Steyn on the Columbia Disaster
Posted in Full (from steynonline.com):
This week the United States got back in the space shuttle business. This is what I wrote about the last shuttle, in The Sunday Telegraph of February 2nd 2003:
The last early-morning Texan TV viewers saw was a beautiful shot of the Columbia streaking across a clear blue sky over Dallas, caught by the cameras at WFAA-TV. These are the marvels of the age -- not only the extraordinary technology that enables man to return from a trip to space, but the ordinary everyday technology that lets a cameraman from a local TV station capture the scene as it's happening overhead at 12,000 miles per hour. It's not just that most countries can't do the former, they can't manage the latter, either: Everything about the moment sums up the remarkable pre-eminence of America.
Four decades ago, the space program was the only romantic thing about an unromantic war -- the competition between two high-tech superpowers to put a man in space, and then on the moon. Now there's no one to compete with. For America's new enemies in a new war, "victory" means no more than American failure. You can't take down a spaceship at 200,000 feet with a shoulder-launched missile. Even the Americans would have difficulty blowing the shuttle out of the sky, though the missile defence system currently under development will be able to do it, despite the usual Euro-Canadian naysaying. Al-Qaeda can't do it, and nor can the French or anyone else. These days, American technology has to pace itself.
But you don't have to believe, as NASA fretted in the weeks before launch, that this shuttle could be a terrorist target to wonder at the freakily perfect symbolism of Saturday's tragedy: The Columbia's crew included the first Israeli astronaut, Colonel Ilan Ramon. Better yet, he was an Israeli who'd participated in the successful raid on the Iraqi reactor at Osirak, back in the Eighties in those dark days before the policing of Saddam's nuclear program was entrusted to Hans Blix. And, of course, the shuttle came down over Texas, home state of the President and in the European press the favoured shorthand for what they see as the swaggering cowboy braggadocio of the United States -- and, just to confirm it was the will of Allah, not merely in Texas but in the vicinity of the small town of Palestine, Texas. At creative writing classes, they'd tell you to make the symbolism more oblique, less clunkily literal.
You don't even have to be some Islamist death-cult loser in Ramallah to be dancing up and down in the street. Within an hour of the shuttle's loss, a CBC interviewer was asking her bemused expert whether the failure was due to American "arrogance," the same "arrogance" the Americans are currently demonstrating in the Middle East. The "expert" -- sci-fi writer Robert Sawyer -- said no, it wasn't "arrogance." When something happens in the middle of your broadcast and you tear up the running-order and scramble for guests and clips and background, things get said that might otherwise be more artfully veiled. But that's the point: Most of us when we're caught by something sudden and unexplained retreat to our tropes, and the gleeful rush to the cliche of American "arrogance" is revealing. An hour later this had apparently morphed into mysterious "space experts" who thought "over-confidence" arising from Iraqi war fever had led NASA to go ahead with the flight. World coverage of U.S. affairs is taking on the same stunted perspective as the old showbiz joke beloved of failed actors: It is not necessary that I succeed, only that my friends fail.
What happened Saturday is a personal tragedy and an historic disaster -- in 42 years of manned flight, NASA has never lost a crew during landing or the return in orbit. It's also a setback for Washington, which had plotted this week as a projection of American resolve: the State of the Union, Bush's meetings with Berlusconi and Blair, all working up to Colin Powell's presentation to the Security Council. Now, instead of steely determination, the TV screens will be filled with funerals, elegies, interviews with neighbours, mounds of flowers and teddy bears: It enables the networks to slip in to their preferred mode, of America as victim, weak and vulnerable, which is why ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN were so good in the immediate hours of September 11th and, for the most part, so bad in the months since.
You can't blame the news shows for their priorities: For most Americans, this will be the only attention they've paid to the space program since the last disaster -- the disintegration of the Challenger on take-off in 1986. Nothing in between has captured the public imagination -- pictures from Mars? Yawn. There's something very American about the presumption of success, about the way something unprecedented quickly becomes routine -- unless it all goes wrong. In 1986, President Reagan, eulogizing the dead, said that they had "slipped the surly bonds of Earth and touched the face of God," quoting the marvellous poem by John Magee, the son of an American father and British mother who couldn't wait for the U.S. to enter the Second World War and so signed up with the RCAF. (For Canadian readers, I should explain that RCAF stands for "Royal Canadian Air Force," but, not to worry, it was abolished and replaced by Canada Post.) President Bush, whom commentators have increasingly compared to Reagan in recent months, is not so comfortable with such highflown rhetoric; he's a more openly emotional man, and it will be the smaller human elements in the story that touch him -- men and women in their early forties, leaving behind young children. They were an American crew -- four men, one black; two women, one born in India. That last is the American Dream writ large across the stars: You can emigrate to the U.S. and become an astronaut within a decade.
