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SHIELDING
THE TRUTH?
The major story around the globe over the past 48 hours has been
the Columbia disaster during re-entry at more than 20,000 kilometres
an hour – and the obliteration of seven male and female astronauts,
It obviously brought back memories of the Challenger tragedy. And
for me -- as a reporter who covered Apollo 13 which had an incredible
happy ending -- there are similarities.
In the final tense minutes before Apollo 13 safely splashed down
there were fears that the space capsule’s heat shield may have
been damaged and that could mean a fiery death for the three astronauts
if they lost their protection from the 3000 degree Fahrenheit friction
heat on re-entry.
The Apollo 13 astronauts made it. The seven men and women aboard
Columbia did not. And although there is nothing official it seems
increasingly probable that this team was doomed within seconds of
takeoff at the start of mission sixteen days ago.
Something broke off from the booster rockets, shortly after takeoff,
and apparently hit the spaceship’s left wing. That could have
cracked or broken some of the 28,000 heat resistant tiles that protected
the aluminium spaceship.
And at that re-entry speed and under that searing temperature a
faulty heat shield would be fatal.
Because there have only been a couple of re-entry problems and
fatalities over more than thirty years of space flight we tend to
ignore the dangers and the bravery every time men and women climb
aboard a spaceship.
As I said on air on my first Drive Time shift on Melbourne’s
3AW today maybe one of the problems is the words chosen by NASA
to describe the re-useable spaceships. They called them Space”
Shuttles.” It made it sound like they were merely shuttle buses
or those shuttle flights between New York and Washington or Boston.
A walk in the park.
There was also a shrewd campaign in the name because NASA wanted
the American people to think that the Shuttle was a cheap, re-useable
commodity at a time when NASA budgets were under attack.
Here on earth we had come to accept that the shuttle flights WERE
that walk in the park. TV networks stopped televising them live.
They almost became a paragraph in the Arrivals and Departure columns.
Sunday’s devastation brought it all back. For me – having
watched men go to the moon for the first time in 1969 and having
reported on the launch pad deaths of Grissom, Chaffee and White
on Apollo One two years earlier and the miraculous recovery of the
Apollo 13 crew – it was a brutal reminder about how tenuous
our hold is on life in such an alien environment.
Monday, February 3, 2003
Derryn Hinch
www.hinch.net
©Copyright
Derryn Hinch 2002
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