Category Archives: History

History, Political Commentary, Space

Twenty-Four Years Ago

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It was my birthday, and the Challenger was destroyed. I have some remembrances of the event, originally posted eight years ago. That was the beginning of the end of the Shuttle program, less than five years after it started flying, though we didn’t necessarily realize it at the time. It was certainly the end of the fantasy that it was going to fly many times a year, and do everything for everyone. In that respect, it was a necessary wake-up call, and it provided the basis for today’s commercial launch industry.

[Mid-morning update]

A lot of memories over at Free Republic.

I don’t recall being as emotionally devastated as many report being, but I think that’s because it didn’t really shock me as much as it did many, who had believed all of the NASA propaganda about how safe the vehicle was. Those of us working on it knew better. The only real surprise was the nature of the failure — we had been betting on either a main engine explosion, or loss of tiles on entry (which did happen sixteen years later). I remember mostly thinking about the policy and (for Rockwell) business implications, and speculating on exactly what went wrong. And of course, I didn’t personally know any of those lost, except for having met Judy Resnik once in the cafeteria when she was visiting Downey.

[Noon update]

Clark Lindsey has more anniversary links.

[Update mid afternoon]

Memories from Miles O’Brien:

At first, I thought it was a cloud. But it was such an odd shape. Kind of like a big “Y”. It was, in fact, the awful scar that loomed off the coast of Cape Canaveral – more than 150 miles away. It seemed to be asking us all a question that to this day offers no easy answers: “Why?”naive-shuttle-concept

As you know, the truth is painful and sad. NASA managers were determined to prove their shuttle fleet was truly “operational” – even commercially viable. If their dreams had become reality, 1986 would have been the busiest year ever in the history of the Space Transportation System.

Fifteen flights were scheduled over 11 months. One was supposed to be the first mission to launch from the new shuttle facility at Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. Nine communications satellites, three classified payloads for the Pentagon and two major unmanned probes were to be carried into space in the payload bay of an orbiter that year.

NASA managers were trying to live up to years and years of their own unrealistic expectations, fanciful claims, pure science-fiction, and outright lies.

So when they discounted and discarded the firm “no-go” admonitions of engineers at the Thiokol plant in Utah where the solid rocket boosters are made, mission mangers team were, in fact, lying to themselves.

In many ways, when they continue to defend the status quo, they still are.

History, Media Criticism, Political Commentary

The War Against Christmas

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…by the Nazis:

“The baby Jesus was Jewish. This was both a problem and a provocation for the Nazis,” explained Judith Breuer, who organised the exhibition using the items she and her mother collected at flea markets over 30 years. “The most popular Christian festival of the year did not fit in with their racist ideology. They had to react and they did so by trying to make it less Christian.”

The regime’s exploitation of Christmas began almost as soon as the Nazis took power in 1933. Party ideologists wrote scores of papers claiming that the festival’s Christian element was a manipulative attempt by the church to capitalise on what were really old Germanic traditions. Christmas Eve, they argued, had nothing to do with Christ but was the date of the winter solstice – the Nordic Yuletide that was “the holy night in which the sun was reborn”.

The swastika, they claimed, was an ancient symbol of the sun that represented the struggle of the Great German Reich. Father Christmas had nothing to do with the bearded figure in a red robe who looked like a bishop: the Nazis reinvented him as the Germanic Norse god Odin, who, according to legend, rode about the earth on a white horse to announce the coming of the winter solstice. Propaganda posters in the exhibition show the “Christmas or Solstice man” as a hippie-like individual on a white charger sporting a thick grey beard, slouch hat and a sack full of gifts.

But the star that traditionally crowns the Christmas tree presented an almost insurmountable problem. “Either it was the six-pointed star of David, which was Jewish, or it was the five-pointed star of the Bolshevik Soviet Union,” said Mrs Breuer. “And both of them were anathema to the regime.” So the Nazis replaced the star with swastikas, Germanic “sun wheels” and the Nordic “sig runes” used by the regime’s fanatical Waffen SS as their insignia.

