Pessimists are now prophets

Don Nelson lives in Alvin, Texas, a town of 20,000 located between Galveston and Missouri City. But he was taking calls at Total Video in Houston because it was easier to do TV interviews there. Even so, his time was limited. “I got a radio interview at 3:06, so I can give you about seven minutes,” he said to one journalist. “Can you talk that fast?”

Nelson is the retired NASA aerospace engineer who in August 2002 wrote a letter to President Bush informing him that “our space shuttle astronauts are in imminent danger.” The letter listed the numerous “potential disastrous occurrences” the launch system has experienced since July 1999, and asked the president to limit crews to four until each shuttle was equipped with escape modules.

After four months, the White House issued a reply declining to get involved. Now, everyone in the world wants to talk to him.

Almost 1,000 miles away, in Boulder, Colo., Roger Pielke Jr. has also been fielding a lot of calls. In September 2002, Pielke, director of the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado, wrote an opinion piece for the Houston Chronicle: “It is only a matter of time before we lose another shuttle,” he wrote, and called for a national dialogue on the space program.

At the time, he got a lot of response -- from friends and colleagues. From NASA and the national press, nothing. Now, of course, the media are in touch.

Since Columbia was lost on Feb. 1, newspapers have been full of the dire predictions about the shuttle program made by people over the past few years, many from NASA officials. Hindsight being famously keen, it is not surprising that those people are now being looked to as prophets.

Call it the Cassandra Syndrome.

“When something like this happens, there are always going to be Cassandras,” says Charles Bosk, a professor of sociology at the University of Pennsylvania. Bosk teaches a class called “Mistakes, Errors, Accidents and Disasters,” which includes a segment on the shuttle Challenger disaster. “Think about what people are supposed to do in an organization like NASA -- argue all the time about data and risk. Inevitably, when the worst-case scenario occurs, there is always tucked in the files a memo saying, ‘We considered this but didn’t find the risk high enough.’ In hindsight, it always looks like some factor that should have been completely obvious.”

Cassandra, according to Greek myth, was the most beautiful daughter of King Priam, so beautiful that the god Apollo granted her the gift of prophesy in return for sexual favors. Cassandra accepted the gift but reneged on the bargain, so Apollo took away her power of persuasion: She could speak only the truth but no one would ever believe her. When she tried to warn her fellow Trojans of impending disaster -- that the wooden horse they had just wheeled into the city was full of enemy soldiers -- everyone thought she was crazy. And so fell Troy.

Nowadays, rounding up those who issued warnings has become as predictable a portion of the disaster news arc as instant replay. From the fall of Troy to the fall of the World Trade Center to the fall of Enron, there is inevitably someone who predicted it all.

This year, among Time magazine’s three People of the Year were Sherron Watkins and Coleen Rowley. Enron employee Watkins wrote an internal memo warning that the company was about to fall apart like a house of cards. FBI Agent Rowley wrote a damning letter about how politics at the agency thwarted her attempts to investigate a suspect who turned out to be a key player in the Sept. 11 attacks. Newfound seer status has helped former Sen. Gary Hart return from exile. As co-chair of a commission on national security, he warned in January 2001 that the U.S. would be attacked catastrophically on its own soil. The prediction, largely ignored at the time, has given him so much political juice he might just run for president again.

The Cassandra figure permeates history -- she is Nicias trying to talk Alcibiades out of the doomed Spartan expedition to Syracuse; James Longstreet advising Robert E. Lee to keep moving past Gettysburg; Albert Einstein warning President Franklin D. Roosevelt against pursuing experiments with the potentially lethal nuclear reaction in uranium.

And, perhaps more important, she is an inexhaustible literary thread -- from her own theatrical debut in Aeschylus’ “Agamemnon” to the soothsayer in “Julius Caesar” to Carol in “Oedipus Rising” to Richard Dreyfuss looking up from his grisly calculations in “Jaws” to insist to disbelieving officials that “this was no boating accident.” Cassandra might have saved us had we but listened.

“Cassandra brings the fall of Troy into the realm of high tragedy,” said Katherine King, associate professor of comparative literature at UCLA. “Now it’s not just a bad thing has happened, it’s that they’ve made a tragic choice.”

