.....NASA, however, is the only one that does so routinely.....
The Space Age Born Of
The Cold War Is Over
The official NASA Columbia STS-1 Lift Off Release.
Spacedaily.com
by Bruce Moomaw
Los Angeles - Feb 02, 2003
Today's appalling Shuttle tragedy proves -- once again -- that manned
spaceflight, at this point in history, is not remotely worth either its
cost or its risk of lives. I say "once again" because virtually any
scientist worth his salt has been pointing out that fact routinely for
decades.
Any skeptic is invited to take a look at what the professional science
journals regularly say on this subject.
NASA has always been warped by the freakish circumstances of its early
development.
The Moon Race was originally promulgated by Vice President Lyndon Johnson
in 1961 (as he told his friends openly) in order to try to pump more
federal money into the South in general and Texas in particular. He managed
-- narrowly -- to persuade JFK to go along (the only subject upon which he
ever seems to have had any significant influence on Kennedy's
administration as Vice President).
Regardless of whether one regards the political goals of the Moon race as
worthwhile, it is unquestionable that -- ever since the Apollo program
ended -- NASA has been frantically trying to maintain the grotesquely
bloated levels of funding it received during those days. It has managed to
do so, by a two-stage process.
First, it has told one deliberate and outrageous lie after another about
the supposed cheapness and utility of first the Space Shuttle and then the
Space Station (overestimates, in both cases and both categories, of over 10
to 1!) in order to narrowly persuade the White House and Congress to
initiate both programs.
As one former NASA official told a "Time" magazine reporter shortly after
the Challenger disaster, regarding NASA's lies to gain initial approval of
the Shuttle in 1972: "We hated to do it, but we were getting SO many votes."
NASA has then resorted, over all the following years, to the time-honored
"camel's nose" technique of methodically raising its cost estimate and
lowering its usefulness estimate for each program by a little each year,
while simultaneously insisting that if Congress didn't go on funding the
program ANYWAY, the money already spent would have been wasted.
As a swindle, this has worked magnificently -- in both cases, by the time
the rubes have finally caught on to the game, tens of billions in
unjustified funding has been pumped into the aerospace-industrial complex.
Ultimately, of course, the game always unravels. The Challenger tragedy was
a direct result of the fact that NASA didn't dare stop launching Shuttles
long enough to fix a whole flock of serious design programs which it knew
existed -- including a problem with the landing brakes even more serious
than the problems with the solid booster O-rings -- because, even by 1986,
it was still desperately trying to continue pretending to Congress that the
Shuttle could be flown at least a dozen times a year at an acceptable cost.
After it finally became impossible to sustain that lie in the wake of
Challenger, NASA switched to saying that the Shuttle program was justified
entirely to support the Space Station (if for no other reason).
The supposed usefulness of the Station itself is a comparable lie which has
been steadily uncovered to a greater and greater degree for the last 15
years or so -- but never quite fast enough for the Station ever to be
canceled (primarily due to its elementary political appeal as pure
home-district pork for Congressmen).
The new tragedy today may change that. At a minimum, it proves that NASA's
post-Challenger estimate of Shuttle safety has been as psychotically
inaccurate as its pre-Challenger estimates -- with both estimates quite
possibly being another set of deliberate lies.
NASA's current estimate has been that the Shuttle has only one chance in
350 of suffering a fatal accident during a launch, and considerably less of
a risk during reentry.
Not quite true. If -- as seems increasingly likely -- the Columbia disaster
was due to detachment of some of its crucial belly tiles, then -- whether
this was actually due to impact by a lightweight piece of debris from the
external tank during launch or not -- it indicates that the Shuttle's
entire reentry thermal protection system is incredibly fragile, and always
has been.
There is also a genuine chance that today's tragedy will turn out to be due
to excessive economizing on Shuttle maintenance and safety programs --
economizing which was criticized, explicitly and at length, by both the
House and Senate Appropriations Committees last year -- in order to make it
possible to continue funding the Space Station, even in some kind of barely
scientifically usable form.
The simple fact is that the average manned spaceflight costs about 10 times
as much as the average unmanned space mission, for much LESS scientific and
commercial return -- and always has.
As President Reagan's science advisor George Keyworth said: "While all
government agencies lie part of the time, NASA is the only one I know of
that does so routinely." The reason is simply that it has far less reason
to exist at anything remotely like its current funding levels than any
other U.S. government agency does.
NASA has been running an gigantic swindle on US taxpayers for at least the
past three decades -- at the cost of about $150 billion in unjustified
spending, and now a total of 14 human lives.
All we can hope for at this point, however, is that the White House and
Congress will finally come to their senses and shut the American manned
space program down, completely, until radical new technology allows massive
improvements in both launch cost and flight safety -- a development which
is at least two decades or so off -- while maintaining (or even increasing)
its spending both on unmanned space exploration and on that development of
aeronautical technology which has supposedly been one of its primary
reasons for existing.
This hope, however, is based on the assumption that the federal government
possesses a significant degree of brains and honesty, which has always been
open to serious question.
_______________________________________________________
John D. Giorgis - [EMAIL PROTECTED]
"The liberty we prize is not America's gift to the world,
it is God's gift to humanity." - George W. Bush 1/29/03
_______________________________________________
http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
