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NATIONAL GRIEF
The politics of disaster
BY MARTY WOLFAND

In January 1986, I went to work at NASA’s Lewis Research Center in Cleveland, Ohio. As far as I was concerned, I’d just scored my ultimate dream job: making pictures from data sent to earth by deep-space Voyager spacecrafts. I’d be teaming up with folks designing the International Space Station, the space plane, and experiments destined for future space-shuttle flights. After spending five years at Cleveland’s Case Western Reserve University medical and dental schools as a scientific photographer and imaging technician, going to Lewis was like being called up to the big leagues.

But it wasn’t long before I realized that NASA had become a figment of America’s collective cultural imagination. A week after starting at Lewis, I witnessed the sight of Challenger’s remains slowly falling out of the sky, in real time, via NASA’s closed-circuit TV network. I had looked forward to watching the launch as a bona fide member of the Space Brotherhood with a roomful of NASA veterans. But shuttle launches had long since become commonplace, so there wasn’t a big turnout — about 10. Still, as soon as the shuttle cleared the launch pad, we all clapped and cheered, " Go! Go! Go! "

Then the ship exploded.

Our silence and bewilderment was shared by the NASA broadcast announcer. A voice finally said that a " flight anomaly " had occurred. The camera stayed fixed on the spiraling smoke trails set off against a perfect, cloudless blue sky. Someone finally thought to change the channel to the local CBS affiliate. There, Dan Rather reported that Challenger had blown up and its pieces had fallen into the deep waters of the Atlantic. Upon hearing this, I suddenly remembered that a friend of my family’s had been aboard — Judith Resnik — and it hit me hard that very probably she was dead.

This weekend’s Columbia disaster sent me back to that awful day in 1986. Officials are making the same excuses we all heard 17 years ago: Columbia was the victim of a cash-starved NASA budget that couldn’t adequately assure flight safety. An aging civil-service work force is on its last legs, and for all intents and purposes no longer believes in the ideals of the space-exploration program. The shuttle fleet has been flown too many times and can’t be maintained properly. The tight mission schedule is too demanding.

Why were the news agencies even bothering to do new interviews? Just rerun the damned footage from ’86.

The day after Challenger was lost, Lewis Research Center director Andrew Stophan made a televised speech to the 5000-plus employees who worked for him. The first 30 or so seconds of his presentation were devoted to what a great friend Akron native Judith Resnik had been to Lewis. He then reassured us that our jobs were safe, that another 500 engineers would have to be hired to work on the International Space Station, the space plane, and yada, yada, yada. Nobody should worry, Challenger or no Challenger, Lewis was gonna do just fine.

I tolerated about 15 minutes of Stophan’s talk before I ducked into the men’s room and vomited. Resnik was a legend in the town where I grew up. She was the honor student’s honor student. She had a doctorate in electrical engineering. She was an accomplished classical pianist. She was an airplane pilot. And she was, as many of us noted, quite attractive. It literally sickened me to think that all Judy was worth to the NASA crowd was a quick 30 seconds.

Challenger was destroyed because its mission had been postponed twice and it couldn’t be kept on the launch pad any longer. It had to fly even though overnight temperatures had been low enough to potentially damage the O-ring seals on the solid-fuel booster rockets. Columbia had also been postponed a couple of times. The only real difference between the doomed missions was that no one could see Challenger’s solid-fuel booster rocket O-rings disintegrating, but everybody watching Columbia’s launch saw a chunk of the liquid-fuel tank hit the left wing.

Spin doctors now claim that even if the ablative tiles on the leading edge of the left wing had been damaged, none of the crew had been schooled in how to replace them, and there weren’t any spares onboard anyway. As for evacuating the crew to the International Space Station, Columbia was not equipped with a docking ring. Even if the crew had done EVA ( " extravehicular activity " ) and found tile damage, there was nothing they could have done about it. They were, therefore, doomed from the very moment the damage occurred. And then there was the detailed analysis by NASA’s best-and-brightest engineers, concluding that the foam insulation couldn’t have possibly caused any damage.

Picture a similar reaction on the part of NASA’s engineers when the fuel cell exploded on the Apollo 13 service module, in 1970. At that time, hundreds of number jockeys hunkered down with their slide rules and note pads. They worked their asses off to save the lives of three men who wouldn’t have had a prayer of survival without their help.

Why couldn’t Columbia have stayed in orbit for a few weeks if an EVA had confirmed tile damage? Emergency teams on the ground might have figured some way for the crew to transfer to the space station, docking ring or no docking ring. Another shuttle might have been prepped for rescue, just like in the movies. Any number of contingencies could have been implemented if anyone had been concerned enough about the survival of Columbia’s crew.

After the Challenger disaster, I lasted another 10 months at NASA before walking into work one day and realizing I couldn’t work there anymore. I turned in my keys, ID, and parking sticker, and left. I’d like to say I never look back, but that’s not true. And now that Columbia has been lost — probably needlessly — I’m looking back harder than ever. Like many others, I’m left wondering why NASA seems doomed to repeat the past and whether anything can be done to ensure it never does so again.

Issue Date: February 6 - 13, 2003
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