Space Shuttle Post-Mortems

Yoder asks: “If a comparable accident had happened in space early in the Mercury or Apollo program, would commissioner Neil Armstrong ever have set foot on the moon?” Commissioner Neil Armstrong might have come back in a box, too, if it weren’t for engineers who maybe said, “It’s not safe to launch today. Wait until tomorrow.” Check the records. I don’t know if that happened, but I like to think it could have.

Christopher Columbus, whose processes were, in conventional terms, deeply “flawed” and who lost two of three ships on the way to discovering America, surely would have had the sense to listen if someone had said, “There’s a storm off the coast, Chris. It’ll pass tomorrow. Why don’t you wait.” Maybe it happened. People weren’t any more stupid in 1492 than they are today.

“Of all the imaginable doubts that might arise in a countdown, which are serious enough to be placed in the channel?” Yoder queries inanely, answering himself along the way. “Critically 1,” NASA jargon for “astronauts’ lives are at stake.” Come on, there’s no graver place (no pun intended) to draw the line, Ed.

“Hey Neil, we want you to make it to the moon. Let’s be safe and wait till tomorrow.” “Chris, the New World will still be there in the morning. Let’s hold off.” The Challenger astronauts weren’t given that choice.

If Yoder doesn’t take the unanimous consensus of 15 Morton Thiokol engineers any more seriously than he does the morning horoscope, that’s his problem. For my part, I wouldn’t want him--or the management of Morton Thiokol, or the current, Reagan-appointed administration of NASA--holding my life, the lives of my loved ones, or the lives of the valiant heroes called astronauts in their grubby little hands. Who in their right minds would want men like these as school crossing guards, knowing what we know now?

JON WILLIAMS

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