What else is going to go wrong in 2003?!, a number of Webdiarists ask after the space shuttle disaster. We can debate the symbolism of the tragedy later – today, a report from Webdiary reader Lucia Dulin Hawkins on the ground in Texas, an eBay press statement in response to the gruesome news that debris of the shuttle is already been hawked around as ‘a collectable’, and a piece by engineer, aerospace technology enthusiast and Webdiarist Malcolm Street with background, links, and the bizarre resonance of the disaster with a 1997 novel by sci-fi writer Stephen Baxter. Malcolm firmly believes the space program should continue.
Before we start, Malcolm’s speculative piece on whether Australia and Britain were trying to stay in good with the Yanks in order to to participate in “anti-gravity” military technology raced around the world after a mention on prominent US website instapundit. Malcolm’s Anti-gravity and us was the second most viewed Webdiary article of last month. Malcolm writes: “I’ve had emails today about it from a fellow in Indiana USA and, wait for it, a friend’s ex-husband, who’d been sent a message about it from a US friend! Maybe I’ve created a monster :-). The Indiana correspondent has put me on an interesting tangent; appears it may not be anti-gravity as such but electric “propellantless” thrust which can, of course, be used to generate extra lift. A phenomenon called the Bifeld-Brown effect is at the bottom of it supposedly. Watch this space!” Sites which have pointed to Malcolm’s piece include “the journal of strange phenomena” forteantimes and anomalist.
The top five Webdiary entries in January by page impressions were Harry Heidelberg’s What to make of the Australian diaspora, ‘Anti-gravity and us’, Always willing, we’re off to war again, New Year resolutions andOh Superman. Scott Burchill’s ‘Counterspin’ piece would have made the top five if we hadn’t published it via the news section instead of Webdiary. The most read Webdiary entry written before January was Manifesto for World Dictatorship.
Webdiary received most referrals in January from instapundit, Fortean Times, whatreallyhappened, timblairblogspot and bowlingforcolumbine, which has linked to ‘Manifesto for world dictatorship’.
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Lucia Dulin Hawkins (received at 6.47am yesterday)
I am an Australian living in East Texas, U.S.A. This morning at approximately 8 a.m. our house grumbled, rumbled and shook. My first thought was an earthquake! I ran out the back door and my husband headed out the front to see what happened. The rumbling seemed to last for minutes. We immediately thought the house next door had blown up. Other neighbours were standing in our street trying to fathom what was happening. We looked overhead and saw a wide vapor trail.
Then, from TV, we learned what had really happened: The Columbia Space Shuttle had exploded upon re-entry.
Now, five hours after the explosion, the day continues to have a surreal feel to it. The stillness of this clear, bright and beautiful January day is riveted by jets flying overhead tracking the Columbia’s final route. Strewn around East Texas and within 15 miles our peaceful lakefront home on Lake Palestine home, shreds of what is left from this momentous mission are gradually being discovered.
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eBay press statement, Sunday:
eBay and its community of users are deeply saddened by the loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia and its brave crew. Our sympathies go out to the families of the crew and all those affected by this terrible tragedy. The handling of any debris from the Space Shuttle Columbia is potentially dangerous and against Federal law. Any listing of shuttle debris on eBay, now or in the future, will be immediately removed from the site. In addition, eBay will cooperate fully with law enforcement agencies requesting information about users attempting to list illegal items.
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Malcolm Street in Canberra
I’m still numb from the loss of Columbia; it’s probably hitting space fans like myself even more than the general community.
Within the sci.space. internet newsgroups there’s long been an undercurrent of anxiety over the age of the shuttle and its compromised design, and what would happen to manned space flight in general if another one was lost before a replacement was ready around 2010. It’s the worst nightmare come true.
From the start of the shuttle program in the 70s two aspects of the design have been repeatedly criticised for cost-cutting in potentially lethal areas – the solid rocket boosters and the ceramic heat protection tiles, each covering one of the critical flight phases (launch and re-entry). Now it appears we have examples of failures in each of these causing the loss of a vehicle and all crew (Challenger and Columbia).
nasawatch has a memorial page up along with many articles (the webmaster is a disenchanted former NASA insider), and spacedaily (originally based in Sydney) is also covering it exhaustively.
For general background on the Shuttle and its history see nasa, in particular “The Space Shuttle Decision – NASA’s Search for a Reusable Space Vehicle”, which goes exhaustively into how the Shuttle concept and rationale changed during the early 70s as funds were cut back post-Apollo, and the political processes that led to its final approval. It’s as much economic and political history as technological, and highly recommended. Note that the cost justification for the shuttle was done on the basis of around fifty flights per year; even before the Challenger disaster the most NASA was able to achieve was eight, largely due to the extremely labour-intensive checks needed on the thousands of heat protection tiles.
John Huxley’s article in today’s smh is personal and moving and may go some way to explaining why some like myself see as so important for humanity something that many regard with justification as just a wildly expensive piece of nationalist self-indulgence.
AFP has an article, published on spacedaily at spacedaily, detailing the successive reentry and landing phases of a shuttle mission and where within that the Columbia disintegrated.
Finally, there’s a nasty parallel with fiction. In 1997 British science fiction writer Stephen Baxter (see sjbradshaw) published a devastating dystopian novel called Titan (see geocities for a perceptive review). Criticised at the time for its pessimism and supposed ignorance of the US political process (“It couldn’t happen here” etc), it forsaw a near future (starting in 2004) of the US narrowly electing a militaristic, nationalistic, Christian fundamentalist government which stops building a space station mid-way through construction, scraps the civilian space program, allocates whatever space functions remain to the US Air Force and hence militarising space, does nothing in the face of an international environmental crisis, and encourages an increased interest in creationism and decreased interest in science throughout US popular culture and institutions. Attempts at total military containment of a resurgent China backfire when the Chinese come up with a desperate gambit that goes horribly wrong.
It must have seemed far-fetched in the Clinton years, but looks uncomfortably prescient now with Bush Jr in control.
In the novel the remnants of the US manned space program are thrown together for one last fling, a manned mission to Saturn’s moon Titan. The deterioration of life on earth is paralleled with the deterioration of the life on board this jury-rigged spaceship built around the shuttle Discovery.
And what’s one of the catalysts setting all this in motion, the collapse of interest in the US in civilian manned spaceflight and in science and reason in general, with in the long run catastrophic consequences for humanity?
The loss of a second space shuttle. Columbia. While returning to earth…