Semi-Daily Journal

The problem is, the space shuttle is a fraud, and even those working on it understand that, if they won't admit it...

The fiction is that the shuttle is important for scientific research. But the experiments on columbia (and those in the space station) can be categorized in 3 areas: (A) Autonomous/remotely operated experiments which only return data, (B)Autonomous/remotely operated experiments which need to return product, and (C) Biological experiments on humans and other creatures.

Experiments in categories A and B are best flown on other vehicles, such as a Pegasus booster (capable of flying 1000 lbs into orbit for ~$20M list-price) or the larger Delta, Atlas, and Titan rockets. To risk human lifes when machines can do the job better, when the published odds are ~1 in 1000 of there being a fatal accident (NASA's safety GOAL for the shuttle, practice has been about 1 in 50) is not just reckless, but criminal.

As for category C, these are all predicated on long-duration human space-flight. Yet humans are so expensive to put into space, each requiring several hundred pounds of life support, many hundreds of pounds of protective equipment, food, water, etc, that all serious space-exploration and exploitation will be automated, simply because at $1000/lb or more, adding a ton of extra weight is simply not cost-effective.

Experiments in category C are interesting, but are the results worth the lives, when, barring a revolution in launch technology, the results are not applicable. And if there is a revolution, allowing space-flight at a fraction of the cost, can't those experiments be conducted then?

The shuttle keeps flying to keep Nasa and private contractors in money, and it is justified based on fraudulent scientific claims and the space station, which in a grand feat of circular logic, is justified based on fraudulant scientific claims and the space shuttle.

I've read the entire Washington Post article, and it's fascinating, moving, and sad.

One question it implies is whether the astronauts were doomed because the problem was discovered on a Friday afternoon before a 3-day holiday weekend (MLK Day). Is no one else shocked that the NASA team took all three days off, even when *there was a shuttle in flight that had just taken off two days previously*? I'd have naively thought that they would just forego the holiday and stay at their posts while a shuttle was in the air.

There's also the point about how the team was supposed to meet daily but only met 5 times during the 16-day mission. Have things been this lax for a while? Was this always the standard procedure for shuttle flights? Or was this a new development due to complacency. (The article makes the manager, Linda Ham, sound truly Dilbertian in her desire to downplay the risks posed by the flying debris.)

As to the previous post, I had been told by a knowledgable insider years ago that the idea of the shuttle was sold to Congress on a completely unrealistic schedule of the number of flights per year that it could handle. So that means that the public was misled, and that NASA would always feel like they were under pressure to get more flights into the air. A bad combination.

So, I'd think that this program is over. When the Challenger blew up, we were still fighting the Cold War, so to discontinue any space program would look like a sign of weakness. Now that this pressure is off, I think it will be terminated, and I for one won't be sad to see it go.

I've read the entire Washington Post article, and it's fascinating, moving, and sad.

One question it implies is whether the astronauts were doomed because the problem was discovered on a Friday afternoon before a 3-day holiday weekend (MLK Day). Is no one else shocked that the NASA team took all three days off, even when *there was a shuttle in flight that had just taken off two days previously*? I'd have naively thought that they would just forego the holiday and stay at their posts while a shuttle was in the air.

There's also the point about how the team was supposed to meet daily but only met 5 times during the 16-day mission. Have things been this lax for a while? Was this always the standard procedure for shuttle flights? Or was this a new development due to complacency. (The article makes the manager, Linda Ham, sound truly Dilbertian in her desire to downplay the risks posed by the flying debris.)

As to the previous post, I had been told by a knowledgable insider years ago that the idea of the shuttle was sold to Congress on a completely unrealistic schedule of the number of flights per year that it could handle. So that means that the public was misled, and that NASA would always feel like they were under pressure to get more flights into the air. A bad combination.

So, I'd think that this program is over. When the Challenger blew up, we were still fighting the Cold War, so to discontinue any space program would look like a sign of weakness. Now that this pressure is off, I think it will be terminated, and I for one won't be sad to see it go.

