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Yet again, I wake up and discover that something utterly ghastly has happened. Yet again, I wake up late, pull Lilith off the nightstand, click a button in anticipation of spending the next hour or two reading digests, responding to business communiques, maybe chat a bit with some friends...but seconds later I'm on 1stHeadlines and reading, reading, reading.
Those poor people.
It happened on re-entry. The big deal about the shuttle's landing profile is that it re-enters as an unpowered glider. It also re-enters with a hell of a lot of energy. To slow down and bleed off that excess energy, the shuttle has to perform a series of curves, just as schussing left to right over and over again will prevent you from careening down the hill and crashing through the fireplace inside the ski lodge.
And that's one of the less-publicised Dangerous Bits of the flight. Most of the concern is centered around launch, naturally, given the immense volume of fuel involved. But these S-curves put tremendous stress on the vehicle. Metal fatigue is one concern, damage incurred during liftoff is another.
I have re-read the daily mission reports in my mailbox. No sign of problems at liftoff or during the missions. Hmm.
My initial reactions, in no particular order:
1) A disaster over water (as befell Challenger) would have afforded the astronauts far more dignity than a breakup over the skies of Texas. Already the air is thick with the drumbeats of news helicopters, desperate to get a bigger and a better aerial shot of debris than the other affiliates. News directors are commanding their vans to leave that tile that the kid found near the ballfield...I just got a cellcall that there's a chunk with a piece of American flag on it in Farmington...and that video could make the national feed!
2) The Shuttle program is done. Temporarily, for sure. It could be two years before it flies again, unless there's a quick and definitive answer to the question "What the hell happened?" Permanently, probably not but maybe. There's far too much money tied up in hardware and facilities to actually pull the plug, but what will this mean to future construction and moving Orbiter technology forward?
3) The Russian space program is saved. Maybe. Only two space agencies can furnish the International Space Station with supplies and personnel, and now it's all up to the RKA. It's entirely possible that the station will be de-populated when the current three-man crew is scheduled to come home, and remain empty until shuttle flights resume. It's equally possible that the RKA will get the money it needs to step up its flight schedule and upgrade its facilities, the better to support Alpha.
(Of course, the problem there is that their Soyuz spacecraft is just a three-seater, with only one spot for a passenger. That's a problem when it comes to replacing ISS crews (what happens when there's only one man left on Alpha?), but it might actually be a factor in keeping the station up and running through the Columbia investigation. If their own space-shuttle project had borne fruit and they had a Buran available, simply bringing the whole crew home at once would be an option. Now that it'd have to be accomplished in three separate Soyuz missions, it might be more readily apparent that leaving the place uninhabited would be a rather substantial waste.)
4) If the Shuttle program is done — "If," I stress — this might step up development on the next generation of reusable spacecraft. It all comes down to the way the humans think.
The original Block I Apollo command-module killed three astronauts. Well, (you say in hindsight) there were problems both with the hardware and with the way the Apollo program was managed and run. Both got fixed. Apollo went on to fly ten successful missions.
Challenger broke apart on launch. Again, there was that problem with the boosters and that got fixed, plus NASA management felt pressure to keep the shuttle program profitable; bolstered by impossibly optimistic numbers regarding its safety performance, they launched it when they shouldn't have. The problems got fixed, and they flew dozens of successful missions before another shuttle broke apart in flight.
See what I mean? One accident is perceived as a freak. Two can be perceived as a Bad Vehicle. Never mind that manned space flight, even after four decades of experience and engineering, remains an intensely dangerous expedition akin to the first polar expeditions. You go with experience, you go with science and preparation and a certain reasonable amount of confidence, but nonetheless you leave with the knowledge that you might never return.
This will be the ultimate test of our commitment to the Shuttle program. Is the old girl worth fixing? Will the existing fleet be simply maintained while The Next Thing gets the bulk of the funding?
(And of course, that phrase is a laugh. A pal of mine at NASA ribs me by asking "Hey, what's the difference between a cheese pizza and a freelance journalist? A cheese pizza can feed a family of four." To which I inevitably respond "What's the difference between an onion and NASA's budget? Well, people cry when you cut an onion...")
Which leads to the next item on the list,
5) I sure hope that the people who tell George W. Bush what to do know what they're doing.
Which is, admittedly, not the first time I've uttered that phrase. It's not even the first time I've uttered it within the past 24 hours.
Manned space exploration and research requires a commitment on the part of government. The shuttle program has enemies; it has them under Bush, it had them under Clinton, Bush Sr., Reagan, Carter, Ford and Nixon. Some of these enemies are even within NASA. No doubt there are people siezing the opportunity, scrambling at this very moment to assemble reports and PowerPoint presentations, preparing an argument of how manned space flight can be gradually phased-out over the next eight years...freeing billions for unmanned exploration, or possibly invading Canada.
