It invariably never ceases to amaze me about how the media, and by extension the people, go into a seemingly rabid fit over an accident. While it is hard not to feel a certain empathy with the tragedy that is the death of complete strangers, I find it, in one sense, to be a complete over-reaction. Life, and the world in which we live, is still an extremely dangerous place even if we were to be rid of the people that actually, and with malice aforethought, want to do us harm; whether they be armed robbers, rapists, al-Qaida or simply some deranged psychopath who gets his or her kicks from killing and then eating people. When we ourselves actually court danger, it is scarcely little wonder that shit happens sometimes. It is as though we have been so completely cossetted in our sanitary, antibiotic-laden, miracle-cure world that the very prospect of dying before our time, whenever that may actually be, that in the wake of a disaster, we all seem to breathe a collective gasp of astonishment that such things are still possible in the twenty-first century.
I was reminded of this as I watched a film about the 'Challenger disaster' in 1986 based on part of Richard (and Gwyneth) Feynman's book, 'What do you care what other people think? Further adventures of a curious character.' and the part Feynman played in the subsequent Presidential enquiry.
The first thing to take issue with here is the very name, 'the Challenger disaster'; that is how it is known. I am sorry but seven people died, heart-breaking enough for their families and their friends to be sure, but a 'disaster'? Surely the Ethiopian famine of the 1980s was a disaster; the 2004 Asian tsunami was a disaster; the 2008 Sechuan earthquake was a disaster; the 1883 eruption of Krakatoa was a disaster; tens, hundreds of thousands of people were killed. Is it right to exercise such hyperbole when more people can be killed in an average motorway pile-up in fog or in a drive-by shooting than were killed in the Shuttle?
Of course such hyperbole is warranted; the US took such a knock to both its self-esteem as the world's foremost technological nation and, more importantly, to its finely and carefully wrought public relations image as being same that I doubt whether the subs at Fox or CNN or the Tribune or the New York Times even had a momentary glance at a thesaurus or a dictionary to determine if 'accident' might be a more apposite word in the circumstances; at least until the results of the enquiry were known when perhaps 'cock-up' would be more appropriate or perhaps 'the event that summed up all that is wrong with western democracy in its callous disregard for human life at the altar of success.'
In many ways, it was, for the media, almost a perfect 'dry-run' for 9/11 (or for the Brits, 11/9 - I do sometimes wonder whether the tube bombers in London in 2005 (7/7) might actually have chosen that date among so many that they could have chosen to ensure uniformity across media outlets, at home and in the US). The same collective hysteria, the same 'it cannot happen here' mindset, the same collective gasp; the only thing that was different on 9/11 was that there was no Christa McAuliffe to mourn by proxy. Does anybody remember the names of the other six who also paid the ultimate price of that ultimate fleeting adventure?* (In fairness to the Yanks, the Brits are not immune from this sort of behaviour. The gut-churning, cloying, sickly-sweet-smell-of death stench that pervaded the UK in the aftermath of Diana Spenser's death not only rivals the achievement of the Americans but actually surpassed it in all of its wreath-laying, goddess-worshipping, gnashing-of-teeth glory; you really would have thought that we had just been denied the 'second coming' and the 'Kingdom of Heaven' by the paparazzi.)
The film was, as I recall it, a fairly faithful adaptation of Feynman's book with the usual 'embroidered' scenes to give background and character; I have not read 'What do you care....' since it was first published in the UK in 1992. However it is, it must be said, coloured as is the book by Feynman's own views about what science is, and what it means, and by his heady dislike for the politics of a 'Presidential Enquiry'. It is hard to escape the conclusion both in the film, and to a lesser extent in the book, that left to their own devices, without Feynman, the enquiry would have found little to fault NASA with. It is to Bill Graham's credit, the acting Head of NASA following the 'indefinire leave of absence' of James Beggs**, that he, amongst others, persuaded a disinclined Feynman to participate.