Nonetheless, this will not be as traumatizing as the Challenger disaster. The yellow-ribbon era died with September 11th: Even if their TV networks haven't quite adjusted, Americans are tougher about these things; this is a country at war and one that understands how to absorb losses and setbacks. What happened happened most likely because the Columbia was just so damn old and rusty. If anything, it symbolizes not American "arrogance," but what happens when the great youthful innovating spirit of the country is allowed to atrophy: The entire space program is now dependent on a transit system from the 1970s. If President Bush really wanted to emphasize the gulf between his country and both the Islamist cave dwellers and "Old Europe," he'd announce a major renewal of the space project. A frontier is part of the American character.
Two weeks ago, when the shuttle was launched, the enterprising Internet commentator Charles Johnson posted an almost note-perfect parody of an Arab news report denouncing the presence of Colonel Ramon:
"This is surely but the first step towards complete and outright illegal Zionist occupation of space," said Arab League spokesman Abr Souffla ... Sheikh Yermani-Makr, appearing on Palestinian television, said, "It is not enough that the unbelievers have come on our land, but now they also take our heavens?"... In New York today, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said that an Israeli presence in space is "unhelpful" and would only serve to further aggravate tensions between Israelis and Arabs. The sentiment was echoed from Madrid by EU representative Javier Solana, who said that what the Middle East needed was more negotiation, and "less cosmic adventurism."
A couple of days later, the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz reprinted the story, having apparently taken it for real. In an odd way, the world's reactions are beyond parody now. No doubt in the big-time mosques the A-list imams really will regard what happened as the judgment of Allah on the American-Zionist plan to seize the heavens. PETA will denounce the loss of the rats and insects on board, victims of America's "arrogant" need to find cures for disease, etc. The rest of us will mourn the dead and urge NASA to get on with the next flight. That's the American way.
This week the United States got back in the space shuttle business. This is what I wrote about the last shuttle, in The Sunday Telegraph of February 2nd 2003:
The last early-morning Texan TV viewers saw was a beautiful shot of the Columbia streaking across a clear blue sky over Dallas, caught by the cameras at WFAA-TV. These are the marvels of the age -- not only the extraordinary technology that enables man to return from a trip to space, but the ordinary everyday technology that lets a cameraman from a local TV station capture the scene as it's happening overhead at 12,000 miles per hour. It's not just that most countries can't do the former, they can't manage the latter, either: Everything about the moment sums up the remarkable pre-eminence of America.
Four decades ago, the space program was the only romantic thing about an unromantic war -- the competition between two high-tech superpowers to put a man in space, and then on the moon. Now there's no one to compete with. For America's new enemies in a new war, "victory" means no more than American failure. You can't take down a spaceship at 200,000 feet with a shoulder-launched missile. Even the Americans would have difficulty blowing the shuttle out of the sky, though the missile defence system currently under development will be able to do it, despite the usual Euro-Canadian naysaying. Al-Qaeda can't do it, and nor can the French or anyone else. These days, American technology has to pace itself.
But you don't have to believe, as NASA fretted in the weeks before launch, that this shuttle could be a terrorist target to wonder at the freakily perfect symbolism of Saturday's tragedy: The Columbia's crew included the first Israeli astronaut, Colonel Ilan Ramon. Better yet, he was an Israeli who'd participated in the successful raid on the Iraqi reactor at Osirak, back in the Eighties in those dark days before the policing of Saddam's nuclear program was entrusted to Hans Blix. And, of course, the shuttle came down over Texas, home state of the President and in the European press the favoured shorthand for what they see as the swaggering cowboy braggadocio of the United States -- and, just to confirm it was the will of Allah, not merely in Texas but in the vicinity of the small town of Palestine, Texas. At creative writing classes, they'd tell you to make the symbolism more oblique, less clunkily literal.
