Safety Is First; The “Final Frontier” Can Wait

As I write this — and you read it, there are seven brave astronauts who last week joined two others hundreds of miles above Earth. They are conducting experiments aboard a space station to which they’ve flown in their shuttle, after experiencing a journey to which only a few human beings have been privileged before.

Brave; courageous; daring. What might you call these people who are going — pardon the now-cliche — where no man has gone before? These people are certainly of a similar mold as those who decided to prove the world was not flat centuries ago; the same types who gathered their belongings and boarded ships and set sail to new frontiers; to new worlds.

It almost makes it easier to picture the spirit of Lewis and Clark as they set out from Missouri toward the west in the early 1800s because they and Thomas Jefferson felt there had to be more to their little universe; more to be explored; more to be searched, not for wealth or power or subsistence but because it existed . The need inside man for exploration was, and is, a strong emotion that can’t be conquered without feeling it deep inside; without experiencing it.

As Lewis and Clark sought a route to what we now call the Pacific Ocean, so do the space agencies to the farthest reaches of the universe — and that not only means NASA, but the Russian and Chinese and other space agencies as well. It’s a condition of man that compels us to explore the unknown, especially if we know we can do it.

I cannot deny my personal love for what we are doing in space. And I hope you don’t mind if I impart my penchant for things aloft: Having flown from as early an age as possible, I have always been closely attached to flying. If it wasn’t in my blood from birth, then it became an avocation early on. As an air traffic controller at one time, my eyes have continued mystically screening the sky, as if I have been allowed membership in an exclusive club whose members know what it’s like to travel through the clouds at the speed of sound and more. Later, with network news media, I was privileged to have witnessed a few Apollo space shots from Cape Canaveral, furthering my interest and feeding more fuel to my enthusiasm.

When I think of how this current space program is being run, however, I’m afraid I am slightly disillusioned. My first thoughts about the astronauts on the Discovery mission is about their bravery because, frankly, I’m a little scared for them — as they must be themselves. When the Columbia orbiter disaster occurred two-and-a-half years ago, it was found that pieces of foam that had come loose and hit the ship were the culprit of doom.

Last week, when the Discovery took off in that spectacular cloud of thunder, a few large pieces of that foam flew off an external tank. Supposedly it did not hit the shuttle itself, but Mission Commander Eileen Collins was heard to say subsequently, “I thought we had that licked!”

Yeah, she thought so, and I guess everyone else did too. NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, in a television interview, also said he and they — meaning the people who have been preparing this mission since the Columbia tragedy — made a mistake in failing to solve the foam problem.

Made a mistake ? I mean, I saw Griffin on television when he said that! He looked like a little boy who had been caught with his hand in the proverbial cookie jar! It was almost laughable to see this scientist say, in effect, “Aw, gosh, everybody. Ah’m rilly sorry.” He almost looked like he was going to say he promised he would not let it happen again.

Besides the fact that there are people in that shuttle, there were hundreds of millions of dollars being spent on the mission. This should have been fixed before the money was spent and before those lives were put into jeopardy by a lack of competence.

I hope the courage of those astronauts does not blind them from the practicality of the situation and they don’t foolishly try to take the shuttle back to Earth before being absolutely sure they’ll make it. They can be rescued by another shuttle within a month, NASA says.

Meanwhile, that “final frontier” will wait....