A few introductory remarks

I am just finishing a superb, recent (2024) work by author Adam Higgenbothem, titled Challenger: A True Story of Heroism and Disaster on the Edge of Space. It is one of several works that in my opinion comprise essential backstory to NASA’s post-Apollo space flight program and which belong on the reference shelf of any serious advocate of space travel. Perhaps, though, despite the book’s superb readability and documentation, it would have been better titled “Challenger: A true story of man proposing and God disposing”...except that God deserves no blame for Challenger’s destruction; man alone bears full responsibility for this sad episode in America’s ‘race for space.’

The other four books I would strongly recommend to anyone interested in our most relevant and recent efforts to explore the near reaches of space since the United States of America first landed a man on our moon, are The Space Shuttle: A Mission-by-Mission Celebration of NASA's Extraordinary Spaceflight Program, by Roland Miller, Truth, Lies, and O-Rings: Inside the Space Shuttle Challenger Disaster, by Allan J. McDonald, Apollo 1: The Tragedy That Put Us on the Moon, by Ryan Walters, and Comm Check...The Final Flight of Shuttle Columbia, by Michael Cabbage.

Each of these excellent books relates details, circumstances and the greater context of The United States’ three most tragic, modern aerospace misfortunes: 1) The loss of AS-204 (popularly known as “Apollo-1”) in 1967, 2) The loss of the Space Shuttle Challenger (STS-51L) , almost 20 years later in January of 1986, and 3) The fatal disintegration upon reentry of the Space Shuttle Columbia (STS-107), in February of 2003, all of which caused the deaths of no less than 17 American astronauts.

[Note: Challenger was the very first ‘space-worthy’ shuttle (‘ENTERPRISE’ was merely a ‘gliding ‘Proof-of-concept’ vehicle that never flew in space), Columbia was the second built. (Coincidentally they were the two oldest shuttles in NASA’s fleet of five reusable space-mission shuttles.]

The greater story behind these needless but inevitable losses

The larger purpose behind this brief paper is my submission to all of you reading this that noteworthy intellectual Noam Chomsky’s disturbing proposition that the evolution of intelligent life on Earth may actually be an evolutionary mistake (in other words, an accidental miscalculation by Mother Nature in evolving biological life forms on this beautiful blue/green planet we call home) may actually be the truth.

Chomsky’s startling assertion assumes several requisites to be true , frankly. 1) That there is no so-called ‘Supreme Deity’, real or imagined, who orchestrates human affairs from behind a green curtain (a la Wizard of Oz). 2) That there is no omniscient "Higher Intelligence" lurking somewhere beyond our most remote imaginings that deliberately devised, formulated and programmed what we perceive as ‘reality’ (as in a hypothetical quantum computer program of infinite complexity, or the film ‘MATRIX’). 3) That no matter how longingly we self-indulge in imagining ourselves (humanity) to be highly advanced, no matter how wise, logical and/or humane we perceive our species to be, we humans contain the seeds of our own eventual, complete and irredeemably total annihilation within us. In this view, so-called ‘intelligence’ is both a blessing and a curse; a fitting topic for a modern Shakespearian drama.

Chomsky (as do I), joins countless thousands of other reflective thinkers and historians of human development throughout recent times (roughly 1900 or so onwards) and not a few heretical skeptics from previous centuries as well, who feel that no matter what heights of enlightenment, supremely noble and humane ideals and social development we aspire to, sooner or later (likely sooner than we think), some one of us will employ the latest technologically advanced weapons (in our case thermonuclear) against an antagonist in a furious fit of irrational pique...typically due to trivial differences of opinion and/or belief.

When one thinks about the complex issues and consequences lurking within this particularly lethal Pandora’s Box (full to the brim and straining mightily to be released), mindful of our collective track-record of stunning capabilities for intra-species cruelty, brutality and violence, the possibility that Chomsky is right becomes ever more and more plausible with each passing year.

