day for thirty years and expect only one failure? The original estimate turned out to be almost exactly on target. By the time of the Columbia disaster, there had been 126 flights with two disasters for a rate of one in sixty-three. Note that if we tolerated this level of error in our commercial flights, three hundred planes would fall out of the sky every day across the United States alone. One wonders whether astronauts would have been so eager for the ride if they had actually understood their real odds. It is interesting that the safety unit’s reasoning should often have been so deficient, yet the overall estimate exactly on the mark. This suggests that much of the ad hoc “reasoning” was produced under pressure from the upper ranks after the unit had surmised correctly. There is an analogy here to individual self-deception, in which the initial, spontaneous evaluation (for example, of fairness) is unbiased, after which higher-level mental processes introduce the bias.
There is an additional irony to the Challenger disaster. This was an all-American crew, an African American, a Japanese American, and two women—one an elementary schoolteacher who was to teach a class to fifth graders across the nation from space, a stunt of marginal educational value. Yet the stunt helped entrain the flight, since if the flight was postponed, the next possible date was in the summer, when children would no longer be in school to receive their lesson. Thus was NASA hoisted on its own petard. Or as has been noted, the space program shares with gothic cathedrals the fact that each is designed to defy gravity for no useful purpose except to aggrandize humans. Although many would say that the primary purpose of cathedrals was to glorify God, many such individuals were often self-aggrandizing. One wonders how many more people died building cathedrals than flying space machines.
THE COLUMBIA DISASTER
It is extraordinary that seventeen years later, the Challenger disaster would be repeated, with many elements unchanged, in the Columbia disaster. Substitute “foam” for “O-ring” and the story is largely the same. In both cases, NASA denied they had a problem, and in both cases it proved fatal. In both cases, the flight itself had little in the way of useful purpose but was done for publicity purposes: to generate funding and/or meet congressionally mandated flight targets. As before, the crew was a multicultural dream: another African American, two more women (one of whom was Indian), and an Israeli who busied himself on the flight collecting dust over (where else?) the Middle East. Experiments designed by children in six countries on spiders, silkworms, and weightlessness were duly performed. In short, as before, there was no serious purpose to the flight; it was a publicity show.
The Columbia spacecraft took off on January 15, 2003 (another relatively cold date), for a seventeen-day mission in space. Eighty-two seconds after launch, a 1.7-pound chunk of insulating foam broke off from the rocket, striking the leading edge of the left wing of the space capsule, and (as was later determined) apparently punching a hole in it about a foot in diameter. The insulating foam was meant to protect the rocket from cold during takeoff, and there was a long history of foam breaking off during flight and striking the capsule. Indeed, on average thirty small pieces struck on every flight. Only this time the piece of foam was one hundred times larger than any previously seen. On the Atlantis flight in December 1988, 707 small particles of foam hit the capsule, which, in turn, was inspected during orbit with a camera attached to a robotic arm. The capsule looked as though it had been blasted with a shotgun. It had lost a heat-protective tile but was saved by an aluminum plate underneath. As before, rather than seeing this degree of damage as alarming, the fact that the capsule survived reentry was taken as evidence that foam was not a safety problem. But NASA did more. Two flights before the Columbia disaster, a piece of foam had broken off from the bipod ramp and dented one of the rockets, but shuttle managers formally decided not to classify it as an “in-flight anomaly,” though all similar events from the bipod ramp had been so classified. The reason for this change was to avoid a delay in the next flight, and NASA was under special pressure from its new head to make sure flights were frequent. This is similar to the artificial pressure for the