The Challenger

This extended excerpt is from my post of January 29, 2009:

In Memoriam.

There are a thousand ways to remember tragedy.

I remember the Challenger in several, discrete episodes one of which I’ll go into after this by Danny Miller from the Huffington Post, who recalls that day like so:

Touching the Face of God: Remembering the Challenger

What baby boomer wasn't obsessed with the space program? As a kid growing up in the 1960s I followed every Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo launch with enthusiasm and wonder and created scrapbooks of the missions. Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were cultural icons in my childhood the same way Elvis and the Beatles were.

…

I can't remember a news event that affected me so viscerally before or since. I couldn't even imagine the grief that the families and friends of the astronauts experienced as they watched the live broadcast of their loved ones' completely unexpected and terribly violent deaths.

…

That’s not a bad take on how Challenger felt to a lot of us.

Why, on 9/11, the only emotionally analogous memory I could dredge up to frame the nightmare I was seeing was from that day -- January 28, 1986 -- when this passionate son of the Space Age saw the most complex machine ever built by man, sailing into the stratosphere with the most “American” crew it had ever borne, blown to atoms, live and in color.

But I also remember another, later chapter of that catastrophe.

A specifically and contemptibly political chapter.

See if this doesn’t sound appallingly familiar:

A Republican Administration which, for grubby political ends, decides to do something incredibly dangerous and reckless.

To get what they want, Administration heavies lean hard on the Department charged with assessing the risk of their endeavor. They make it clear that “The President Wants This!” and that the consequences of not find a way to "Yes" may be very unpleasant.

In response, the men at the top -- The yes-men. The politically-sensitized careerists and bureaucrats -- steadily whittle away at every rationale underpinning each of the risk assessments. Insisting that the engineers frame each scenario in the most “optimistic” possible terms.

In other words, Pure Fucking Cheney-Think: that incessant thugging-down of every cautionary voice as somehow disloyal or harebrained, and the relentless amping-up of any data, not matter how wispy and wishful, that helps to spin a happy tale of glory and triumph.

In short order, the engineers who actually know what the risks are, are pushed aside, ignored or beaten into equivocation. Which, if you don’t have a conscience and have the authority to screw someone out of their career, is really not hard to do. You pick, and pick, and pick until the experts admit they cannot say with 100% certainty that your insane idea will end in ruin.

Of course they can’t.

Unknowns multiplied by unknowns multiplied by still other unknowns make for a predictive model which can be shot to sunshine if you are an ideologue hell-bent on seeing only what you want to see. If you are the kind of freak who absurdly insists that science must either be a flawless seer of what-is-to-come...or it's just "opinion" in which case isn't one opinion just as valid as another?

It was on this contemptible corruption of science that Big Tobacco was built, and that Global Climate Change is still dismissed as "unproven" by agenda-pounding wingtards.

And because no one can predict the outcome of unknowable events with perfect certainty, once the wormy shits from the Big House on Pennsylvania Avenue can bully the analysts into admiting any element of doubt exists, they then have all the room to maneuver they need.

And so, against the consensus advice of their experts but with the consent of their appointed lackeys -- their own pet "Heckofajob" Brownies and Bremers -- the Reagan Administration threw Challenger into the sky and killed it.

I supposed the single, merciful fact that philosophically separates the Shuttle Disaster from the Iraqi Disaster is that once the Challenger exploded -- once the debris fell into the ocean -- no one could continue to cling to the belief that the Challenger Mission could still somehow be salvaged – that “Victory” could still somehow be achieved -- by pouring more money and lives down that rat hole.

But other than that, the parallels roll right down the same, predictable, disgraceful track.

After the failure came the parade of experts. All in impressive uniforms, bulwarked by impressive credentials. All spewing highly technical doubletalk specifically designed to make the non-experts feel stupid and silly.

In other words, spouting bullshit calibrated to make anyone who was not suited up in a NASA-issue lab coat and blessed by the Administration that dared to venture a harsh question or skeptical opinion feel like an idiot.

Feel like they were somehow besmirching the brave sacrifices of our noble astronauts.

Is this sounding at all familiar?

And they may well have gotten away with it if it weren’t for this guy.


Richard Feynman: A physics genius with that rare, mentor’s gift for communicating the often exotic intricacies of the scientific world with admirable plainness and clarity.

It was Feynman who, during the hearing -- live and on-camera -- used the simple props of a C-clamp, a glass of ice water and a chunk of O-ring material to demonstrate irrefutably that the stuff they used as gaskets on the shuttle would fatally lose its elasticity when the temperature fell below freezing.

Period.

Who wrote this in his appendix to the “Roger's Commission Report on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident”.

(emphasis added)

"It appears that there are enormous differences of opinion as to the probability of a failure with loss of vehicle and of human life. The estimates range from roughly 1 in 100 to 1 in 100,000. The higher figures come from the working engineers, and the very low figures from management....

“Finally, if we are to replace standard numerical probability usage with engineering judgment, why do we find such an enormous disparity between the management estimate and the judgment of the engineers? It would appear that, for whatever purpose, be it for internal or external consumption, the management of NASA exaggerates the reliability of its product, to the point of fantasy.”

...

“There was no way, without full understanding, that one could have confidence that conditions the next time might not produce erosion three times more severe than the time before. Nevertheless, officials fooled themselves into thinking they had such understanding and confidence, in spite of the peculiar variations from case to case.”

“Official management, on the other hand, claims to believe the probability of failure is a thousand times less. One reason for this may be an attempt to assure the government of NASA perfection and success in order to ensure the supply of funds. The other may be that they sincerely believed it to be true, demonstrating an almost incredible lack of communication between themselves and their working
engineers.

“In any event this has had very unfortunate consequences, the most serious of which is to encourage ordinary citizens to fly in such a dangerous machine, as if it had attained the safety of an ordinary airliner. The astronauts, like test pilots, should know their risks, and we honor them for their courage. Who can doubt that McAuliffe was equally a person of great courage, who was closer to an awareness of
the true risk than NASA management would have us believe?

"Let us make recommendations to ensure that NASA officials deal in a world of reality in understanding technological weaknesses and imperfections well enough to be actively trying to eliminate them. They must live in reality in comparing the costs and utility of the Shuttle to other methods of entering space. And they must be realistic in making contracts, in estimating costs, and the difficulty of the projects.

"Only realistic flight schedules should be proposed, schedules that have a reasonable chance of being met. If in this way the government would not support them, then so be it. NASA owes it to the citizens from whom it asks support to be frank, honest, and informative, so that these citizens can make the wisest decisions for the use of their limited resources.

For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.”

Substitute "White House" for "NASA" and "Iraq" for "Challenger", and if Richard Feynman were alive today and making the same kind of clear, rational observations he would be flogged as a traitor on Fox, or as a terrorist-sympathized in the Wall Street Journal, or as a disloyal American who refuses to support the troops by Tony Snow.

Every Fucking Day.

There are a thousand ways to remember tragedy, and I can’t think of any way sadder than to realize that that subspecies of Rodenta Republicana Americanus whose political hubris and contempt for science authored the Challenger tragedy have, over the years, proven themselves time and again to be uniquely incapable of learning a single god damned thing from their own failures.
...

To which I have nothing to add, except this clip of Richard Feynman

destroying NASA's bullshit cover story using a few, simple props in under one minute.