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Why continue space flights?

Posted on: Thursday, 28 August 2003, 06:00 CDT

Richard Cohen

Why continue space flights?

By RICHARD COHEN

The Washington Post

Thursday, August 28, 2003

We know now that a number of things led to the Columbia disaster last February. We know that at liftoff, a 1.7-pound piece of foam insulation ripped from the space shuttle's external propellant tank, striking the left wing. We know that the impact broke the heat shield, and we know that NASA did nothing about it. We know, in short, how the Columbia came down. What we do not know is why it went up in the first place.

The 250-page report of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board blamed something called the "NASA culture" for the disaster. By that it meant a propensity of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to press on no matter what, to overlook safety considerations or, worse, brush them aside. This is a damning indictment, but it is something of an old one. It's more or less what a similar NASA panel found after the Challenger broke up in 1986, with an identical loss of seven astronauts.

Whatever NASA's shortcomings, it's a bit unfair to blame the space agency for a cultural problem that is as much ours as its. After each disaster, presidents employ some wonderful rhetoric to honor the dead and vow that the program will continue. President Bush's brief message of Feb. 1 was one of his most eloquent. It was similar in both content and feeling to President Reagan's of Jan. 28, 1986. "The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them," Reagan said back then.

But he, like Bush years later, never actually said why. The old Cold War rationale for the space program -- beating the Soviets to the moon or controlling the truly high ground of space for military reasons -- is gone. The shuttle's scientific experiments -- some of them conceived by high school students and lofted into space for public relations reasons only -- could be duplicated either on the ground or mechanically in space. Nothing gained so far is worth the lives of 14 astronauts -- 5% of the people sent into space aboard the shuttle, an unacceptably high mortality rate.

Significantly, Reagan reached for "a coincidence" when the Challenger blew up. He noted that 390 years earlier, explorer Sir Francis Drake had died on a ship off the coast of Panama. In this way, Reagan linked space travel to the great age of exploration. "Well, today we can say of the Challenger crew: Their dedication was, like Drake's, complete."

Yes. But Drake, like Columbus or Magellan or, much later, Lewis and Clark, went off on voyages of discovery that were linked to hard and tangible benefits. Whether we are talking trade or colonialism or bringing Christianity to people who were managing, somehow, to get along without it, the consequences of exploration were profound. They changed the world.

Now, though, the manned space program is detached from any sort of practical consequences. It resembles, in fact, the all-too- frequent attempt of some adventurous soul to circumnavigate the world in a balloon, a perilous endeavor that brings great satisfaction to the balloonist, but a yawn from me. It has all the practical consequences of bowling a 300 game.

There is a Pavlovian quality to these adventures. They ring a bell in our historical imagination that once was sounded for real feats of exploration. The same holds true for the manned space program. It not only suggests what went before -- Drake and others - - but adds the reverence we all feel for scientific experimentation. Out of this will come something, we are told.

But out of this has come, really, nothing. This, though, we are not told -- at least not by our political leaders.

But watch what they do, not what they say. The shuttle program's budget has been cut and cut. It has become a PR boondoggle, not to mention just another area for Congress to add pork barrel projects. School kids send up experiments (how to paint with urine, an available commodity in any capsule) and presidents add this or that foreign astronaut for diplomatic, not scientific, reasons. This is a program that has lost its way.

Over the years, I've saved much time in the morning by not reading about the space program. It's become a bore, lacking relevance or interest. The true challenge of space is not to science, but to the imagination -- to policy-makers from the president on down who must tell us why, after 14 shuttle deaths and countless billions of dollars, it makes any sense to continue sending men and women into space. "The cause in which they died will continue," Bush said after the Columbia broke up. Fine words, but why?

Houston, you have a problem.

Richard Cohen is a columnist for The Washington Post. His e-mail address is cohenr@washpost.com

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