Farewell to the Mystique of Space : Technology Must Always Mirror Man’s Imperfections

In 1961, ‘62, ’63 we expected it momentarily. Space shots must be dangerous, we said, or Walter Cronkite wouldn’t be on hand for them. We nudged and prayed each manned missile into the sky in the hope that NASA, America and mankind could mate its tools with its dreams, but not with its nightmares.

It was a world groaning with Khrushchev’s missiles, overpopulation, hunger and revolution. The space program symbolized the ability of technology and human management to overcome such global and national perils. Not just “if we can send a man to the moon, then surely we can . . . “ but also “if we can’t master the controlled engineering feat of space flight, how can we ever cope with the more intractable problems of race, revolt and Russians?” When Apollo 8 first orbited the moon on Christmas Eve, 1968, “the hopes and fears of all the years were met in thee tonight.”

The explosion of Challenger was a blow to our gut for the same reason that successful space shots are a sublime boost to our spirits: because the space program is so much more to us than the sum of its human and technical parts. Do we mourn for the space dead more than for the 200 Marines in Beirut? If so, is it because of the immediacy of television? To be sure. Indeed, after 24 successful shuttle missions, the media elite had long abandoned Cape Canaveral, and space launches had become a tame diversion well suited to the rest of daytime television--a Hugh Downs amusement, not a Dan Rather drama.

Was the blow to the gut Tuesday a function of NASA’s overall success in making space flight seem routine? To be sure. But NASA can hardly be blamed for making the shuttle perform brilliantly 24 times, thereby diminishing our perception of the risks. And the public-relations stunts--congressmen and schoolteachers --were a case of NASA, a small and weak agency in Washington terms, bowing to outside pressure.

The political effect of this first in-flight calamity may be as follows: The campaign against exclusive reliance on the shuttle by the two proponents of unmanned, expendable launch vehicles--the Air Force and private industry--should now make progress, especially given President Reagan’s interest in private enterprise in space.

If, in this era of Gramm-Rudman, Congress feels the need to slice the NASA budget, the sacrificial lamb could well be the shuttle-dependent space-station program, on which little so far has been spent. But the space program will not grind to a halt, as people in the 1960s feared might occur after a disaster. Reagan’s support is sure, as is that of congressional leaders tied to aerospace. The key players in the debate over future space policy will probably be congressional leaders who are not otherwise beholden to aerospace constituencies.

In the long run the philosophical fallout may be most important and most redeeming. Our national shock has served to remind us what space flight has been to us all along: a metaphor of human and governmental adequacy. The worst response that we could make would be to take the Challenger disaster as proof that technology is fickle, dangerous and not worth the cost. The next-to-worst response would be to bluff ahead with brave words about human life being the inevitable price paid for technological progress.

A better response, it seems, would be to liberate the space program, and technology in general, from the mystique that we have placed on it. True, we are living in a material world, but we ourselves are not just raw material; machines, after all, do not grieve. And our technology is imperfect because we are imperfect, so either worshiping or despising our technological age is just a neat shifting of blame.

If Challenger was a tragedy, and not just a disaster, it was because it killed not only seven people but also a god. And that god was not technology, which will march ahead, but the idol of human perfectability. That idol has leered patronizingly over space flight ever since Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, the father of modern rocketry, wrote at the turn of the century that space colonization would mean “the perfection of society and its individual members.” It won’t, but if in relinquishing that subconscious dream of power and immortality we spitefully shuck off the urge to make and do, explore and wonder, then we deny another reality of our own human nature.

In C. S. Lewis’ “The Voyage of the ‘Dawn Treader’,” the intrepid sailors of Narnia encounter a mysterious island shrouded in eerie blackness. After much debate they plow toward it in a spirit of discovery, until they happen upon a crazed castaway on a raft: “Fly! Fly! About with your ship and fly!” he cried. “This is the island where dreams come true . . . dreams, do you understand, come to life, come real. Not daydreams: dreams.”

We, too, cannot turn away from the eerie blackness of space any more than we can resolve never to go to sleep. But we must expect to find nightmares as well as daydreams awaiting us.