> Give it a rest, James. You didn't even get the name of the shuttle right. It was the shuttle Columbia. Challenger blew up in '86. The conflation is fairly telling, given what we know about the crass stupidity and greed that caused the previous calamity. If I were a Freudian, I'd say that you doth protest too much. Like the student of mine who once told me, when making an excuse for an absence, "My grandmother lied, er, I mean, died." "It was Challenger, that great emblem of Boeing's greed and state stupidity, er, I mean, unbidden scientific exploration." God save the Queen.
Since I never hesitate to disagree with James, let me defend him on this one.
Yes, because it was a short post, he elided some of what comes from a space program in our current horrid system. It is used for the military. It is underfunded; and some of what is allocated is wasted. Probably a lot if it goes to inefficient and evil contractors. Possibly safety requirements are not paid sufficient attention or sufficiently funded and critics who point this out ignored. But you know, worse things can be said about our health care system. Even the harshes critics of our health care system want a different better health care system, not to eliminate health care. Similarly critics of our space program may have good arguments for running it differently; but I think there is not good argument against having a space program.
A friend mine, Joseph Conat puts it much more eloquently than I can:
> Aimee decided we would watch selected episodes of From The Earth To The Moon, detailing and dramatizing the Apollo space program that took us to the first man on the moon. And it occurred to me that the space program is a miracle.
>
> Merriam-Webster's defines a miracle as:
>
> Main Entry: mir·a·cle
> Pronunciation: 'mir-i-k&l
> Function: noun
> Etymology: Middle English, from Old French, from Late Latin miraculum, from Latin, a wonder, marvel, from mirari to wonder at
> Date: 12th century
> 1 : an extraordinary event manifesting divine intervention in human affairs
> 2 : an extremely outstanding or unusual event, thing, or accomplishment
> 3 Christian Science : a divinely natural phenomenon experienced humanly as the fulfillment of spiritual law
>
> I understand that definition 1 doesn't necessarily apply. To my knowledge God Him/Herself never appeared to Kennedy or Buzz Aldrin or whoever and said "Thou shalt exceed the pull of earth and touch the Moon". But look at definition 2 again.
>
> In four billion years (roughly) no species other than humanity has left the atmosphere. No species, in four billion years, has touched another heavenly body. We have done something we were never designed by nature to do. We defied evolution, we shook our fists at the "natural order" of things and achieved "an extremely outstanding or unusual event, thing, or accomplishment".
>
> We built a miracle with our hands.
>
> I mourn the loss of Columbia and her crew. I also mourn the crew of Challenger, and the crew of Apollo 1. These seventeen people are forever engraved on my soul as heroes of the highest order.
>
> I'm not going to talk of nobility of sacrifice...I think it's a hollow argument. While these people accepted risk as part of their calling, I don't believe any of them, if asked, would say "Golly it's swell to die in the service of such a cause". Most of them would probably say "I would like to have come home and seen my family".
>
> But, to me, their deaths, while tragic, were not a waste. They were not tossed unprepared into danger to accomplish nothing. They were not martyrs to a feeble and useless cause.
>
> They helped build a miracle.
>
> I'm going to go about my life and maybe write something good, and have a family and have my own private miracles. I can't fool myself, though. I'm not going to touch the stars, I will never walk on the surface of the moon, I will never see Mons Olympus with my own eyes. I won't be contributing to the human miracle of space travel. All I can do is watch it and cheer.
>
> Just so long as the miracle keeps happening.