Friday, July 29, 2005
A Triumph Of Politics Over Engineering
It is very possible the much vaunted US Space Shuttle is dead.
NASA's desire to do whatever it can to preserve the life of those it hurls into space is quite laudable, but this may be taking a things a bit too far. First of all, how many missions were flown prior to the last disaster with foam falling off that were completely successful and without incident? A lot, the odds are definitely in our favor here.
Secondly, consider what is involved in space flight as it is currently constituted. People are strapped to what is for all practical purposes, a very large bomb. The explosion of that bomb is controlled and channeled in such a way as to hurl those people into outer space at enormous velocity. Those people then proceed to exist in a near-complete vacuum for days on end, and eventually are allowed to fall back to earth, generating enough heat to melt most metals and deaccelerating in the process with forces that cannot really be duplicated by man, only harnessed. When you think about it, it is nothing but credit to NASA that more people have not died over the years.
What concerns me most is not losing the shuttle -- it's old, really old -- what concerns me is that politics will bring an end to any sort of manned space program. If I was NASA, I start laying out the statistics for what they have accomplished instead of focusing on the problems. the scale is not even close to balanced.
NASA's desire to do whatever it can to preserve the life of those it hurls into space is quite laudable, but this may be taking a things a bit too far. First of all, how many missions were flown prior to the last disaster with foam falling off that were completely successful and without incident? A lot, the odds are definitely in our favor here.
Secondly, consider what is involved in space flight as it is currently constituted. People are strapped to what is for all practical purposes, a very large bomb. The explosion of that bomb is controlled and channeled in such a way as to hurl those people into outer space at enormous velocity. Those people then proceed to exist in a near-complete vacuum for days on end, and eventually are allowed to fall back to earth, generating enough heat to melt most metals and deaccelerating in the process with forces that cannot really be duplicated by man, only harnessed. When you think about it, it is nothing but credit to NASA that more people have not died over the years.
What concerns me most is not losing the shuttle -- it's old, really old -- what concerns me is that politics will bring an end to any sort of manned space program. If I was NASA, I start laying out the statistics for what they have accomplished instead of focusing on the problems. the scale is not even close to balanced.
