Ba-BOOM!

"Sometimes everything just breaks off" – Jim Lovell, Apollo 13 astronaut

by Bryan Zepp Jamieson

02/01/03

http://www:/zeppscommentaries.com/History/ba-boom.htm

When I was a kid we lived near military bases, and sonic booms were a daily part of life. Everyone knew those pilots were protecting us all from them red menace guys, and, being kids, we thought sudden loud noises were pretty cool.

But a lot of older folks thought that those pilots could defend us against the red menace just fine without scaring Aunt Tessie our of her skin or giving Grandpa a heart attack, and supersonic flight was banned, first from populated areas, and then over North America in general. By the early 1960s, sonic booms had stopped, and became something you just read about in physics texts.

So one morning in the early 1980s, I was snapped away by a loud double bang – "Ba-BOOM!", and, this being southern California, my first thought was "Earthquake!". But after a few seconds, I noticed that the floor was right where I left it the night before, and it dawned on me that I had heard a couple of sonic booms, close together. I probably would have forgotten the incident by noon if the radio announcer hadn’t said that the sonic booms were caused by the space shuttle coming in for a landing at Edwards.

I was a big fan of the space program, had been ever since my dad took me out to see Sputnik fly overhead one chilly night in October 1957, but I had some reservations about the shuttle, which struck me as a wasteful dead end. But a questionable choice was better than no choice at all, and given the alternatives (none) I was happy enough to hear the sonic booms and know that this was what would get us to Mars by 1995.

We got used to the distinctive double-booms of the shuttle coming in, and of course we all got used to the shuttle flights to the point where they were part of the background hum of our lives, along with baseball scores and the latest Hollywood movies.

Then came Challenger with its demonic horned demise in the clear blue skies of frigid Florida, and we all realized that for all the seeming routine, space flight was still very dangerous, and if the people on board weren’t as famous as John Glenn and Neil Armstrong, the dangers they faced were just as real, their courage just as great.

We got reminded of those risks, and that courage, again this morning. Columbia, at age 22 the eldest of the shuttles, disintegrated during reentry, spewing small flaming meteorites all over east Texas and parts of Louisiana.

The crew members, of course, knew the risks. The six Americans and one Israeli were the finest, and the bravest, humanity has to offer. David M. Brown, Ilan Ramon, Rick D. Husband, Kalpana Chawla, William C. McCool, Michael P. Anderson and Laurel Salton Clark. Put their names on the wall next to those of Apollo 1 and the Challenger. And the Russian cosmonauts who perished aboard Soyuz.

In the early going, attention is centering on Columbia’s left wing. It might have been struck by insulation off the main fuel tank, and even a little pinprick hole in one of the tiles, if it happened to be near anything critical and/or explosive (as nearly everything on a shuttle is), could cause a catastrophic failure.

They decided the incident probably didn’t do any critical damage, but the fact of the matter is there wasn’t a damned thing they could do if it had. The astronauts weren’t set up to replace any damaged tiles.

The shuttle was at 200,000 feet, moving at 12,500 miles an hour. Friction had raised the temperature of the leading edge of the wings to about 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit.

If something is going to go wrong under those circumstances, it’s going to go wrong in a HURRY. For whatever comfort it may bring their family and friends, they probably never even knew what hit them. I expect they were all dead within two seconds after radio transmission shut off.

I watched the videotapes of the disintegration, and remembered Mir. The derelict Russian space station had been allowed to decay from orbit, and a video camera had caught its dying moments. The images were very nearly identical.

The Internet, being the Internet, filled up with speculation, gossip and rumors within minutes of the catastrophe. These ranged from the goofy (Iraq shot down the shuttle) to the stupid (Putsch caused the shuttle crash to boost his ratings) to the bizarre (The shuttle collided with a UFO).

There was the mordant moment, as well, when one poor teenage kid, obviously a space fan, showed up at the impromptu memorial in front of the Johnson Space Center and told CNN and the World that he showed up because he was "so ashamed of the astronauts who died." Anyone watching knew that wasn’t what he MEANT to say, and I’m surprised that CNN broadcast it, but I can just picture the expression on the poor kid’s face tonight when he inevitably tuned in to CNN to see if he got on. Yeah, kid. There’s your fifteen minutes. You’ll be hearing more about it tomorrow.

I was watching mostly CBS, which brought Dan Rather in. At one point, Dan picked up a piece of paper, and, distaste evident on his face, read that Iraqis were gleefully pointing to the crash as evidence that Allah was punishing the Americans for their transgressions against the people of Islam.

Hard to tell if Dan was disgusted at the antics of the Iraqi falwells or at the blatant propaganda of such cherry-picked responses (probably both), but Iraqis would hardly be alone in making idiotic noises about the shuttle suffering the fate of all who displease the local cosmic sky muffin. One writer on Usenet acidly noted that given a track record of 105 successful flights against 2 failures, the shuttle had a pretty good track record, and the cosmic sky muffins needed to work on their aim a little bit. (Well, if the Iraqi army can’t shoot down a shuttle, there’s no reason to suppose God could do any better, right?)

Putsch got on and mooed religious noises at the citizenry, and then mercifully vanished again for the rest of the day.

As tragic as today’s catastrophe is (you’ll remember where you were when you heard this news, just like we did with the Challenger, or when the Kennedys were shot), the real tragedy might be that it will be the effective demise of America’s role in space.

Putsch was reportedly making noises about going to Mars just last week, but he talks about a lot of things, and is famous for saying something that sounds promising, and then turning around and doing the opposite.

And the accident occurred just hours after the Office of Management & Budget, the admin accounting office, came out and forecast record-shattering deficits for the next two years of over $300 billion each year. Congress, already faced with economic catastrophe, isn’t going to be interested in spending billions more on a spacecraft that was birthed from a technology that was obsolete thirty years ago. And there is nothing planned to replace the shuttle fleet; that idea was quietly dropped in 2001. A Space Odyssey in reverse, yes.

America may be rapidly following Russia into becoming a former space power, and while like Russia, it might one day return, it probably won’t be in our lifetimes.

I’ve believed, since 1962, that America’s strength as a nation was reflected in the space program. As a country, America suffered huge emotional blows in the last years of the 1960s and in the early 1970s, and turned its back on exploring the solar system.

Now it might turn its back on even the space station.

So now, we watch the Europeans and the Chinese (and eventually, the Russians) and see if they pick up where we left off.

Humanity will move forward, whether America moves with it or not.