Housewives were encouraged to bake biscuits in similar shapes. One of the exhibits is a page from a Nazi women’s magazine with a baking recipe: “Every boy will want to bake a sig (SS) rune,” proclaims the accompanying text.

The Nazification of Christmas did not end there. The Christmas tree crib was replaced by a Christmas garden containing wooden toy deer and rabbits. Mary and Jesus became the Germanic mother and child, while dozens of Christmas carols, including the famous German hymn “Silent Night”, were rewritten with all references to God, Christ and religion expunged. At the height of the anti-Christian campaign, an attempt was made to replace the coming of Christ the Saviour with the coming of Adolf Hitler – the “Saviour Führer.”

“We cannot accept that a German Christmas tree has anything to do with a crib in a manger in Bethlehem,” wrote the Nazi propagandist Friedrich Rehm in 1937. “It is inconceivable for us that Christmas and all its deep soulful content is the product of an oriental religion,” he added.

This kind of thing would be a palliative against the historically ignorant who think that Nazism, or fascism in general, is a “right wing” or “Christian” phenomenon. But they won’t read it — it conflicts with what they were taught in government schools.

History

Old Europe

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Really old Europe:

Although excavations over the last century uncovered traces of ancient settlements and the goddess figurines, it was not until local archaeologists in 1972 discovered a large fifth-millennium B.C. cemetery at Varna, Bulgaria, that they began to suspect these were not poor people living in unstructured egalitarian societies. Even then, confined in cold war isolation behind the Iron Curtain, Bulgarians and Romanians were unable to spread their knowledge to the West.

The story now emerging is of pioneer farmers after about 6200 B.C. moving north into Old Europe from Greece and Macedonia, bringing wheat and barley seeds and domesticated cattle and sheep. They established colonies along the Black Sea and in the river plains and hills, and these evolved into related but somewhat distinct cultures, archaeologists have learned. The settlements maintained close contact through networks of trade in copper and gold and also shared patterns of ceramics.

It’s amazing how much we still don’t know about so much.

History, Political Commentary, War Commentary

The Deterioration Of Deterrence

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Thoughts from VDH on the danger of the Obama foreign lack-of policy:

I think we are going to see soon some regional flare-ups, minor in themselves, but terribly important as the world pauses to gauge the US reaction. Syria and Iran feel liberated and think they can act with impunity. Turkey is an emerging regional hegemon. I would not want to be a former Soviet republic—at least if I were consensually governed, pro-Western, and democratic.

If I were in Manila, I’d start learning Chinese; if in Tokyo, I’d think about massive rearmament. I would not wish to be in NATO if east of Berlin—“allies” in the West would (cf. 1939) stay theoretic and distant, enemies would be concrete and proximate.

The survival of Israel now depends on its pilots and missiles, not on any guarantees from the US. In today’s currency, what we guarantee is worth about as much as US treasury bills, or promises of missile defense for Eastern Europe. If I were an Israeli, I’d either pray for the skill and audacity of the nation’s Air Force pilots, or begin cultivating India, Russia, and China, or that and more.

The problem with all this pessimistic view of human nature is that our elite and anointed smirk at it. They seem to say, “Tsk, tsk, we are 21st century Ivy-Leaguers in the postmodern age. The world is no longer like it was in 1914. I explained all this in my latest piece in Foreign Affairs. Cell phones and the World Court are the order of the day, not Neanderthal notions of something called “appeasement””. But does anyone think human nature has changed since the Greeks due to improved diet, or that brain chemistry has altered with video games?

The problem is that the left doesn’t believe in human nature. And when you don’t know, or understand history, and think that Austrians speak Austrian, and that the Americans liberated Auschwitz, it’s hard to learn from it. Again, I’m thankful on this day that we’ll have elections in a little less than a year. I wish they were sooner, though.