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Jewish World Review August 3, 2005 / 27 Tammuz, 5765 Space Shuttle America By Tony Blankley
http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
As an old space cadet, I continue to follow the missions of the
space shuttle with both hope and foreboding. Its current plight seems to
provide a metaphor, in some ways, for the plight in which the United States
finds itself in the world today.
The Shuttle is the most complex moving machine ever built by
man. Conceived in the 1960s, the current machines are up to 25 years old and
weigh 4.5 million pounds at launch. The program has cost over $145 billion
as of early 2005. It was built with America's typically unrestrained
confidence that it would function virtually flawlessly and with safety for
its crew.
Despite the age of the machines and the technology, no other
people on the planet yet have had the skill, wealth and will to build such a
thing. It is a triumph of engineering to assemble millions of parts into the
necessary complexity that permits the machine to function with only two
failures in a quarter of a century under the extreme pressures of launch,
space, reentry and re-use.
And yet. The safe functioning of this whole magnificent
contraption is, at this writing, possibly threatened by the unintended
extrusion of a few square inches of material from between a couple of
thermal tiles.
Our top aeronautical engineers cannot predict whether such a
small extrusion of material may create wind friction, and thus heat, upon
reentry that might destroy the shuttle on its return to Earth. So, one of
the astronauts has been assigned to take a space walk and try to cut off the
material with a small hack saw — without pulling loose any of the tiles
which might, itself, threaten the mission.
It is ironic that such a complex piece of modern engineering
might have to rely on an essentially bronze age technology — the small hand
saw — for its very survival.
But the essential vulnerability of the shuttle — and perhaps
the vulnerability of our American civilizational enterprise itself — lies
in its very nature. In order to be capable of its massive effectiveness, it
must be complex. But in its complexity is its vulnerability. So many things
must work to keep the leviathan functioning.
Moreover, the growing confidence in our own capacity that
emerged within us as we successfully constructed and launched such a
complex, powerful and wonderful device may have given us the false
confidence that we could continue to operate it indefinitely — and
increasingly on the cheap.
So, too, America since the end of World War II has grown ever
more masterful and dominating on the planet. By the fall of Communism at the
end of the last century, we stood as the colossus of the ages — with a
sense of ineffable safety and mastery of all we beheld.
It was not always thus. While we have always been a strong and
confident country, until the great rise of our affluent middle class after
WWII, millions of Americans lived hard scrapple lives unaided by the
taxpayer's relief. It was only at the culmination of WWII that we came into
our full military domination of the world. And it was only in the last 40
years that we came to assume a college education and health care for
virtually all our citizens who want them. We have come to take for granted
that we can protect ourselves from all dangers and even most inconveniences.
But on Sept. 11, we were disrupted, at least briefly, from our
slumbering dreams of mastery and safety. While the barbaric act was seen
clearly by all, for many Westerners the extent of our vulnerability was
not — and is not — fully appreciated.
The NASA team, caught unprepared once again for the contingency
of catastrophic vulnerability, is forced to improvise with an un-practiced
space walk and with makeshift tools that may or may not fix the problem. All
praise the brave astronauts, but surely unjustified pride, overconfidence
(and under-funding) back at headquarters plays a part in the current space
shuttle danger.
At least the space shuttle fleet can be grounded, if necessary,
after this flight. But we cannot remove America from the dangerous world we
are in.
America should stay in space and we should stay firmly atop the
world we have done so much to make and make civilized: still ambitious but
vastly more wary and attentive to protecting both our magnificently complex
machines and our necessarily complex civilization.
As we cannot return to simplicity, we must diligently learn to
survive in complexity.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in in the media and Washington consider "must-reading". Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here. Tony Blankley is editorial page editor of The Washington Times. Comment by clicking here.
© 2005, Creators Syndicate |
Arnold Ahlert | |||||||||||