Hear, hear, Nicholas and David. I've been following the space program pretty closely for literally decades (I've written several articles on the implications of the Columbia disaster for the "SpaceDaily" site), and you're completely correct when you say that the entire post-Apollo manned space program is a complete and gigantic fraud going back literally three decades. The details have long since been documented in exhausting detail - and, during his testimony before the Columbia accident board, the Shuttle's 1970s program manager Robert Thompson not only freely admitted that NASA had deliberately told outrageous lies to Congress about the Shuttle's economic viability in order to get it approved -- he laughed while doing so. He thought it was hilarious: "Hell, anyone with any sense knew we were never going to be able to fly it more than 10 or 12 times a year."

As for your puzzlement over NASA's sluggishness in responding to the news that the foam strike might have done serious damage: I think this is a side effect of the fact that NASA has ALWAYS been aware that the Shuttle is an extremely dangerous vehicle, and that it will continue to be an extremely dangerous vehicle no matter what corrections are made in response to the Gaiman report -- and they've therefore become highly fatalistic about the whole thing. The Shuttle cannot ever be made reasonably safe because (A) no launch escape system can ever be installed in it without adding so much weight that it will be able to carry virtually no payload into orbit; and (B) like all winged spaceplanes (and unlike capsules), it's intrinsically and very seriously unstable during reentry -- to spread out reentry heat over a wide enough area of it, it has to reenter belly-first, which is as unnatural as throwing a Frisbee through the air sideways and thus requires constant and instantaneous active attitude control,with no margin for error. (Capsules, by contrast, stabilize themselves during reentry -- a fact which has already saved the lives of several cosmonauts.)

Footnote: "Space.com" now reports (http://www.space.com/missionlaunches/nasa_budget_030823.html) that NASA has just told the White House that -- in order to make the Shuttle acceptably safe OR begin building the "Orbital Space Plane" to succeed it (which may well end up being a capsule rather than a small spaceplane), they'll need $1.8 billion more this year and $20 billion more over the next 5 years. The White House has already told them no. It looks as though NASA has finally reached the crisis point they've been steadily approaching ever since they started lying through their teeth three decades ago. It's just possible that the US will now close down both the Shuttle and the Space Station completely, although the odds are still against it -- as Schiller said, "Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain."

Yes, NASA initially defrauded the politicians on a huge scale, but the politicians subsequently wanted to be lied to.

They never wanted to admit that they had been the enthusiastic purchasers of the grossly oversold shuttle program in the first place, because of the scandal - they chose instead to bury it under more mountains of public cash, hoping the problem would either go away or that enough time would pass that it would no longer be traceable to them.

Note that this strategy actually worked, as it so often does in government: the individuals involved have now mostly retired with their reputations and their pensions intact.

The professional crew members, if the truth be known, have also been complicit. The shameful facts about the true risks and the failure to manage them have been in plain view since at least Feynman's analysis of the Challenger report, and well before that to anyone on the inside who cared to ask a few serious questions and observe the process. They wanted to keep flying even though they knew how dangerous it was.

The only people who didn't know where the voters paying the bills and innocent PR goofs like Christa McAuliffe.

Nicholas Weaver writes about shuttle experiment categories:

> (C) Biological experiments on humans and other
> creatures.

I find this to be one of the more tragic ironies of the whole manned space endeavor. If the only benefit of the manned space program is an ability to do a few exotic biology experiments that really are easiest to do this way, then you should presumably ask the life scientists whether they would like to do these experiments, or instead fund more of the crushingly beautiful research that still goes un- or under-funded by the US. You never get a unanimous response to such questions, but I'd be completely blown away to see more than single digit percentage support for such work given (even a highly-discounted) alternative.

What strikes me as odd about all this is the lack of competent processes in place at NASA to handle this kind of issue. Computer developers, hardly known for producing reliability, have at least settled on mechanisms which (when used) produce results: keep a central issue database, use automated systems to automatically notify those who need to know, and push decision authority down to the levels most able to make the decision. An organization which thinks about safety and reliability does not institute a bureaucracy to determine if there's a problem, it allows the engineer to flag the problem and forces the bureacracy to prove otherwise. If it takes a committee to tell you there's a problem the answer will only come after the fact.

Bruce Moomaw,

I think part of what you said above is overstated.
By your own account on your website, www.spacer.com,
President Richard Nixon, ordered the upper management
at NASA to lie to Congress about their estimates of
the cost of building the space shuttle.