The story is too well known for me to have to go into any detail here but two things struck me, and continue to strike me, about both the accident (I refuse to call it a disaster) and NASA behaviour. The first is that it took a theoretical physicist, you know, the people that live on the planet Pluto, sorry, the dwarf planet Pluto, to actually perform the experiment with the 'O' ring and the glass of iced water.*** Despite the fact that they were going into uncharted territory by launching in such extreme conditions, against the advice of the sub-contractor responsible for building the solid fuel booster, no-one had thought to do even the most preliminary test to see if the manufacturer was actually telling the whole truth in their specifications. One of the things that I have learnt in my long years of specifying and testing computer software is that you trust no-one; test everything until it passes or breaks no matter how long it takes, it usually does the latter.
The second issue is that, while Shuttle launches had become somewhat passé as far as the American viewing public were concerned, Christa McAuliffe had changed all of that; the first High School teacher, and a woman to boot, in space; a fact that NASA seemed to ignore. While recognising the pressure that NASA were under, they were seriously underperforming in the delivery of their commitment (in return for an enhanced budget) to Congress and the Department of Defence, not to go the extra mile seems at best imprudent and, at worst, downright reckless. However blasé NASA had become, this was surely a time when everything should have been similar to all of the other missions, otherwise postpone. I would not think of rewriting a long-running play on the evening that the Queen and Prince Phillip were due to attend but that, in effect, by not taking account of the much colder conditions, is what NASA managers did.
In the final analysis, going into space, into orbit, on a giant firecracker, and however many precautions you take, is a risky business; just ask Jim Lovell****. Like driving a car, or riding an aeroplane, climbing a mountain or ski-ing downhill, shit sometimes happens. Get used to it. Often it is no-one's fault, although in general someone has to be held accountable, even if it is not remotely actually their fault; the blame culture is so ingrained in our society that we feel cheated if there is no-one who we can deem culpable.
In one respect, I feel genuinely sorry for Christa McAuliffe, the only member of that crew to be given a personality, a life, by the media. To have worked hard to get your opportunity to do something that few of us would have the chance of achieving and to have it so cruelly dashed by fate a mere seventy three seconds into the flight seems to me to be unduly harsh on the part of God. By all accounts the command module, crew quarters, remained intact throughout the descent and some, at least, of the crew were able to activate the oxygen which meant that some, if not, all, of the crew survived the initial explosion which tore the ship apart. I wonder if Christa, as she fell, in that briefest of time, had the merest glimmer of a thought, which I imagine everyone subjected to the vagaries and vicissitudes of life must at some time succumb: why me, God? Why me?*****
* In case you want to know, and have forgotten, they are: Francis R. (Dick) Scobee (Commander), Michael
J. Smith (Pilot), Judith A. Resnik, Ronald E. McNair, Ellison S. Onizuka, (all mission specialists), Gregory B. Jarvis and Sharon Christa McAuliffe.
** Beggs was accused of 'contract fraud' by the US Department of Defence. Charges were later dismissed by the Attorney General and profuse apologies and 'trebles all round' followed.
*** In which Feyman suspended a section of 'O' ring, suitably cramped - yes, cramped, the tool is called a G-Cramp, not Clamp - and showed that the rubber did not immediately regain its former shape.
**** For those of you too young to remember (and I too stayed up all night for days to watch the coverage), Jim Lovell was mission commander of the ill-fated Apollo 13 mission. Surely, along with Jack Swigert and Fred Haise, the luckiest man ever to have lived. If you have a accident and you cannot fix it at least you have a prospect of someone coming to rescue you; they had none. Only Tsutomu Yamaguchi****** might be considered more fortunate.
***** The absence of any 'rescue' facilities for the crew was surely hubris in the extreme. Even the 'make-do-and-mend' arrangements using old SR-71 'Blackbird' equipment of the first four Shuttle missions might have saved lives.
****** The man caught in the Hiroshima nuclear explosion, 'Little Boy', in August 1945 and who went by train to Nagasaki the following day. He was just in time for 'Fat Man'. He died on January 4, 2010, aged 93.
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