Beyond words...

Galina called a few minutes ago to relay the news that Shuttle Columbia was lost during re-entry. I ran down to the coffee shop to see if I could pick up some news on the radio... most stations were carrying on as usual, but one station did carry the grim news.

I cried when the radio confirmed what Galina'd said. Like a baby. I'd worked, briefly, with a couple of the crew members back when I was full-time in Houston. Four of Columbia's crew were rookies, including the Israeli.

RIP

Fleeting thoughts...

I've returned home and had the TV on long enough to see the video of Columbia breaking up. I then shut the damn thing off so as not to see a bunch of cretins blather on and on, in the vain hope of keeping me from changing the channel.

Feht called, wanting to know my "professional" opinion as to whether this may have been the result of terrorist action. While it's never wise to automatically rule things out, I think the idea of Columbia's loss as the result of a terrorist attack is far-fetched. I consider it eminently more likely that a book will be published in France, detailing how the loss of Columbia was either (a) faked, (b) the work of the Mossad, or (c) a CIA plot designed to accomplish some equally far-fetched end that I am not in the mood to imagine. That such a book would be an instant best-seller among sophisticated Paris intellectuals is a cinch.

In 1986, when Challenger and her crew bought the farm, it took NASA something like 28 months to work up the nerve to fly another Shuttle. (I seem to recall Jerry Pournelle musing that, for a while in the aftermath of that tragedy, it seemed as if NASA's primary goal was to delay launching another Shuttle until the entire crop of NASA bureaucrats had retired.).

But piecing together what happened in the sky above Dallas this morning is not going to be easy. I would imagine the debris field will be huge, and despite pleas to the contrary, there are enough yahoos out there - a small fraction, I am sure, but adequate nonetheless - who will want to comb the countryside and get some "souvenirs" before they're all scarfed up by "gummint" people. On the other hand, I also expect pretty broad public cooperation in helping to find as many pieces as possible.

Not to mention the bodies (or what's left of them...).

In any event, it's going to take a long time to come to a conclusion regarding what happened.

But NASA does not have that luxury today, not without abandoning the ISS. While that outpost might possibly survive without a crew for some short time (assuming here that the crew that's there now will come down using its Soyuz lifeboat after stretching their flight out as long as possible), ultimately, you're going to need a Shuttle up there to reboost the station to a higher orbit, else have it suffer the same fate as the Mir.

Without an ISS, it will be that much easier for us to ground the Shuttle fleet permanently, until some kind of replacement vehicle is developed - which is far from guaranteed in any meaningful time frame.

Meanwhile, the world's only active manned program will continue to be developed in China. Who knows? Maybe 10 years from now, the "language of space" will be Cantonese?

Yeah, I know, this is a pretty pessimistic view of the world, but I'm pretty down in the dumps right now. Sue me.

Cheers...

UPDATE (6:19 pm, 1 Feb): Progress cargo vehicles can also be used to reboost the ISS. The problem - as I understand it - is that the Russians haven't the financial resources to produce them in adequate quantities.

The words keep coming...

In a comment to my first post this morning, LJ friend deborahj said:

Reading your Entry, knowing that this mattered and that others care and are present (however distant they may be) at this moment, helps ease the awful sense of human helplessness.

More power to you.

My emotional reaction was not one of helplessness. Once events began to unfold during the re-entry, there was simply no time for anyone to do anything.

Whether you're piloting a spacecraft or going down to the bakery to buy a loaf of bread, you're taking a chance. All other things being equal, the former is more hazardous. A couple of years ago, when I attended a Shuttle launch, NASA Administrator Dan Goldin cited the risks during a pre-launch briefing: one in several hundred for a Shuttle launch, one in about 20,000 for an infantryman in a combat zone, one in about 2,000,000 for an airplane passenger.

Re-entry is no piece of cake, either, as the vehicle you're in plows into the atmosphere at something like 25 times the speed of sound, and just about every law of physics is working in tandem with all the other laws, trying to rip your vehicle (and you) to pieces. The tremendous stress it puts on an airframe is about what you'd expect when attempting to do aerobatics in a Boeing 747, except that the Shuttle airframe is built to take such havoc.

No, my emotional reaction (looking back over the past few hours) has two components:

First, I feel a sense of loss, as I'd worked with McCool (I forget in what context, but you don't forget such a name) and Husband (in connection with STS-96, briefly), and even though we were not exactly drinking buddies, the loss I feel is personal.

Second, I feel a sense of foreboding with regard to the bureaucratic response to the tragedy. It's entirely possible that manned space flight may come to a screeching halt with the loss of Columbia, not to resume again until the Chinese get their program going, with the possibility that it may not resume again for the United States period (the engineers and other personnel who work in the space program are an insignificant voting block).