By your own account, Shuttle's 1970s program manager
Robert Thompson was very proud of the fact that the
shuttle had come in on time and on budget, that is
the budget and schedule estimate that NASA originally
prepared and was ready to present to Congress.

By your own account Nixon not only instructed NASA
to lie but also instructed OMB to lie, which knew
the real budget estimate and schedule.

It seems to me that the Space Shuttle program had
a number of problems from early on, but that this
was a serious if subtle one. Once lies have begun
they are hard to stop or untangle. Of course for all
I know this may be the norm in Washington.

Of course, Robert Thompson and others should have
told Nixon to take a hike and publicized what
happened. In the real world that sort of thing
rarely happens. People that might be inclined to
do such a thing rarely make it to top management.

Since Richard Nixon had apparently little interest
in the space program it's even conceivable he did this
with the intention of having it blow up in NASA's
face in the future. Or on the other hand that may
be just paranoid. What's for certain is that
Nixon didn't want to spend any political capital
supporting NASA.

As most people here probably know there's an X-prize
competition running now with a reward of $10 million
for the first team to put a spacecraft up with
a man aboard in space briefly twice within two weeks
before the end of 1994.

There are about twenty groups trying for this. Two
that have caught my attention are:

Scaled Composites: www.scaled.com

and

Armadillo Aerospace: www.armadilloaerospace.com/n.x/Armadillo/Home

I give Scaled Composites better odds of succeeding,
but Armadillo has a completely different approach
and further is giving a detailed blow-by-blow
accounts of their efforts which makes interesting
reading.

It's amazing what small, motivated groups of people
can do.

If NASA were to adopt an adopt an X-prize approach and
set intelligent goals and sponsored competitions rather
than designing and launching space vehicles itself then
that it's entirely likely that within ten years we
would have a diverse earth-to-low orbit capability at a
tiny fraction of what was spent on the space shuttle
program and more importantly the cost per pound launched
would be significantly lower than the most efficient
launch systems today.

Since launching is by far the biggest item in space
efforts this would greatly cut the cost of unmanned
programs and perhaps move manned efforts into a different
domain of practicality.

Unfortunately I think there is only a short window of
opportunity to do this because Social Security and
other entitlements are going to explode federal spending
in the coming decades and pretty soon there isn't going
to be money for anything else.

At the launch costs today our practical use of space
is mostly limited to communication and surveillance
satellites. If we can lower those costs dramatically
then we might among many other things be able to solve
the energy crisis and eliminate the use of carbon dioxide
generating power plants entirely.

Mark: Reread my account (along with the swarms of other, previous accounts of the whole affair by the likes of T.A. Heppenheimer and Alex Roland). NASA had made up its mind to lie long before they got permission from Nixon to do so. And Thompson repetedly confirmed, during that testimony, that NASA's REAL estimate of the time and money necessary to develop the Shuttle was far greater than the estimate they deliberately handed to Congress -- and that NASA officials had no qualms about the fact, and no feelings of guilt about their massive lies. They weren't "pressured" by Nixon into doing anything -- they merely collaborated with him on it.

Moreover, NASA did the same damn thing all over again to get Reagan to approve the Space Station -- that is, they underestimated its cost to an utterly absurd degree, and then started using the "Camel's Nose" technique of raising the cost estimate and lowering the utility estimate for the Station a little each year, while simultaneously telling Congress that if funding for it wasn't continued anyway, the money already spent would have been wasted. As aerospace engineer Heppenheimer points out in his NASA history "Countdown", it's a longtime technique by government agencies to maximize their funding -- but very few agencies do it as egregiously as NASA.

Reagan's science advisor George Keyworth had it right: "All government agencies lie part of the time, but NASA is the only one I know of that does so most of the time." The reason is simple: as a result of the freakish way America's space program got started -- a technological Muscle Beach contest with the USSR -- NASA's funding was grotesquely bloated during its first decade, and like any government agency they've been frantically trying to keep it as close to that artificially and hugely bloated level as posssible ever since. They have less reason to exist at their current funding level than most government agencies, and so naturally have to lie a lot more to stay at that level.

As for your statement that getting launch costs minimized is America's first priority in space exploration, and that a centralized, monopolistic government bureaucracy like NASA is clearly NOT the way to go to do so: I agree with you completely. NASA is one of the clearest examples of "crony capitalism" in America today.

