The end of January is a time of remembrance for NASA human spaceflight, starting with the Apollo 1 anniversary on Wednesday, the Challenger anniversary (30th) on Thursday, and Columbia a week from tomorrow. Here’s one of the first pieces at Florida Today, by James Dean, on the Challenger anniversary, with some quotes from Yours Truly.
7 thoughts on “Sad Space Anniversaries”
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Challenger was on the 28th
(the very day I got married, in 1986)
ahhhh. 30th refers to the anniversary number, not the date. Right! Nothing to see here, citizen. Move along…
You picked a bad time of year to have a birthday, Rand.
Yeah, pretty dumb of me.
Same thing every year. We mark Challenger, Columbia, Apollo 1, and your birthday, and NASA learns nothing. Or rather, Congress and the Senate learn nothing, just keep funneling that sweet pork into certain districts, feeding the cargo cult.
I remember January 28th, 1986 way too well.
I’d been an our-future-is-in-space believer most of my thirty years at that point, and I’d spent half that time acutely aware that this future for some reason was hanging fire.
I’d gotten involved in writing about space in a side-track of the nascent internet the previous summer, which led me to being at NASA JPL reporting on the Uranus flyby that week, which led me to talking to the L5 Society people (also there) about coming to work for them to sort out their HQ computer operations.
And when NASA launched that magnificent kluge of a spaceship despite the ice that’d covered the stand that morning and blew it to hell, I took the L5 job. It paid a pitiful fraction of my previous tech job; I understood I was going to work to finally start making our proper future happen.
And I got there, and discovered L5 was fractioned and fractious and mostly had no clue what was needed to make that future happen – that was someone else’s job; most were happy to plan vast plans for what it would all look like once someone else did the heavy lifting, and a few didn’t care if there was a plan at all as long as they were in charge.
Fast-forward thirty years… I met a few good people who did have a clue, and we worked together to leverage what we had into real progress, and DC-X happened. And then I learned a lot of hard lessons about people and politics and what you can and can’t expect to accomplish against massively entrenched institutions with limited leverage.
The answer is, a lot, eventually, if you’re stubborn enough to just keep applying that leverage in the same direction for twenty years straight.
Ed M, if you think it’s bad now, compare it to twenty years ago. Now, there’s a growing awareness the old system is broken, and a willingness to go around it, or outside it completely, to get done what needs doing, and some real resources going into that. Believe it or not, we’re winning.
That tragic disaster says bad things about the larger society.
Let me point people to first a posting on my blog that has a copy of the February 2014 Mensa Bulletin. The article that begins on page 24 is titled Zombie Nation. It is about how sleep deprivation is harming our country. What is the first example that the author uses? Challenger. The people who decided to launch that day were, among other things, badly sleep deprived. Tired people make mistakes. Tired people don’t stand up to unreasonable demands.
I am also going to put a link to an older posting of yours Rand about Worker Abuse. There is too much of this kind of thing going on, especially in tech fields. Exhaustion causes all sorts of problems, not always as dramatic as Challenger.