But there I go, being maudlin again, which cannot possibly be healthy. In any event, thanks for your comment.

Cheers...

The Reuters "Ain't-No-Such-Things-As-Terrorists" news agency reports...

Iraqis Call Shuttle Disaster God's Vengeance

25 minutes ago (via Yahoo!)

Sick bastards.

Here we go...

From the independent media center, a loonie's view of current events:

I do not want ever to make light of a tragedy such as this. People have died. This is horrible. But after 9/11, I cannot help but be suspicious of government involvement. And there is a precedent...

In the early 1960s, the Joint Chiefs of Staff planned "Operation Northwoods"...this was a sinister multi-pronged plan designed to gain America's public approval of US forces invading Cuba. The plan was declassified via the Freedom of Informatin Act, and is available at the George Washington University National Security Archives library. THREE ELEMENTS OF THIS PLAN ARE PERHAPS SIGNIFICANT TO CURRENT EVENTS:
1) Military planes disguised as passenger commuter jets were to be "hijacked" and flown into large buildings.
2) Random Americans were to be shot on the street by "snipers."
3) If the space mission of the time (to the moon, I think) failed and crashed - either on the way or the way back - evidence was to be preplanted in order to blame the crash on Cuban militants.

No link was given in the post, but a commenter provided a link to the document cited, noting that none of these elements appeared in the document.

I'm going to have to go offline, else I think I'll go crazy. Most certainly, I must curtail my surfing.

Heck, I still have some translation to do today, but I need to rest first.

Cheers...

I hadn't seen this before...

Via LJ friend bandicoot:

Almighty Ruler of the all,
Whose Power extends to great and small,
Who guides the stars with steadfast law,
Whose least creation fills with awe,
O grant thy mercy and thy grace,
To those who venture into space.
-- Robert Heinlein, Prayer for Travelers

I'm on some sort of crying jag again, after having read Terry's post of Heinlein's extract of The Green Hills of Earth.

Cheers...

Winding down...

Despite my plans, when Galina came home yesterday, she said she wasn't hungry for my proposed elk steak and Swiss chard.

So, we had them for dinner tonight.

My only comment: The steaks are too small (they're medallions, actually :^). But they are good.

I lost myself in my work this afternoon, wandering up and down paragraphs of horrid, not-quite-repetitive legalese on the fascinating process of obtaining a Russian license (gosh, how it hurts to write that word right now!) through the State Mining and Industrial Oversight Committee (aka Госгортехнадзор, or Gosgortekhnadzor - which is such a finger-breaker as to be listed in my AutoCorrect list).

I figure I probably got half the job done (~3200 words), as it wasn't as bad as I had initially expected it to be.

Now to go rest, if I can.

Cheers...

(no subject)

From Dan Hansen's blog, the speech Bush should have delivered:

"My fellow Americans, today the Space Shuttle Columbia was lost. This is a terrible tragedy, and our hearts go out to the families and loved ones of the brave astronauts the world lost today.

But the people who flew that flight knew their risks, as did the myriad engineers, scientists, and other specialists that have made it their life's work to help mankind fulfill its destiny of exploration and discovery. They chose to fly rockets into space despite those risks, because they believed in what they were doing.

Today's accident is a challenge, but the history of the last two years has shown us that the American people are fully prepared to rise to any challenge that confronts them. The brave astronauts on that shuttle overcame many challenges on their journey from childhood and a child's dreams to being the competant, tough professionals who chose to ride pillars of flame to achieve those dreams.

We will honor the memory of the seven brave souls lost this morning. We will honor it by ensuring that their childhood dreams do not die in tragedy. We WILL go back into space, and soon. We will not just overcome this tragedy, we will transcend it. We will try harder, spend more, and continue to take risks. More astronauts may die in the future. We will mourn them, but at the same time we understand that great achievements come at great expense.

In several days, we will be announcing the new NASA budget. Many of you probably expect that this budget will now be scaled back. Some of you may think that we should be humbled, shut down our manned spaceflight programs, close our space station, and shy away from the risks of exploration.

But we will not do that. I will be announcing greatly enhanced funding for newer, more powerful rockets. New, more ambitious manned programs.

And we will honor these seven brave people by creating a small memorial to them, and the hands of a NASA astronaut will place that memorial on the surface of Mars. This is the way that Americans honor their brave pioneers - by carrying their pioneering spirit forward. God bless every one of those seven. They will not be forgotten."

And on that note, I will cease posting for the day.

Cheers...