Cassandra is used throughout literature in many ways. In Homer, King said, she is just one of Priam’s daughters; in Euripides, she is half mad. Marion Zimmer Bradley, a famous feminist re-teller of myth, wrote a novel from Cassandra’s perspective called “The Firebrand,” and the most oft-mentioned modernization of the character is “Cassandra: A Novel and Four Essays” in which East German writer Christa Wolf uses her to speak out against the proliferation of nuclear weapons.

“Cassandra should always be talking about immense important disaster, not little things,” said King. “She’s very political.”

This is exactly why Bosk believes we have to be careful about labeling someone a true Cassandra. As terrible as the destruction of the Columbia was, he said, it doesn’t necessarily indicate a decision to ignore the truth. “Sometimes things will line up just so to create a disaster,” he said. This doesn’t necessarily mean a mistake was made. “But it’s hard for us to look back and judge the process when we already know the outcome, especially when the outcome is disastrous. It seems ridiculous to think the process worked.”

Far simpler, and more familiar, is the concept that warnings were ignored -- the leitmotif for many modern thrillers and most disaster movies. “The Towering Inferno” has no story line without Paul Newman’s architect yelling into the phone about dangerous wiring or William Holden arguing that nothing could go wrong “in this building.”

The idea of prophecy is very attractive to denizens of complicated, technology-fueled modern times, said UCLA classics professor Kathryn Morgan, because it gives us the sense of having some control.

“It’s hard for us to believe that something bad could happen without someone knowing it,” she said. “Cassandra encapsulates that fear and anger -- ‘if only someone had listened.’ ”

Morgan sees society’s need for a Cassandra figure reflected in such TV shows as “Miracles,” “The Dead Zone” or “The X-Files.” “TV and movies are the modern myth makers,” she said, “and we are still obsessed with people we perceive to have a special access to the truth.”

Angels and clairvoyants aside, she added, this indicates a post-Enlightenment way of looking at the world. “Pre-Enlightenment, people were more content to think, ‘Well, the gods control everything, nothing much we can do about it.’ Now, science has given us the idea that we can control the chain of events.”

Which may explain why so many of our modern prophets are more right-brain wired than left -- biologists, engineers, mathematicians. What it doesn’t explain is why, with this tendency to laud our Cassandras after the fact, we so often ignore them when there is, to use the disaster-film vernacular, “still time.” Cassandra herself, Morgan pointed out, was dismissed even after she had been proven correct time and again.

The problem for Americans in believing the word of a Cassandra, said cultural historian Simon Schama is that their need to control, and blame, is at odds with a national loathing of pessimism. “In America, optimism is the tendency,” said Schama, who is British. “Deep in the American psyche is that can-do-ishness, the Lewis and Clark syndrome; there are no limits.”

Europeans, he said, have the opposite problem. “In Britain, we always find reasons not to do something, which is just as bad.” But the unflagging enthusiasm that has sparked so many successful ventures also makes it difficult for Americans to accept that a project they believed in just isn’t going to work out.

“Once something is half-started or half-funded,” Schama said, “there is something in the American mind that refuses to slam on the brakes,” even if there is evidence of possible disaster.

And that, says Bosk and Nelson and Pielke, is the most formidable obstacle someone with really bad news, or even concerns, must overcome. Cassandra fights not only her curse but the inertia of her countrymen.

Nelson was in his car when news of the Columbia broke. “My wife called me on the cell phone and I just sat there and cried. I felt like I had failed those guys.” For three years, he said, he tried to make himself heard, wrote letters, self-published a book, started a Web site called nasa problems.com. “A colleague of mine said it would take another disaster to get people talking,” he said. “I hoped it would be after my time, when I was old and crazy. But now it’s on my shoulders. Now we have an opportunity to save the space program.”

Pielke, though saddened and frustrated by the disaster, does not share Nelson’s sense of guilt. “The shuttle has a 1% to 2% risk of destruction,” he said. “You don’t have to launch too many of them for that percentage to catch up with you.”

His concern is not with specific design elements but with the lack of interest in our space program. NASA, he said, operates in a vacuum -- there is no outside organization analyzing or commenting on the hows and wherefores of space travel. His provocative editorial was meant not to scare anyone or even to ground the shuttle, but to catalyze such a conversation.

“I didn’t predict anything,” Pielke said adamantly. “Because I didn’t say anything about the risk that everyone didn’t already know.”