since.
You can't blame the news shows for their priorities: for most Americans, this will be the only attention they have paid to the space programme since the last disaster - the disintegration of the Challenger on take-off in 1986. Nothing in between has captured the public imagination - pictures from Mars? Yawn. There's something very American about the presumption of success, about the way something unprecedented quickly becomes routine - unless it all goes wrong.
In 1986, President Reagan, eulogising the dead astronauts, said that they had "slipped the surly bonds of earth and touched the face of God". President Bush, whom commentators have increasingly compared to Reagan in recent months, is not so comfortable with grandiose poetic rhetoric; he is a more openly emotional man, and it will be the smaller human elements in the story that touch him - men and women in their early 40s, leaving behind young children. They were an American crew - four men, one black; two women, one born in India.
Nonetheless, this will not be as traumatisingly mesmeric as the Challenger disaster. The yellow-ribbon era died with September 11: even if their television networks haven't quite adjusted, Americans are tougher about these things; this is a country at war and one that understands how to absorb losses and setbacks.
What happened happened most likely because the Columbia was just so damn old and rusty. If anything, it symbolises not American "arrogance", but what happens when the great youthful innovative spirit of the country is allowed to atrophy: the entire space programme is now dependent on a transit system a generation old. If Mr Bush really wanted to emphasise the gulf between his country and both the Islamist cave dwellers and "Old Europe", he would announce a major renewal of the space project. A frontier is part of the US character.
Two weeks ago, when the Shuttle was launched, the enterprising internet commentator Charles Johnson posted an almost note-perfect parody of an Arab news report denouncing the presence of Colonel Ramon: "'This is surely but the first step towards complete and outright illegal Zionist occupation of space,' said the Arab League spokesman Abr Souffla. Sheikh Yermani-Makr, appearing on Palestinian television, said, 'It is not enough that the unbelievers have come on our land, but now they also take our heavens?' In New York today, the UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said that an Israeli presense in space is 'unhelpful' and would only serve to further aggravate tensions between Israelis and Arabs."
A couple of days later, the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz reprinted the internet story, apparently taking it for real. In an odd way, the world's reactions are beyond parody now. No doubt in the big-time mosques the A-list imams really will regard what happened as the judgment of Allah on the American-Zionist plan to seize the heavens. The rest of us will mourn the dead and urge Nasa to get on with the next flight. That's the American way.
Perhaps worse is the silence that echoes from the lips of the populace who do not recant the slanderous comments.
May God bless the souls that were lost today - and protect the souls of those who continue to live our dreams and fight for our freedom.
J.Q.
I think it will stiffen our resolve, if anything. We've learned to take a punch and keep hitting, so to speak.
Thank you Mark, for understanding us, these days it's rare indeed. President Bush should announce a renewal of the space project that will enhance his program of developing hydrogen fuel. One of the best things about the space program was the leaps and bounds that were made in the technology that enhanced our everyday lives. Let's not just renew the program, let's seek truely innovative solutions that can be applied to current problems.
God, I love America, and I love our people.
I would agree with this ... I remember specifically where I was when I heard of the Challenger disaster, the same, of course, with 9/11. These events were etched in my memory much like Pearl Harbour was for my parents. This tragic event didn't impress me the same way ... it was more like hearing about the PanAm flight going down over Lockerbie(sp?), tragic certainly, and not taken lightly, but somehow not quite as searing in my memory.
I don't agree at all. If anything, tragedy brings us closer together and stiffens our resolve. I never imagine America (in times of sorrow)as a woman, hysterically sobbing into her hankie. I see a man, a soldier, standing proudly at attention with his head held high and one single tear trailing down his cheek.
Bombs? I'd say a couple of fairground 22.'s and some hobnail boots would have the stink of fresh, hot, frogie-feces in the air.
Thank you for this! It helps restore my faith that my (few) Canadian friends might still be representative of their fellow countrymen.
I retract the pox on Canada.
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