Healing Our World: Weekly Comment

By Jackie Alan Giuliano, Ph.D.

The Blindness of Science – Part 2

Often the test of courage is not to die but to live.
-- Vittorio Alfieri

We need to find the courage to say NO
to the things and people that are not serving us
if we want to rediscover ourselves and
live our lives with authenticity.
-- Barbara De Angelis

The real acid test of courage is to be
just your honest self when everybody
is trying to be like somebody else.
-- Andrew Jensen

Theories about what destroyed the Space Shuttle Columbia abound, and in the last week the National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) policy of telling the public each day what their latest disaster scenario is may be creating more confusion than clarity. NASA’s belief that sharing all the raw data and ideas will somehow make the public think that they are being honest in their investigations only serves to demonstrate how out of touch the agency is in so many ways.

As I said last week in Part One of the Blindness of Science, I think it is important to focus on the Columbia tragedy because it illustrates dramatically and graphically how science is practiced today and the consequences of creating a system that has devalued the importance of the human experience, emotions, and senses.

Liftoff of STS-62 Space Shuttle Columbia from the Kennedy Space Center, March 4, 1994 (Photo courtesy NASA)

Is the human space exploration program worth the risk to lives, especially considering that the risk is often caused by political schemes, poorly funded programs, managers who have been promoted in spite of mediocre performance in their careers, and scientists who are trained to remove human experience from the analysis?

Couldn’t robots do the job just as well? Some people claim that direct human involvement is necessary to appreciate the experience of space exploration. That argument, however, assumes a “Star Trek” universe with air conditioned spacecraft with all the amenities and filled with, as Captain Kirk would say, “class M planets” rich with life and culture. What we have in our solar system, though, is a barren wasteland where the only readily available fresh water and fresh air are found on Earth. Robotic explorers can easily capture the knowledge to be gained from our corner of the universe.

Many of us who worked in the unmanned space program have seen many problems with the manned program that did little to justify its existence. But when you work for the space program at a NASA funded facility, such as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory where I spent nearly 20 years, it is heresy to speak of such things. Such discussions are relegated to “off lab” lunches and after hours parties at someone’s home.

The justifications for a human presence in space are weak at best. Sending seven astronauts is a total waste and is done more for the public relations value of having a multiracial and multinational crew than for the scientific justification. And it is a fallacy that space based experiments will yield massive advances in drugs and technology, providing a boon to business and saving the lives of those afflicted with deadly diseases.

The fact of the matter is that NASA has been quite unsuccessful in gaining support from the business community, including the pharmaceutical and medical industries, to fund experiments in space. That was supposed to be the basis for the initial designs of the space station, which was originally intended to be, as described in the space station documents of the 1980’s, some of which I helped write, a “United States space station with international participation.” There was to be copious funding from businesses and industry that would line up for the chance to get an experiment on the station.

But what really happened was that business and industry didn’t show up at the table. Few had any interest in the huge expense and the difficult working environment. The promise of zero-gravity materials and drug manufacture was more science fiction than science fact. And many businesses were worried that sending their data back to Earth via a radio link could result in theft of propriety results. It was just too much trouble to bother with, especially considering the huge cost and infrequency of each shuttle mission.

NASA, in order to save the program, changed the philosophy of the station, and all the program documents, to read “an international space station with U.S. participation.” Money was then sought from other nations to fill the void left by U.S. business and industry.

Many analysts believed that building a space station is premature and a waste of resources. Many Russian scientists who were heavily involved with their country’s space station program, MIR, recommended that the U.S. not even bother building a station. They said that their experience suggested that it wasn’t worth the effort.

The Space Shuttle STS-107 crew members who lost their lives February 1 (from left) Mission Specialist David Brown, Commander Rick Husband, Mission Specialists Laurel Clark, Kalpana Chawla and Michael Anderson, Pilot William McCool and Payload Specialist Ilan Ramon. (Photo courtesy NASA)

So where should this lead us? First, those responsible for not aborting the Columbia mission immediately after launch should be punished and face criminal charges. Second, NASA needs to take this as the second wake up call in 17 years that it needs help retraining its workforce in how to include common sense in their engineering analyses. Government oversight has failed miserably to correct NASA’s systemic problems with its management, its mission, and its philosophy. Maybe it is time to turn the agency over to a consortium of colleges and universities.

