Patrick Ruffini, who by his own admission is no space expert, seems to get it.

What’s more striking about this accident is NASA’s nonchalance, even now, in the face of the Columbia’s known vulnerabilities. NASA wasn’t cutting corners so much as it was accepting these imperfections as a tolerable risk. Their attitude seems to be that even attempting to fix them would have introduced other (equally hazardous) safety and engineering problems; either that, or the cost would be so astronomical as to defeat the purposes of the current Shuttle program, rendering utterly academic today’s debate about whether a 5% increase here or there could have saved these seven lives. Furthermore, claiming NASA knowingly skimped on needed repairs ? and given the caliber of engineering talent working there, it would have to be knowing ? assumes that the agency didn’t even have the autonomy to simply trim back a launch or two and pay for the repairs with that. Indeed, the primary alternative to the budget-cut scenario is potentially more damning: NASA knew about the tile vulnerabilities, and took a calculated risk by not fixing them.

Yup. That’s life, in the non-Oprah world.

If this story is true, the Iraqi army is eager to get on with the war. Their families are being held hostage to get them to fight, and they can’t wait to surrender.

“They are terrified,” said one army captain, clad in a blue beret. “They won’t surrender at the first shot. They will surrender when they hear the first American tank turn on its engine.

“…I don’t think there will be much fighting here,” one UNIKOM captain said during an interview in a coffee shop. “That waiter there looks more together than any soldier I have seen in southern Iraq.”

In response to my NRO piece the other day, in which I wrote:

There are some space missions that will just never be jobs for robots. Building an orbital infrastructure that can both mine useful asteroids and comets, and deflect errant ones about to wipe out civilization, is unlikely to be done with robots. Building orbital laboratories in which biochemical and nanotechnological research can be carried out safely is unlikely to be practically done with robots. A new leisure industry, with resorts in orbit or on the moon, would be pointless, and find few customers, if we weren’t sending up people. Establishing off- world settlements to get at least some of humanity’s eggs out of the current single fragile physical and political basket is not exactly a job for a robot.

Kevin Drum replies, (inexplicably) incredulously:

That’s it? Mining the asteroids? The long-promised pharmaceutical revolution in zero-g? Sex in space?

Well, no, that’s not “it.” Those are just examples. And I don’t know where he got the pharmaceutical revolution in zero-g, or the sex in space. My point about the labs had nothing to do with zero-g. It was that there’s some research that might be too dangerous to perform on earth, and that vacuum makes a dandy firewall.

But the worst part is the final sentence, which I’ve seen repeated over and over: we need to colonize Mars (or whatever) so that humanity will live on in case we blow ourselves to smithereens here on Earth.

There’s really no polite way to put this, but the notion is simply nonsensical. Do space enthusiasts keep writing this stuff because their neurons stop firing before they put finger to keyboard, or is it just that they’ve been saying it for so long that it’s become a habit? Do they have any idea how dumb the proposition really is?

No, Kevin, we really don’t. One of the reasons we don’t is that you don’t even bother to put up any reasons to support your statement that it’s dumb, or nonsensical. You seem to think that it’s so obvious that it requires no explanation, and you think that simply calling it that makes it so. When you’re prepared to actually discuss it intelligently, then perhaps I’ll find your fulminating a little more persuasive.

As absurd, almost parodic as it seems now, by May, if all goes well, Iraq may be exactly the right country to be heading up the UN Conference on Disarmament.

Have any other bloggers been getting a lot of pr0n spam from Warbloggerwatch?

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, Americans are coddled, and take many things for granted.

We get into our cars, and we drive out in the country, or up into the mountains, and we expect to find gasoline, and food at the grocery or general store, and a motel that will have indoor plumbing and bedding for our biological needs. If we’re really adventurous, we’ll not take a car, but instead a motor home, so that we can stock up on food and supplies, and rough it out in the woods for a while.

But when our country was young, out on the frontier, there were no groceries. There were no conveniences. Sometimes, if one went too far over the verge, there weren’t even the basic things that we needed to live, like water. Yet many went out into the wilderness, risking life and happiness, often for no reason than to see what was over the next mountain.

Let’s move back into the twenty first, or even the twentieth century, for a moment, and change the subject slightly (but only slightly, as we will see in a few paragraphs).

When a pilot takes off in an airplane, one of the fundamental things he does before spinning up the propellor and becoming airborne is to check out the aircraft. He walks around it, examining the control surfaces, the pressure in the tires, the fasteners that hold vital wings to critical fuselage. He tests the controls, and verifies that his manual activities result in aircraft response–rudder, aileron, elevator.

Then, he knows that the aircraft is ready for flight, and so is he.

Prior to each flight, the space shuttle undergoes the same procedure, except instead of a simple brief walk around by the pilot, it spends months under the tender ministrations of a division of troops, dedicated engineers and technicians, the “standing army” that claims so much of the cost of the system, to ensure that it is ready for its mission.

But consider: there are three phases to a space shuttle’s mission.

The first is the launch phase, in which it is thrust out into the universe on a huge flaming tail of fire, briefly generating more power than the entire electrical output of the nation. We lost a shuttle during this phase seventeen years ago, and everyone assumed that it was the most dangerous part of the flight.

The second phase is on orbit, in which the astronauts float, ethereally, accomplishing their mission, and the sense of danger is almost nonexistent, and palliated by the serenity of weightlessness and silence of the emptiness of space, and beauty of the earth passing below, once every hour and a half.

The third phase is actually the most dangerous.