(Their ways are weird, many of them are bearded, not only do they have oil BUT they have great beer and no religious mandate against soldiers drinking it; what the hell are we waiting for?)
Will manned space flight continue? Almost certainly, yes. NASA is like a cat. You can pick it up and toss it over the side of a building (you can; it's a component of free will; however, none of the best people do) and while it doesn't land gracefully, it lands. They'll investigate, they'll conclude, they'll move ahead, and somehow they'll endure.
But through both Republican and Democratic presidential administrations, never assume that common sense will prevail.
Given the idiocies we've witnessed over the past year, though, my greater worry is that Columbia will somehow, some way appear to fall within the current Argument for a War with Iraq.
How? Well, I dunno. I also dunno how the commentators and the Administration are insisting that Iraq remains a clear and immediate danger despite a consistent failure to prove that this country is capable of doing anything worse to us than causing NBC's Thursday-night lineup to be delayed for 20 minutes for another Presidential address.
I've seen enough press conferences to be able to clearly envision a Presidential spokesperson answering the inevitable question "Was this an act of terrorism" with a solemn "The investigation is still ongoing and we're following several leads."
("Um...I'm sorry, Kenny? Did you notice how I pointedly arched my left eyebrow when I said "several" just there? You boys got that, right?)
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Here I am, watching the Michael Jackson documentary (time-shifted about 8 hours thanks to TiVO). And because I was obviously experiencing some sort of subconscious need to feel as though I wasn't totally completely and wretchedly wasting both time and brain cells, I wrote a fun little bit of AppleScript. It builds a list of all the browser windows you've got open and turns it into a clickable, HTML-formatted table. Viz:
It's an oddly attractive bit of code. I'm looking at this list now and thinking that it's sort of a curious collection. They represent pages that I opened for fun, pages I hit because I was bored and needed something to keep me at the keyboard, research for stuff I'm actively working on and things I opened in response to something I saw on TV or read elsewhere. And then there's the category known as Idle Google-Fueled Whims.
It's an oddly appropriate bit of code, too, given the circumstances. Here I am, watching a documentary in which a man has unthinkingly allowed the entire planet to come in and take a peek at random moments from his life, and clearly not suspecting that these Random Moments, when taken together, would paint a clear picture of a total whackjob. And here I've gone and written a little tool that delivers that sort of experience to anyone with Safari and their own website.
| | It's good to be related to me. One, because I'm a patient mover. I mean, I'm a really good sport about it. I'll gamely just take the next cardboard box or the next piece of furniture off the truck and carry it into the new apartment, and then I'll go back to the truck and repeat the process all day until I'm told that it's OK to stop or that I've been dropping things off at the wrong apartment. And two, because I occasionally have surplus hardware that needs outsourcing. I'm one of the few people in the Boston area who thinks "Damn, I have too many sets of multimedia speakers" and doesn't follow it up with a big Presidents' Day Sale.
So my Dad is now the happy recipient of an only slightly-used set of JBL Creature sub/sats. What makes this worthy of mention is how Dad's set it up in the dining room. The satellites share a sideboard with the Jumbo George Foreman Lean Mean Fat Grilling Machine that my sister gave my folks for Christmas, viz:
One glance at this setup and you can't help but think that this would make a great product. Instinctively I want to lift the lid, drop in an LP, close it, and spend an afternoon listening to Louis Prima.
(Instead of smelling burning plastic. Well, Mom and Dad were thinking of getting a new dining-room carpet anyway.)
The Apple //c came into existence when Steve Jobs walked into an office, laid an Apple //e motherboard down on someone's desk, and then arranged a keyboard and a new half-height 5 1/4" floppy drive atop its footprint. "That is a great product," he announced. "Let's make it."
Thus are legends born. All I'm saying is that if I saw the Apple iSpin for sale, I'd plunk down the money. And my delight with the purchase would even last a few hours beyond the realization that I only actually own three LPs.
I lost an uncle Friday night. Uncle Bob was a highly influential man; he helped me to define the high standards by which I judge my own Uncling.
See, he never simply shook my hand. I'd be at the wedding or the Christmas party or whatever and whereas some uncles would offer a wave or perhaps a cheery hello followed by a drink order, Uncle Bob would leap forward and give me the sort of hip, soulful handshake that you'd see George Jefferson laying on people in "The Jeffersons." It consisted of a firm grip, one pump, a change of hand position so that you're gripping the base of each other's thumb, another good pump, then clap the other hand over the whole works and give a side shake with a couple of invigorating barks. It's a hell of a first impression. "Now here's an uncle marked for glory" I thought, riding home in the back seat of the Country Squire after my cousin's sixth birthday party. "I shall track this man's future work with great interest."