Third, university programs in science, engineering, and medicine throughout the world should reexamine their curricula and find the places where the students become disconnected from their hearts and the natural world. They should teach critical thinking and reasoning and work to remind students that what is on paper is just a starting point, not the end point.

I can give you a classic example of what I mean. After I left engineering, I took on the role of Educational Outreach Manager for a series of space exploration missions for NASA.

I once supervised an undergraduate aerospace engineering student who was building a full sized model of a robotic spacecraft designed to journey to the planet Pluto. While he was assembling the model prior to display at a science teacher’s convention, I noticed that he was hesitating mounting the dish antenna on the body of the craft. When I asked him why he was waiting, he said that he calculated that the vector forces were such that the antenna would not hang on the spacecraft. I said to him “it doesn’t work on paper, but it does in the real world.” I took the three foot diameter dish and simply hung it on the screws on the side of the craft with some piano wire. He was incredulous. He would have never just tried it. His Caltech education had taught him much theory, but he rarely got out into the light of day.

A few hours before this encounter, an engineer who had volunteered to help load the spacecraft model into the van for transport to the convention was using a tape measure to carefully determine if it would fit. She was measuring every possible angle and concluded that we needed a larger van. I asked her to just help me load it in. I could tell just by looking at it that it would fit. It did fit and she was amazed. Once again, this very brilliant person’s education taught her to devalue real life experience in favor of the paper journey.

An emphasis on building a sustainable society would enhance future scientists’ and engineers’ competency in managing the natural world and its life support systems.

Fourth, the manned space program should be put on hold until its mission and objectives can be clearly defined and justified. Construction of the International Space Station should cease, and serious debate should begin at the highest levels of government, the scientific community, and the general public to determine if the robotic space exploration program should be the only effort at this time.

And lastly, we should all remind ourselves that the bonds that hold us to planet Earth are solid, but also very fragile. The Columbia astronauts lost their lives because scientific blindness and fear kept the mission controllers from exercising common sense. But all our lives are on the line if we don’t stop the wholesale destruction of the Earth’s life support systems.

Astronaut Edwin E. Aldrin, Jr., lunar module pilot, walks on the surface of the Moon. July 20, 2969. (Photo courtesy NASA)

Astronauts are the repositories for the values, dreams, and hopes of humans everywhere. Every one of them represents the best the human race has to offer this universe, and to squander their lives is a great travesty and a crime against humanity. Those astronauts from space programs around the world who have perished should be remembered with great reverence, and every effort should be taken – even if it means ending the human space exploration program – so that such lives are never lost again for the foolish reasons discussed above.

We must do everything we can to insure that they rest in peace.

RESOURCES

1. See the text of the first hearing on the Columbia accident at: http://www.aip.org/enews/fyi/2003/027.html

2. NASA’s official website on the Columbia tragedy is at: http://www.nasa.gov/columbia/

3. NASA’s human spaceflight website is at: http://www.spaceflight.nasa.gov/

4. The website for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA’s leader for the robotic exploration of the solar system, is at: http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/

5. Visit the Center for a New American Dream at: http://www.newdream.org/

6. Read the Culture Change newsletter at: http://www.culturechange.org

7. Become part of the peace movement. Visit: http://www.nonviolence.org/iraq/

8. The debate about whether or not there should be a human space exploration program has been going on for some time. See an essay about it at: http://www.worldandi.com/public/1994/july/ci1.cfm

9. See a website loaded with opinion from former NASA employees at: http://www.nasaproblems.com/

10. Find out who your elected representatives are and contact them. Tell them it is time to scour NASA from top to bottom. You can find them at http://www.visi.com/juan/congress/ziptoit.html

{Jackie Alan Giuliano, Ph.D. is a writer and teacher in Seattle and the author of "Healing Our World", A Journey from the Darkness Into the Light," available at: http://www.xlibris.com/HealingOurWorld.html or your local bookstore. His new book of photographs and thoughts on interconnectedness, “Of This Earth, Reflections on Connections,” is now available. Learn about it at: http://ofthisearth.org. Please send your thoughts, comments, and visions to him at: jackie@healingourworld.com and visit his website at: http://www.healingourworld.com}