In this phase, the vehicle must reenter earth’s atmosphere, and it must slow down by using the friction of that hypersonic air to drag it to almost the halt necessary for it to make final approach to the runway and land. It has an unimaginable amount of energy in orbit, and almost all of it must be dissipated into the thin gases at tens of miles of altitude, and (at least momentarily, until it can cool off) into insulating and heat-absorbing tiles on the hottest portions of the structure, particularly the nose and leading edge of the wings.

The ascent environment, assuming that there are no catastrophic disassemblies of the stressed propulsion systems (as occurred on the final Challenger flight in 1986) is a cake walk compared to the entry, at least as far as the orbiter is concerned.

Yet prior to ascent, engineer spend months refurbishing and inspecting the vehicle, preparing it for launch. In contrast, prior to the much more strenuous descent, after having gone through the rigor of ascent, almost nothing is done, unless there’s an obvious problem indicated by sensors. It is simply assumed that the ground preparation readied the vehicle for the entire mission, and that nothing will occur on orbit to make the return problematic.

Why? Because there’s no capability in the system to do otherwise. There are no facilities in space to inspect, or repair a shuttle orbiter. There are no tow trucks to rescue it if it has a propulsion failure. There are no motels to spend the night if they can’t return on schedule. There are no general stores to purchase additional supplies of food–or air.

Every flight of a space shuttle (at least those that don’t go to ISS) is a flight deep into the wilderness of space, in the equivalent of a motor home on which everything has to go right, because there’s no other way home, and delay is ultimately death, and “ultimately” isn’t very far off.

I’ve written before about the fragility, and brittleness of our space transportation infrastructure. I was referring to the systems that get us into space, and the ground systems that support them.

But we have an even bigger problem, that was highlighted by the loss of the Columbia on Saturday. Our orbital infrastructure isn’t just fragile–it’s essentially nonexistent, with the exception of a single space station at a high inclination, which was utterly unreachable by the Columbia on that mission.

Imagine the options that Mission Control and the crew would have had, if they’d known they had a problem, and there was an emergency rescue hut (or even a Motel 6 for space tourists) in their orbit, with supplies to buy time until a rescue mission could be deployed. Or if we had a responsive launch system that could have gotten cargo up to them quickly.

As it was, even if they’d known that the ship couldn’t safely enter, there was nothing they could do. And in fact, the knowledge that there were no solutions may have subtly influenced their assessment that there wasn’t a problem.

The lesson we must take from the most recent Shuttle disaster is that we can no longer rely on a single vehicle for our access to the new frontier, and that we must start to build the needed orbital infrastructure in low earth orbit, and farther out, to the Moon, so that, in the words of the late Congressman George Brown, “greater metropolitan earth” is no longer a wilderness, in which a technical failure means death or destruction.

NASA’s problem hasn’t been too much vision, even for near-earth activities, but much too little. But it’s a job not just for NASA–to create that infrastructure, we will have to set new policies in place that harness private enterprise, just as we did with the railroads in the nineteenth century. That is the policy challenge that will come out of the latest setback–to begin to tame the harsh wilderness only two hundred miles above our heads.

Tony Andragna has figured it out.

There’s some really great commentary (by my readers, not necessarily by me) in this post, particularly toward the bottom, that may contain the key not to what happened to Columbia, but how NASA fooled themselves into believing that it was going to be OK after they saw the launch video.

Imagine that you’re an engineer at JSC. The Shuttle is up, and there’s no way to bring it back except the way it normally comes back–a hot entry, just as it was designed for. There’s no other way of getting the crew out of it, and there’s no realistic way to get supplies to them to extend their mission to buy time until you can some up with some way to save them. If there’s a problem, you have no realistic options.

Now, you’re asked to make an assessment, in the absence of any data except a launch video showing some insulation hitting the vehicle, as to whether or not the damage could be catastrophic. Others around you, whom you respect, are saying that it won’t be. You have a bad feeling, but you can’t prove anything with the available data.

What do you do? What’s the benefit, given that there’s no action that can be taken to alleviate the problem, in fighting to get people to recognize that we may have a serious problem?

Moreover, suppose that we do believe that there’s a problem.

Do we tell the crew? What can they do, other than make peace with their God and say goodbye to their families? Think about the scene toward the end of the movie Apollo XIII.

“Gene, we think they may be entering a little hot.”

“Anything we can do about it?”

“No.”

“Then they don’t need to know, do they?”

It would make it difficult, if not impossible, for them to perform their experiments, knowing that they may be doomed at the end of it, and much of the results destroyed along with them, so if it turns out to be a false alarm, we ruined the mission.

It’s not hard for me to see how a group of smart people, all in the same situation, could reach a consensus that there’s not a problem.

The real problem is the fact that we send Shuttles off into the wilderness naked, with too few options.

That’s almost certainly tomorrow’s Fox News column.

[Update at 9:10 PM PST]

Dave Himrich agrees, and presciently, he did it on Saturday.

This thread, over on Free Republic, may explain Kim Il Jung’s brinkmanship. He’s desperate, because the regime may be on the verge of falling apart.

Calling Trent Telenko…

Glenn already posted on this, but it’s worth repeating. It’s from a seventeen-year-old high-school student in the Detroit area.

We must achieve the almost impossible to go further then you. To go further then you we have to establish human life beyond the confines of our home. That is a mighty task you have left us with. Hopefully we can do that while finding the solutions to earthly problems in the process. We need a place to go, and we’ll find that place. Then we will go there, with our kids in the backseat (of the spacecraft) asking “Are we there yet?”

People like David are why we have to get it right this time. One generation’s dreams betrayed are enough.

[Via Kathy Kinsley]