The real mystery is why investigators continue to talk to actual NASA engineers, as if they know anything, when they should be relying on the expert advice of internet posters such as "bakho" who proved long ago that doing nothing was the exact optimal course of action.

You ask

A one-unit difference in stellar magnitude
corresponds to a 2.512-fold difference
in apparent brightness. (2.512 fold?
Why not an e-fold? Why not a
ten-fold? I am told not to ask.)

Nearly two millenia ago, Ptolemy listed magnitudes. A century or two ago, the values
were standardized. 5 magnitudes is a difference in intensity of 100;
hence the base of the logarithm.

Greetings from Hemphill, Texas

You know, the place where the Columbia crew crashed along with tanks of rocket fuel. You would be amazed at the poor job NASA did responding to the hazardous material spill. I was exposed to a tank of leaking rocket fuel, got sick and could never get NASA to see me, much less tell me what was in the tank. The tank was left unguarded for almost two days (even with my pleading to get the site secured) allowing people to take group photos around it. Every time that I checked on the tank during that time, it only had caution tape around it at about fifteen feet, nothing or anybody else. I have been an environmental consultant for over twenty years and have rarely seen such a bad job by a responsible party to a spill. Usually the guys that did this bad of a job were not very smart. I think that the same guys that wrote NASA manual on how to deal with safety concerns must have written their spill response plan. Step one. Pretend that there is not a problem. Step two. Repeat step one. The only action that I can see that they came up on their own was to issue a press release that said to not touch anything. Hardly what you would expect from elite scientist handling one of the most dangerous chemicals known reentering the atmosphere over populated areas.

As for me, I am fine now as far I can tell. But I would like to know what the guy was thinking at NASA when he or she decided to ignore me. I can only assume the reason was to be able to say that no one was hurt on the ground and to not draw attention to the bad performance given by NASA (I have been a vocal critic from day one to no avail). There was a total lack of compassion for the fact was that I had been getting sicker by the day and did not know how long it would last or how bad it would get. I had to find out the hard way that nitrogen tetroxide has potentially lethal symptoms that can initiate more than 72 hours after exposure. For those of you drink too much on occasion, it felt like the worst hangover you ever had a dozen times over, starting about noon everyday (and no I was not drinking). That went on for more than a month. I know that does not sound like much looking back at the big picture, but I was a bit scared. My doctor could not tell me much either not knowing exactly what it was that I had been exposed to. However, I think the worst example of NASA’s spill response was when they failed to inform about a dozen searchers who had all gotten sick from mysterious causes at the same time in the same area, about the potential delayed effects of nitrogen tetroxide. These guys were never (nor was I) even given a MSDS sheet, much less the CDC form made specifically for NASA to give potentially exposed persons. So much for the “right to know laws”.

What bothers me most is that my civil rights had been violated by the government agency that I respected the most. I now have lost all respect for and confidence in NASA. I think that if NASA does not change, then they will suffer the same fate that befell the armed forces after Vietnam. Many, if not the majority of us in the seventies were totally disillusioned by the realization that the federal government lied to support public opinion of a war that had no clear mission (sound familiar). Most of my generation never forgot and the effects still linger on even after a generation.

If you think this is an isolated case in government then research how the EPA lied about the dangers posed by the WTC dust. As I read about how some of the WTC workers now have blood oozing from their noses. I thought first how easily prevented the exposure would have been with adequate respirators, second was that at least the Russians told the Chernobyl clean-up workers of the dangers before they subjected themselves to the radiation. We as a nation did that to those guys and I think we are also capable of fixing it.

If anyone has any knowledge of why I am ignored by NASA, the press, and everyone else, then let me know. Tell me straight, am I trying to make a big to do about nothing, am I stupid, naive or unbelievable and if so, does that justify ignoring me? Can’t stupid people get sick and still get help? At this point, I would just like a public apology from NASA as this whole thing has people thinking I made it up “cause those nice NASA folks who hand out pretty pins to the natives would not treat someone like that”.

I commend those who have seen through the hype without having to be hit upside the head with a leaking tank of rocket fuel like me. Anyway, that is the way it is in the boondocks of Hemphill.

Danny Brashear