You don't even have to be some Islamist death-cult loser in Ramallah to be dancing up and down in the street. Within an hour of the shuttle's loss, a CBC interviewer was asking her bemused expert whether the failure was due to American "arrogance," the same "arrogance" the Americans are currently demonstrating in the Middle East. The "expert" -- sci-fi writer Robert Sawyer -- said no, it wasn't "arrogance." When something happens in the middle of your broadcast and you tear up the running-order and scramble for guests and clips and background, things get said that might otherwise be more artfully veiled. But that's the point: Most of us when we're caught by something sudden and unexplained retreat to our tropes, and the gleeful rush to the cliche of American "arrogance" is revealing. An hour later this had apparently morphed into mysterious "space experts" who thought "over-confidence" arising from Iraqi war fever had led NASA to go ahead with the flight. World coverage of U.S. affairs is taking on the same stunted perspective as the old showbiz joke beloved of failed actors: It is not necessary that I succeed, only that my friends fail.
What happened Saturday is a personal tragedy and an historic disaster -- in 42 years of manned flight, NASA has never lost a crew during landing or the return in orbit. It's also a setback for Washington, which had plotted this week as a projection of American resolve: the State of the Union, Bush's meetings with Berlusconi and Blair, all working up to Colin Powell's presentation to the Security Council. Now, instead of steely determination, the TV screens will be filled with funerals, elegies, interviews with neighbours, mounds of flowers and teddy bears: It enables the networks to slip in to their preferred mode, of America as victim, weak and vulnerable, which is why ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN were so good in the immediate hours of September 11th and, for the most part, so bad in the months since.
You can't blame the news shows for their priorities: For most Americans, this will be the only attention they've paid to the space program since the last disaster -- the disintegration of the Challenger on take-off in 1986. Nothing in between has captured the public imagination -- pictures from Mars? Yawn. There's something very American about the presumption of success, about the way something unprecedented quickly becomes routine -- unless it all goes wrong. In 1986, President Reagan, eulogizing the dead, said that they had "slipped the surly bonds of Earth and touched the face of God," quoting the marvellous poem by John Magee, the son of an American father and British mother who couldn't wait for the U.S. to enter the Second World War and so signed up with the RCAF. (For Canadian readers, I should explain that RCAF stands for "Royal Canadian Air Force," but, not to worry, it was abolished and replaced by Canada Post.) President Bush, whom commentators have increasingly compared to Reagan in recent months, is not so comfortable with such highflown rhetoric; he's a more openly emotional man, and it will be the smaller human elements in the story that touch him -- men and women in their early forties, leaving behind young children. They were an American crew -- four men, one black; two women, one born in India. That last is the American Dream writ large across the stars: You can emigrate to the U.S. and become an astronaut within a decade.
Nonetheless, this will not be as traumatizing as the Challenger disaster. The yellow-ribbon era died with September 11th: Even if their TV networks haven't quite adjusted, Americans are tougher about these things; this is a country at war and one that understands how to absorb losses and setbacks. What happened happened most likely because the Columbia was just so damn old and rusty. If anything, it symbolizes not American "arrogance," but what happens when the great youthful innovating spirit of the country is allowed to atrophy: The entire space program is now dependent on a transit system from the 1970s. If President Bush really wanted to emphasize the gulf between his country and both the Islamist cave dwellers and "Old Europe," he'd announce a major renewal of the space project. A frontier is part of the American character.
Two weeks ago, when the shuttle was launched, the enterprising Internet commentator Charles Johnson posted an almost note-perfect parody of an Arab news report denouncing the presence of Colonel Ramon:
"This is surely but the first step towards complete and outright illegal Zionist occupation of space," said Arab League spokesman Abr Souffla ... Sheikh Yermani-Makr, appearing on Palestinian television, said, "It is not enough that the unbelievers have come on our land, but now they also take our heavens?"... In New York today, UN Secretary General Kofi Annan said that an Israeli presence in space is "unhelpful" and would only serve to further aggravate tensions between Israelis and Arabs. The sentiment was echoed from Madrid by EU representative Javier Solana, who said that what the Middle East needed was more negotiation, and "less cosmic adventurism."
A couple of days later, the Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz reprinted the story, having apparently taken it for real. In an odd way, the world's reactions are beyond parody now. No doubt in the big-time mosques the A-list imams really will regard what happened as the judgment of Allah on the American-Zionist plan to seize the heavens. PETA will denounce the loss of the rats and insects on board, victims of America's "arrogant" need to find cures for disease, etc. The rest of us will mourn the dead and urge NASA to get on with the next flight. That's the American way.
posted by John Aristides at 11:19 AM
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