This week marks the thirty-eighth anniversary of the launch pad fire of Apollo 1, which took the lives of Astronauts Gus Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee. In a grim irony, this same week also marks the nineteenth anniversary of the Challenger disaster, as well as the second anniversary of the loss of the space shuttle Columbia. Though memorials are certainly in order, a closer examination of the nature and cause of each catastrophe reveals much about the nation throughout the past four decades. Particularly in the wake of the Columbia tragedy and its ensuing investigations, disturbing trends in NASA...