It's Called NASAWatch For A Reason

02/10/03 00:00:00    

By Michael Mealling

Keith Cowing of NASA Watch has an

An Open Letter to Congress Regarding the Columbia Accident. NASA Watch's banner reads “This is not a NASA Website. You might learn something.” It seems as though Keith has been to close to NASA for to long since it seems he hasn't learned anything from NASA's problems either.

Cowing attempts to be concerned with Congress' rush to hearings on the Columbia accident and their predilection for “partisan stunts” and for looking for someone to blame. He at least does suggest that the search for blame should go as far back as those in the Nixon administration to those who thought that NASA was a playground for politicians to play at being engineers.

Keith even goes so far as to state that the lesson we did not learn from Challenger was “how to sustain interest in the excitement and promise of space exploration when things become routine once again.” Which, if he'd thought a little harder would've at least lead to a better question.

Sadly, while the letter started off well, he completely looses any sense of separateness from NASA when he falls back on that Goldin-esque truism of bq. “However, if we take this sad occasion to identify the cause of this accident, enable it to be fixed, and then to move on , we honor their sacrifice by making America's space program better than it was before - empowered with a re-commitment to the cause of space exploration.”

This statement simply shows that even those that attempt to be NASA critics make NASA's (or at least those that set policy at NASA) same mistakes of believing the space program is about “exploration” when the discussion about what the space program is for has never actually been had or the term “exploration” even defined. He even uses the extremely tired nonsense phrase “move onward”. The term “move onward” is simply a statement of motion along a line. Without knowing the direction of the line it is a meaningless statement. You can't have a vector without both a direction and a velocity.

I agree with Keith that if the Congressional hearings turn into what they normally turn into then it will be a complete insult to the Columbia crew. But while “solving the problem and moving forward” won't be an insult it will definitely be a disservice to them. Congress (or anyone for that matter) instead needs to have an in depth discussion on exactly what our goals are in space, including all of the possibilities: science, weaponry, colonization, industrialization, capitalist exploitation, etc. Once that has been had, then it is possible to move forward. In many cases those goals can even be achieved without NASA simply by providing legal frameworks for property and regulations.

Keith sums up his letter with one line, “We need to get it right this time.” But, in an almost grammatically incorrect way he still misses the real question.He never qualifies the pronoun “it”. Until we can do that we're sitting on a point on a graph with a velocity and no direction.