Psychologists such as Sigmund Freud and his confrere Carl Jung

have long speculated about and discussed humanity’s seeming ‘death wish’ (our subconscious, obsessive tendency towards manifesting self-destructive behavior). And to be sure, suicidal or self-destructive behavior on the part of a single individual is one thing, but something far more ominous (such as a deeply sublimated, collective species-specific obsession with death) remains an ill-defined, monstrously portentous possibility that has yet to be quantified to even the least definitive extent. [I bemusedly think here of all the puerile juveniles who wear black Goth or punk-rock clothing adorned with symbols of death and chaos, and regard symbols of death (such as bloody skulls or living-dead ‘zombies’ as super cool. Mindless juvenality about something they understand least (the concept of the eventual end of their lives), being not far from birth as they are, seems to be characteristic of a certain half-baked mindset of callow youth.]

What should instead be recognized by all of us, young or old, is that all human beings are flawed, grossly imperfect and can be utterly, devastatingly unpredictable in terms of almost every aspect of their behavioral affect. And that given this seeming status quo, anything at all that can be imagined may well be attempted at some point, whether supremely beneficial or the polar opposite.

Religionists excuse this unhappy nuance of human life by claiming that while their God (or gods) is perfect, human beings created by (their) God are imperfect replications of their ‘creator’, and that this is a ‘correctible’ or excusable flaw that may be mostly overcome through adherence to a codified set of moral beliefs and ethical behavioral standards handed down by their god or his/her/its divine messenger (e.g. as in the case of Christian ‘Ten Commandments’, Christian Bible and so forth, for instance).

Atheists and trenchant agnostics reject this belief scornfully and categorically, regarding such convictions as hopelessly sophomoric and emotionally primitive, attributing the inherent good/bad Yang/Yin of human behavior to a range of possible causes (low-intelligence, whimsy perhaps, ignorance or on a much deeper level, failure of one or more of the supposed laws of natural selection), but none having any ‘divine’ associations.

I myself am in the latter category, being a life-long non-believer, and although somewhat taken aback when Chomsky delivered his famous opinion on humanity’s narcissistic claim to be Earth’s highest evolved ‘sentient, intelligent life form’, I was quick to recognize the ominous irony of his likely being absolutely correct!

So how does the Space Shuttle Challenger’s loss tie into all of the above?

Returning to Higgembothem’s fascinating chronology of the events that led to the loss of the STS-51L mission vehicle in 1986, and to his allegation that the shuttle’s loss was principally attributable to misplaced priorities, consider this: That NASA weighted ephemeral human relations (AKA: public relations) concerns over rational engineering prudence, with regard to the decision made to launch (or not) on 28 January 1986. As such, he makes an extreme well-documented and in my opinion almost inarguable case that lives were needlessly sacrificed due to institutional pressure to press ahead with a mission that hard, factual evidence had amply demonstrated would almost certainly end up in disaster. In other words, despite the risk factor for catastrophic failure of the boosters being exponentially high, perceived ‘national prestige’ aesthetic rationales trumped proven scientific evidence of pending doom.

In Higgenbothem’s compendious work (500 pages or so), the evidence he presents is compelling, in that despite all the complex and sophisticated engineering that had gone into the shuttle and its launch components, an ‘explained away’ but fatal flaw in the solid rocket booster design almost assured that at some point, a calamitous booster malfunction would trigger not just a vehicular malfunction, but a fatally catastrophic and unsurvivable one.

The problem of the shuttle’s rocket booster’s integrity

As Higgenbothem carefully explains, when the shuttle system was first conceived in the late 60s, liquid-fueled rockets were the industry norm for all orbital vehicles launches. Liquid-fueled vehicles, which use a two-component fluid mix of fuel and oxidiser, had been in use for decades, proving to be highly reliable (for the most part) by countless studies and decades of successful launch experience. They also had the important benefit of being ‘throttleable’ (read: controllable). That is, their combustion could be controlled much the same way a car’s accelerator adjusts speed, to either increase or decrease combustion rates (or even shut-down completely upon command) at the option of the operator (in the shuttle’s case, the mission’s pilot).

