Fleeting thoughts...
Feb. 1st, 2003 11:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpI'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.
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.
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Date: 2003-02-01 11:09 am (UTC)