Taking Up Space
by Mickey Z.
Dissident Voice
February 2, 2003
Within 24 hours
of the Columbia Space Shuttle accident, NASA made three announcements worth
examining. On Sunday, February 2, as reported by AP writer, Pam Easton,
"NASA warned members of the public Sunday against trying to sell purported
Columbia debris on eBay, as local law enforcement agencies struggled to cordon
off and protect the hundreds of pieces of wreckage."
"People
should not be collecting that at all. It's all government property," warned
NASA spokesman Bruce Buckingham, but he was too late. On Saturday, listings for
pieces began appearing on eBay.
"We live in
an evil world, and there are people that will do those types of things,"
Buckingham said, claiming to be "stunned."
I certainly have
no desire to defend those who may or may not have tried to sell alleged
wreckage debris, but I couldn't help but remember that, besides studying the
effects of weightlessness on spiders, fish and silkworms, one of the
"scientific" experiments conducted on Columbia's final mission, was the
development new products ranging from paints to perfumes...stuff to be sold
(maybe even on eBay).
And how about
NASA and our culture at large? Won't they, in the name of American values and
the continuation of the space program, readily "sell" this tragedy to
us? The Sunday press was filled with early examples of spin:
"These
brave astronauts died for all humankind," Daniel Ayalon, the Israeli ambassador
to US said, before adding: "This event has galvanized the two countries
together. We have full trust in NASA."
The Rev. Mike
Weaver of the All Saints Evangelical Lutheran Church in Columbus, Ohio, said
the doomed shuttle crew had touched "the face of God."
Daniel Salton,
brother of mission specialist Laurel Clark said his sister was "a great
role model for kids," proving "you can do great things for humanity
if you just set some small goals and always go for the next thing and set your
sights higher."
Dubya himself
declared, "The crew of the shuttle Columbia did not return safely to
Earth, yet we can pray that all are safely home," before attending Mass at
St. John's Church near the White House where the Rev. Luis Leon laid down the
hard sell:
"We grieve
because they represent the best in us, a part of which has died," Leon
said. "God's heart is more heartbroken than our own, and I believe they're
already resting."
Leon said he had
heard some who believed the shuttle's disintegration was "God's way of
getting back at us" for Bush's Iraq policies. "I don't believe in
that kind of God," he assured our president. "That's hokum. That's
just garbage." The Columbia's destiny, Leon told the congregation, was
"the price for our freedom."
But the ultimate
commodity being sold is NASA's very existence. Rep. Dana Rohrabacher,
R-Huntington Beach, chairman of the House space subcommittee, said: "We're
going to correct the mistakes...but, we have to know that space policy has got
to come off the back burner. Space policy for the last 10 years hasn't been
given the attention it deserves."
"I hope it
won't impair public support for the program," said David Hyland, chairman
of the University of Michigan's Department of Aerospace Engineering. "If
we really want to be a space-faring nation, we've got to ante-up."
"Our
journey into space will go on," President-Select Bush concluded.
Another product
we'll be asked to purchase came in the second announcement: safety through US
technology. The New York Times reported that the space agency "spent tens
of millions of dollars improving safety after the Challenger accident,"
and has "estimated the risk of a calamitous event on re-entry as 1 in
350." Also from the Times came the NASA estimate that the "risk of disaster
in any given shuttle flight is about 1 in 145, or 99.3 percent."
But, as
journalist Karl Grossman reminds us, "Before the Challenger accident, NASA
based the likelihood of a catastrophe at 1 in 100,000. The came the Challenger,
and now it's 1 in 74. [It] just shows how ridiculous these claims by NASA
are."
Grossman has
written extensively on nukes in space, i.e. an October 1997 launch from the
Kennedy Space Center in Florida of the Cassini space probe with 73 pounds of
plutonium on board. For those of you just tuning in, plutonium is rather
deadly. Called "the most toxic
chemical known to science" by Michio Kaku, a professor of Theoretical
Physics at the City University of New York, less than one-millionth of a gram
of plutonium-an virtually invisible particle-is a carcinogenic dose. According
to Dr. Helen Caldicott, "one pound, if uniformly distributed, could
hypothetically induce lung cancer in every person on Earth."
A capricious
scenario, you say? Not when you consider that the Russians have a fifteen
percent failure rate with nuclear payloads and the US has already launched
twenty-four devices carrying nuclear material into space and three have met
with accidents. This includes the infamous Apollo 13, although the nuclear
factor was conveniently omitted from the Ron Howard/Tom Hanks film spectacle.
Which creates a
nice segue for one last NASA announcement. Mission control in Houston said on
the day of the accident, "Any debris that is located in the Dallas-Fort
Worth vicinity should be avoided and may be hazardous."
Apparently,
poisonous rocket propellant was the main concern as "debris smashed
through a roof, splashed into a reservoir and dropped amid farms, homes and
businesses," Easton wrote. Some 70 people in Nacogdoches County, Texas had
gone to two hospitals because they had touched debris and were worried. Will
there soon be a Columbia syndrome?
Thank to its
so-called "Mission to Planet EARTH," NASA has gained a reputation as
a tree-hugging oasis within an arid governmental desert. For example, a 1993
shuttle Discovery mission was designed to "study the ozone layer."
However, there is one small detail that those kooky space kids at NASA tend to
omit: The National Toxics Campaign has reported back in 1993 that three space
shuttle launches release as much ozone-destroying chlorine into the atmosphere
as DuPont-the single largest industrial producer of chlorofluorocarbons
(CFCs)-generates in a year.
When one
considers the military role of NASA, the environmental façade becomes
laughable. A 1998 report, "Vision For 2020," outlines the US military's
plans to control space. "It's politically sensitive, but it's going to
happen," explained US Space Command Commander-in- Chief Joseph W. Ashy.
"Some people don't want to hear this, and it sure isn't in vogue, but--absolutely--we're
going to fight in space. We're going to fight from space and we're going to
fight into space.... We will engage terrestrial targets someday--ships,
airplanes, land targets--from space."
"Not only
are there to be weapons in space," adds Karl Grossman, "but they will
likely need nuclear power as their energy source."
Is this news to
you? That's probably because the corporate media would rather report on brave
astronauts and scientists paying the price for freedom than a
taxpayer-subsidized militarization of space. "Military space policy is a
media wasteland," says Loring Wirbel, communications editor of Electronic
Engineering Times. "I think part of it has to do with a lot of editors
thinking Americans like being Number One, like being the bully, so no one
should raise the ethical questions involved in that."
Perhaps the
greatest legacy of the fallen Columbia crew could be some of us taking a closer
look at NASA and beginning raising those ethical questions.
Mickey Z. is the author of The Murdering of My Years: Artists and Activists Making Ends Meet (www.murderingofmyyears.com) and an editor at Wide Angle (www.wideangleny.com). He can be reached at: mzx2@earthlink.net.