MarsBlog.net

Michael Turner compares the hubris of mountain climbing with the fatal choices that led to the Apollo I, Challenger, and (in his view) Columbia disasters.

If I understand him correctly (the article wanders quite a bit), he is criticizing NASA, and the space advocacy community(!), for supporting and reinforcing the “astronaut-as-hero” image. Maintaining this image of invincible bravery, hypercompetence, confidence, etc., drives the agency to take unneccessary risks that eventually lead to catastrophe.

The responsibility doesn’t lie with the “space community” except to the extent that the space community (whoever that is) is to blame for being NASA’s doormat, and for being NASA’s political shock-troops, whenever pork-barrel space-heroics programs are in danger. The problem was not lack of support.

In a way, the problem was too much support, given with so little questioning, and so much confidence. As well as timidity, where timidity is a weakness, rather than mere prudence.

The overconfidence (and the timidity) that this support engendered in NASA and its contractors is what ultimately killed the crew of the Columbia.

I wonder what gave him that idea? The members of the space community that I know personally have attitudes towards NASA that could be better described with the terms “frustration”, “resignation”, or even “contempt”.

Frankly, it’s hard to see these disasters as the result of proponents being “doormats” and “shock-troops”, pushing NASA to do what it should not be doing or to take risks that it need not take. Quite the opposite, in fact — the Challenger launch decision, for instance, was in part motivated by the need to demonstrate schedule performance in order to answer the critics of the program. There is a thread of opinionizing at present which points a finger of blame for the Columbia accident at Sean O’Keefe’s focus on getting the agencies finances in order (the implication being that he was cutting corners, which led to the accident), a move motivated by Congressional critics of the agency and it’s massive overruns on ISS.

The problem with blaming anyone for Columbia‘s loss is that we just don’t know yet what caused it.

After its fifteen minutes of fame, Prometheus seems to have dropped off the table.

NASA is probably working on the flagship mission right now (be it to Jupiter or Pluto), but the point is that, after all that attention, there is suddenly nothing to report.

An interesting commentary on Columbia and the “why send humans?” question, in which those calling for the fedgov to redirect funds from manned spaceflight to “more worthy programs” is compared to a similar policy reversal in China’s Ming period.