Republican warming deniers will now cut NASA

Truth to power

In large organizations, whether governmental and corporate, the lone conscientious person who speaks up often pays a terrible price for telling the truth and especially if he then doesn't acquiesce when power wants to cover it in bullshit. Roger Boisjoly was one such man.

Boisjoly was not the only engineer who attempted to stop the launch and suffered for blowing the whistle. Allan J. McDonald was Thiokol's program manager for the solid rocket booster and became the most important critic of the accident afterward. When he was pressed by NASA the night before the liftoff to sign a written recommendation approving the launch, he refused, and later argued late into the night for a launch cancellation. When McDonald later disclosed the secret debate to accident investigators, he was isolated and his career destroyed.

The tragedy was particularly hard on Boisjoly, who would sometimes chop wood in the Utah winter to work out his anger. In a 2003 interview with The Times, he recalled that NASA tried to blackball him from the industry, leaving him to spend 17 years as a forensic engineer and a lecturer on engineering ethics.

The exact reason it's important to protect whistleblowers is so that those of us who are interested can hope to learn the truth.

Thrust to wait

Of what use is a newborn babe?

Click image for full Nate Beeler/Washington Examiner cartoon.

Reality-based

Good government (among other things) requires hard-headed looks at reality. That's the only way to understand disasters. It's also important when things are going well.

NASA has taken a hard look at the crew deaths in the 2003 Columbia shuttle disaster. Now, of course, NASA has had safety management problems for a long time. The engineers warned against the 1986 Challenger disaster, just as they did in 2003. Management was too removed from the risks to make the right choices.

Still, NASA did take the blinders off this time in a way it did not regarding the Challenger. Thank goodness then for Richard Feynman, who apparently never had blinders on in his life. (I highly recommend What Do You Care What Other People Think? It includes his personal report on the Challenger disaster.)

The New York Times story sanitizes the death, not just where the report (PDF) itself redacts personally identifiable information. The astronauts suffered rapid decompression and blunt force trauma, either sufficient to kill them quickly and acting within seconds of each other. Asphyxia is a bit of tepid word to describe the bends (ebullism evident in recovered tissues), which would be excruciating although mercifully brief in this case.

Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons. Click image for details.

AP's LGM

You didn't know that the AP had a photographer on Mars? And that damn NASA Phoenix is stealing his shots!

Let me tell you this AP, you don't get control of an image by slapping an "AP images" bitmap into it, even if you also cropped it and sharpened up the contrast a little.

Click each image for its original location.

Republican values

Profits first.

An unprecedented national survey of pilots by the U.S. government has found that safety problems like near collisions and runway interference occur far more frequently than previously recognized. But the government is withholding the information, fearful it would upset air travelers and hurt airline profits.

I'm so relieved I don't have to be an adult in GOP-land.

Safe at home

Endeavour is safely on the ground. Grissom, White, and Chaffee were important to me when they died in Apollo I, as were the two crews lost on shuttle orbiters. So were these astronauts, even though I could not name them, not even the teacher.

The shuttle program is a mess of reduced expectations:

NASA has outlined an ambitious shuttle launch schedule to complete assembly of the international space station. If all goes as planned, NASA will fly 14 more missions before the fleet is retired in 2010.

Fourteen missions in 40 months does not show spaceflight to be routine, which was the goal of the program. That was probably too much to hope for.