He was also my hockey coach. To this day, whenever I'm skating and come to a curve in the boards, I hear him barking "Crossovers, men! Crossovers!" as I swing one ankle over the other.
(The other time my instinctive youth-hockey training comes back to me is when I notice that a passer-by has something that I want and I then acquire it by performing an act of extreme indelicacy upon his person. But that's a common failing of former youth-hockey defensemen so the blame properly rests with Society and not my Uncle Bob.)
He was a lifer at Boston Edison, so as a fellow member of the Fraternity of Those Who Have Been Unwitting Vessels For The Electron's Relentless Pursuit Of A Connection To Ground I always felt a certain kinship. Any man who could, if need be, climb a utility pole and come back down without getting killed or arrested was OK in my book. I myself had a perfect score on the former but rated perhaps a C+ on the latter.
Uncle Bob had Alzheimer's. Even as he began steadily slipping away from himself and his family degree by degree, he'd still greet me like a soul-brother. Maybe he wouldn't greet me by name, but he'd have that same sudden glint in his eye, and then perform the same metacarpal-phalangelical acrobatics.
Then the day came when he didn't, and I knew that the end-game had begun.
| | If the worst thing that happens to me all week is that my TiVO got sick and tired of waiting and started deleting shows before I had a chance to watch them, then I suppose that's a good week.
I guess.
Yeah, you see, I've tried very, very hard to come up with a paragraph that'll win me busloads of sympathy from one and all. I'm not having much luck with it. In the last version, I described how I've been a very good boy and I've been working very hard all week and I was so totally looking forward to watching those two dramas. How I felt that I'd finally earned myself a break so I picked up the remote only to have the cup dashed from my lips, et cetera. It was well-crafted but it still came down to "I wanted to watch TV but couldn't."
"Roumain had something profound to say about life's difficulties," I imagine some reader telling me in response. "'Providence is nothing but man's will not to accept hardship, to tame, day to day, the earth's bad will, to bend the water's whims to fit his needs'. I took great comfort from those words back when the hurricane destroyed my home while I was in the third month of my chemotherapy. A week later, the insurance company decided to terminate my coverage, too. This quote was a great source of strength for me back then and I hope it does the same for you now."
I mean, what would I say? "Jacques Roumain was right on the ball with that one. You can tell everyone I said so, too."
So let me just say it straight: I'm not suggesting for a moment that my missing this week's "West Wing" and "The Shield" represents just cause for the Make-A-Wish foundation to arrange a tour of Skywalker Ranch.
(Aside: sure, I want to tour the Ranch one day...but I want to earn it. I want to disguise myself and a friend as paperhangers and tell the guy at the gate that Mr. Lucas called us in for an emergency re-papering job, and that the time he wastes phoning the house to check our story is time we should be spending in the dining room, getting it re-papered in time for his big fancy society party tonight, and that ultimately it'll be his neck on the line, not ours. I want to get in there and then unzip my coveralls to reveal my high-powered fancy Hollywood writer costume and sneak into the Episode III building and tell the receptionist that George told me to take a quick peek at the shooting script, and that I should make any changes or photocopies that I feel are necessary. Of course, I'm not a fool; I know that eventually, someone will see through my slick subterfuge and take me into custody. But just before the haughty director of security calls the cops, he'll be ordered to haul me off to the main building. There he is, all smug, thinking that the Boss wants to chew me out personally, when in reality Mr. Lucas has read my script revision and thinks it's brilliant and hires me as Lucasfilm's Jedi Master Of All Creative Aspects Of Film Production right on the spot. "Mr. Ihnatko has the run of the Ranch," he'll say, removing my oilskin Aussie hat and replacing it with a fedora that Harrison Ford wore in "Raiders Of The Lost Ark."
Which will be much more satisfying than just coming in on some pre-arranged tour. End of aside.)
I am nonetheless bummed. When I added "The Shield" to my TiVO list and saw my first Season Two episode, I had no idea why Michael Chiklis slammed that guy's face onto a red-hot stovetop element. The scene was in a recap at the start of the show. The dude's really miffed about it — which is understandable, I think — and he's keen on exacting a dramatic comeuppance. Cool. But why did Chiklis give him the Aunt Jemima Treatment in the first place? And now, because I foolishly put work and family ahead of my obligations as a TV viewer, I've fallen yet another week behind.
"The West Wing" promised to be a Heavy Revelation Episode, too. Dash it all.
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