Solid fuel rockets, on the other hand, while relatively new, were much less complex and far cheaper to devise, produce and use than their liquid-fuel counterparts. However, they were not throttleable and once ignited, would instantly build to maximum thrust and stay there until completely expended. This aspect of solid fuel rocket performance raised serious safety red-flags among many engineers, given that solid fuel rockets used to launch non-crewed vehicles (such as guided missiles and satellites) when failing, resulted only in loss of the hardware payload, but given the potential for possible loss-of-life situations when the payload was human that they posed, they were exponentially more risky. In the end, cost factors exerted disproportionate influence on the shuttle design team’s decision to go with the solid boosters, given the enormous fiscal sums already invested in producing a reusable space shuttle system.

It helps to remember that America was at that time coping with the late 60s social protest movement, as well as the horrifically costly ‘Vietnam War.’ NASA was under already operating on a tightly constrained budget. Added cost variables (posed by development of a safer liquid-fuel booster) were not welcomed.

Given the huge dimensions and proportions of solid fuel boosters needed to launch heavy space vehicles, the shuttle boosters were necessarily large (several hundred feet tall in some cases) in terms of length and width. This required that they be manufactured in sections joined together, rather than produced in one single, fully integrated, tubular configuration.

The space shuttle’s boosters were thus built in sections that used two different types of casing joins: one type that was called a ‘plant join’ (a join made in the factory) and another join called a ‘field join’ (or a join assembled in the field...at the launch site). Both types of booster casing joins utilized somewhat similar techniques but the ‘field joins’ had been designed from the outset to use two polymeric ‘O-rings’ (a so-called ‘primary’ and a ‘secondary’ or backup ring) in that casing join process...both fabricated from a dense polymeric material called Vitron.

[Surprisingly, the shuttle Vitron O-rings were virtually identical to O-rings already in use in existing engines and other mechanical systems, in terms of their formulation.]

Given the extremely high pressures (+1000 PSIG or more) that developed in the rocket casings immediately upon ignition, and the equally high (if momentary) temperatures (+5000 degrees F. or so) produced, it was crucially important that all of the rocket casings join seals not leak, since even the slight, smallest leak would result in likely loss of the vehicle the boosters were attached to.

A leak of this sort is exactly what caused the loss of Challenger, of course, when the immense heat & pressures of launch overwhelmed the casing join on the right rear booster, burning through both O-rings used on that join and sending a jet of intensely hot jet of flame into the shuttle’s central Hydrogen/Oxygen fuel tank, exploding it just 72 seconds into the STS-51L launch on 28 January 1986.

Higgenbothem’s book examines in great detail

how the boosters were designed and engineered, of course, and also exhaustively documents the fact that there was very early, compelling evidence after the first few STS launches that potentially catastrophic leaks of this very type were occurring in booster joins.

After each successful shuttle launch, the recoverable boosters were retrieved from the ocean and subjected to exhaustive examination. In almost a dozen or more instances, signs of critical ‘burn-through’ of crucial join-seals were found and some of the shuttle engineers regarded this as a possibly calamitous flaw that required correction before the shuttle could be truly considered safe for human space-flight. They estimated that the risk factor for complete shuttle destruction was literally ‘off-the charts’ and reported this finding numerous times to the NASA management team. Furthermore, tests conducted on the booster Vitron seals demonstrated that while a launch under reasonably warm weather conditions might minimize the possibility of booster seal failure, a launch under unusually cold conditions (such as had occurred during Challenger’s 1986 flight, with ambient cold of 23 degrees F.) increased the risk of seal blow-by failure by an order of magnitude, and yet pressure to launch the shuttle after numerous delays and launch scrubs was so great that once again, the risk factor was downplayed to ‘manageable’ by NASA’s top decision makers.

Despite all of their evidence and despite the mounting evidence that a shuttle loss was almost certain in the near or immediate future, NASA‘s highest shuttle management officials, bowing to intense pressure from the Administration to certify the reusability of the shuttle system and get it ‘on-line’, considered the ‘catastrophic failure’ possibility and dismissed it as merely a ‘manageable risk.’

