Paul Ryan is reportedly expecting it.
I know what I’d do if I were overseeing NASA’s budget, but it’s not what they’ll do.
Twenty-Seven Years
That’s how long ago was the beginning of the end for the Shuttle, not even five years after it first flew. Eleven years ago, I recalled the event:
I was sitting in a meeting at the Rockwell Space Transportation Systems Division in Downey, California. It was a status review meeting for a contract on which I was working, called the Space Transportation Architecture Study. It was a joint NASA/USAF contract, and its ostensible purpose was to determine what kind of new launch systems should replace or complement the Space Shuttle. Its real purpose was to try to get the Air Force and NASA Marshall to learn how to play together nicely and stop squabbling over turf and vehicle designs (it failed).
It was a large meeting, with many people in attendance from El Segundo and Colorado Springs (Air Force) and Houston, Huntsville and the Cape (NASA) as well as many Rockwell attendees.
As I sat there, waiting for the meeting to begin, one of my colleagues came running into the room, his face white as a freshly-bleached bedsheet. He leaned over and told me and others, in an insistent sotto voce, “I just saw the Challenger blow up.”
We stared at him in momentary disbelief.
“I’m serious. I just came from the mission control center. It just exploded about a minute after launch.”
One could actually see the news travel across the large meeting room as expressions of early-morning torpor transformed into incredulity and shock. More than most people, even with no more information than the above, we understood the implications. While there was speculation in the media all morning that the crew might be saved, we knew instantly that they were lost. We knew also that we had lost a quarter of the Shuttle fleet, with a replacement cost of a couple billion dollars and several years, and that there would be no flights for a long time, until we understood what had happened.
The ironic purpose of our meeting became at once more significant and utterly meaningless. Most of the NASA people immediately made arrangements to fly back to Houston, Huntsville and the Cape, and we held the session without them, in a perfunctory manner.
This was one of those events, like the more recent one in September, that is indelibly etched into memory–where you were, what you were doing, what you were feeling. I’m curious about any inputs from others, either in comments here or email.
Oh, and I should note that it’s an easy date to remember for me–it was (and remains still) the anniversary of my date of birth…
So today, I start another trip around the sun, and space policy remains a mess.
And it’s not just today. The Apollo 1 fire happened the day before my twelfth birthday. And Columbia was lost four days after my forty eighth. I have no trouble remembering any of these anniversaries.
The War On Science
…by an idiot “gender studies” professor. A male one.
These departments need to be the first to go when the academic bubble pops.
“Bitter, Arrogant And Partisan”
…as he starts his second term.
He’s always looked that way to me. Mendacious, too.
Political Eulogies For Tom Harkin
Won’t Anyone Think Of The Crab Lice?
My petition is stuck at only forty-nine signatures. C’mon, folks, only three weeks or so left.
[Monday-morning update]
Wrong link. Fixed now, sorry.
For A More Grown-Up Cable News Culture
Four rules. If you have time, watch the Ezra Levant clips.
We Need A Waiting Period
…for passing laws.
Can’t do that. Might make it too hard to pass stupid laws.
After every tragedy, legislation gets rushed through that’s typically just a bunch of stuff that various folks had long wanted all along, but couldn’t pass before. Then it’s hustled through as a “solution” to the tragedy, even though close inspection usually reveals that the changes wouldn’t have prevented the tragedy, and don’t even have much to do with it.
The goal, thus, is to prevent close inspection through a combination of heavy-handed legislative techniques and bullying rhetoric: If you don’t want to pass our bill without reading it, you must hate the children.
Over the years, we’ve gotten a lot of lousy legislation this way — the Patriot Act, for example, about which I wrote a column something like this one back in 2001. We’ve gotten it because politicians like to manipulate voters and avoid scrutiny.
But why let them?
Why indeed?
Forty-Six Years Ago Today
Ed White, Roger Chafee and Gus Grissom died on the launch pad, an event that resulted in the formation of the Aerospace Safety Advisory Panel, and a complete overhaul of the design and management of Apollo. It was the first of the late-January tragedies that make this time of year a sad one for NASA. Tomorrow will be the twenty-sixeventh anniversary of the loss of Challenger, and Friday will be the tenth anniversary of the loss of Columbia.
Memories Of Flint
A few months ago when I was back to visit relatives, I took a drive around, and saw the vast empty field that used to be A.C. Spark Plug, where my father and later my brother (and, during summers in college, I) worked. And when I flew in, I saw from the air the ruins of what used to be Buick City, along the Flint River. It was surreal.
For years, Gordon Young, a Flint native living in San Francisco, has been running a blog that’s become sort of a water cooler for people who are from Flint, Michigan, but not necessarily any longer residents.
As a result of a lot of time spent back there over the past few years, he’s written a new book
And I hope that with the new right-to-work law in Michigan, some of the companies like Honda and Mercedes and others will now consider setting up shop on the old industrial sites, and there can be some semblance of a return to the former glory, even if the new jobs won’t provide the middle-class incomes on unskilled labor that they did in the fifties and sixties. Those days are simply gone, never to return.
[Update a couple minutes later]
Here’s an example post from the blog. 1973 was the year I graduated from High School, into a recession that in Flint was a depression (unemployment was more than twenty percent). The suckitude of the economy, and getting laid off from a job as a mechanic at the VW dealer, inspired me to go back to school, at Mott Community College (named after Charles Stewart Mott, on whose property it was built, and who did die that year, as Gordon notes). In retrospect, that probably was the high point. I moved away three years later, to go to Ann Arbor, and never moved back.
[Update a few minutes later]
Here’s the book’s web site. That reminds me that I should build one for mine.