It was this feckless (and irresponsible) attitude of ‘press-on-regardless’ by management (and human relations people), despite the intense, implicit risk, that resulted in Challenger’s loss, as Higgenbothem’s investigations clearly and irrevocably demonstrate. Simply put: HUMAN FAILURE figured at the core of the matter.

Seventeen years later, in 2003, the shuttle Columbia was lost.

The second catastrophic loss of a shuttle occurred 17 years later, although this time, Mission STS-107’s loss was caused by a large chunk of main liquid-fuel tank external foam insulation hitting the right leading edge of the shuttle’s wing during lift-off, the possibility of both ice coming loose from the support gantry or foam insulation from the shuttle central external fuel tank and striking it (causing severe damage to the craft’s leading wing edge). Remarkably (viewed in hindsight), this structural damage (in a high-heat-of-reentry part of the craft) was regarded as ‘unlikely’ to be the cause for excess worry about another possible catastrophic vehicle failure. This was a second case of ‘manageable risk’ status assigned to that incident owing to bureaucratic pressures to get the shuttle launched without further delay.

It is therefore not strange that, given all of these ‘near accident’ situations on previous shuttle flights, shuttle vehicles had almost been destroyed on launch at least several times after Challenger, and prior to Columbia’s flight!

36 years before Columbia’s loss

Ironically, some 36 years earlier, when the North American Rockwell built Apollo AS-204 (Apollo-1) capsule was being ‘live’ pressure-tested on the launch pad with its crew inside, a sudden electrical short circuit within the pressurized 100% oxygen mix capsule resulted in the fatal loss of all three astronauts (Grissom, Chaffee and White) on 204’s crew.

A comprehensive review of that fatal accident (which my friend Doctor Fred Kelly helped write) revealed that a combination of poor design, faulty electrical systems, and ill-considered use of highly flammable materials (such as Velcro, which is easily ignited) within the capsule had precipitated the fire. Further, faulty design components, such as the capsule’s inward opening hatch (which required several minutes to operate) were also implicated.

Most or all of these factors were entirely avoidable, had North American, which was also under intense pressure to deliver their Apollo crew vehicle for immediate use, not succumbed to human relations/public relations prompting to ‘get ‘er done’ in combination with unyielding upper management pressure to place prestige over human safety factors in Apollo. This same set of circumstances obtained principally in all three of NASA’s tragedies! In other words, the same mistakes were made over and over, throughout our space program from the 1960s onwards! In light of this, it’s a miracle that we only experienced three major deadly mishaps. [Apollo-13 was certainly also a near-miss, had it not been for human ingenuity and resourcefulness on both ends of the mission!]

But the above is merely a recapitulation

of the principal elements that resulted in the needless and avoidable sacrifice of astronaut lives for the sake of national and corporate prestige in all three of these separate but related catastrophes.

My point in covering all this ground (aside from recommending Higgenbothems’ excellent book to you) anew is two-fold: First, human beings tend to be far too overconfident of our species’ intelligence and cleverness, an arrogant presumption that flies in the face of centuries of human fallibility, carelessness, ignorance, ego and overweening, grossly flawed self-regard. It is therefore a recipe for repeated failures in the face of immense technological undertakings such as the shuttle, especially when the technology being used is still relatively complex, new and to a great extent not yet fully proven.

It is no exaggeration to relate that, speaking of new and not completely proven technology, the shuttle was breathtakingly complex, consisted of over 200 million individual parts, components and intricately interacting constituent elements! When one is dealing with complex, crewed systems of that sort, disproportionate (‘manageable’) risk factors, intricately complex constituents, but especially bureaucratic pressure to label the full value of human life with a lessened expediency, leave no margin of safety left to hedge chances of success with any certainty!

Second, the flawed human thinking (which is often emotionally volatile) behind all of these oversights is hard-wired into our race, we ‘imperfect’ replicas of someone’s primitive god, and if a catastrophe exists even as a calculable ‘remote possibility’, the odds of risk management backfiring cataclysmically become incalculably astronomic!

I often flail out at America’s corporations,

at the corporate manipulations of consumer reality in our daily lives that are unconscionably contrived to skew things in their favor or con us ‘consumers of mass quantities’ into believing their ideological propaganda and substitute realities, whether common sense tells us it is 99.9% bullshit or not!

You’ll have to forgive this tendency of mine but I’m sure many of you are now accustomed to it! Believe me, the massive processes we are daily exposed to are colossal and largely irresistible. Especially so when these commercial (marketing) efforts are powered by hundreds of billions of dollars of corporate money to deliver the goods (read: get us to consume ever-greater amounts of wretched dreck and materialistic excess).

When the audience being addressed is somewhat less reflectively intelligent that the smarter animals in our herd (as is the case with America’s mainstream media treatment of the TV-viewing public as only slightly less-intelligent than slime mold), you can be sure that most of our fellow-herd members shall remain fat, dumb and happy without the least clue they’re being mercilessly exploited, each and every day, by the corporate wolves in sheep’s clothing.

Regrettably, getting the word out to our fellow ‘sheeple’ to pause and ruminate reflectively and critically about the life they are being told they need to live by P.T Barnum’s wealthy descendants is hopelessly complicated by such things as social media (that now consists mostly of young, buff and handsome individuals who are being paid to ‘influence’ the less-bright members of society), as the internet is progressively taken over by Barnum’s understudies!

Personally, I’ve given up trying to get people to ‘wake up’

and smell the bullshit they're daily wading through. But if I didn’t keep bringing this subject up, I’d probably go join the Lemmings lined up in an orderly queue to leap over the nearest seacliff, so thanks for your forbearance! Just remember the Socratic wisdom that reminds us that “The unreflective life is not worth living”; but let me modify that famous aphorism slightly by saying that “The unreflective life is infinitely WORTH living, but only when it isn’t being spoon-fed to us like geese forced to ingest pate foie gras in America’s perverse version of Orwell’s 1984!”

PS: “Wake-up” is neither synonymous nor compatible with “WOKE”, but you knew that, didn’t you, you smart thing, you!

The final word:

All of my personal observations, studies and field notes, taken over a period of more than 75 years suggest that Noam Chomsky’s expressed opinion (about our self-assumed, grossly presumptive ‘highest evolved, sentient life form’ status) is sadly, tragically true . We very likely ARE an evolutionary mistake, at least until otherwise demonstrated.

I’d be inestimably delighted to have anyone provide me with documentary evidence to the contrary, of course, but meanwhile I’ll continue to schmooze around with my Equus Asinis buddy EEYORE and keep my bookshelves well-stocked with recreational references by Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Aurelius, Socrates, Celine, and Lao Tzu (among others). As for Higgenbothem’s wonderful book on the Challenger accident, buy it and read it! It’s one of those rare ‘can’t put it down’ reads that skillfully merge factual, well-researched documentation with undeniably excellent writing craftsmanship and it’s also just plain enjoyable as hell, if you’re an enthusiastic space travel advocate such as moi!

What’s the take-away here? The Challenger catastrophe isn’t a fluke or a rare instance of human fallibility! It’s the poster child of all of humanity’s history on this beautiful but grievously abused bit of star dust we Humming Beans inhabit (temporarily, I am convinced)...

Noted physicist and iconoclastic intellectual Richard Feynman, who was a key member of the post-accident investigation commission, memorably summed up our human tendency to indulge in undue overconfidence in our technological advancements when he said: "For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled..."

----------------------------------

[Note:

During my own career in medical areas of technology, one of my nicknames was “The High-Grade Chimp” (another was Eeyore, but don't tell anyone!). The illustration accompanying this article is AI-generated, in case anyone wonders, but the allusion to chimpanzees in space, if perhaps unfairly insinuative with regard to the shuttle program, is still instructional, since after all, the shuttle was designed and constructed by slightly ‘higher-grade’ chimps' (in a certain context), and the very first American astronauts actually were chimps... The use of this illustration is not meant in any way to belittle or disparage the raw courage of the shuttle crews, who were taking their lives in their hands each time they flew on that flawed behemoth (nor should it be construe d to demean our Simian relatives, LoL!)]