Gregg Easterbrook looked irresponsible back in 1980 ...

Always read the gossip columns: The L.A. Daily News' "Tinseltown Spywitness" coverage of an L.A. awards banquet has former U.N. Ambassador Richard Holbrooke predicting a war  in 10 weeks.

"There will be heavy air strikes with very accurate weapons," said Holbrooke. "And those on television who say the war will be a cake walk are wrong."

Also, Universal Pictures chairman Stacey Snider wore a black Vera Wang pantsuit. ... [But if Bush is bluffing maybe Holbrooke is part of the bluff--ed. An American Jewish Committee dinner at the Beverly Wilshire isn't a venue well-chosen to send a message to Saddam. Not many Iraqi agents there. But maybe they read the trades.] 8:60 P.M.

Another pre-Columbia Cassandra: Looks like this guy told us so too. Roger Pielke, like Easterbrook, argues that the problem isn't lack of spending billions (contrary to the implication of the administration's immediate post-catastrophe reaction). ... 8:59 P.M.

Easterbrook Update: The competition to get Gregg Easterbrook to write a piece about Columbia has been won by Time. It's up and it's good. As expected, Easterbrook argues that the Shuttle's problem is not a lack of funding -- more like an addiction to the substantial funding for an outmoded program. Contrary to expectations, though, Easterbrook doesn't dismiss the idea of an escape pod. ... Meanwhile, the Washington Monthly has posted the entire text of Easterbrook's creepily prescient 1980 (pre-Challenger)anti-Shuttle piece. Be sure to also view the irresponsible-enough-to-be-responsible cover image. ... 1:53 P.M.

Saturday, February 1, 2003

He Told Us So: WaPo has a long piece  suggesting budget-cutting is to blame for the Columbia disaster. Such claims may be true, but should be viewed with great initial skepticism -- isn't a bureaucracy's first defense always to implicitly ask for more money? The idea that the shuttle might have been fitted with an escape pod that might somehow have been activated "as it broke up around the point of reentry into Earth's atmosphere" seems especially suspect.

This aspect of the shuttle's design seems to have been dicey from the start. Back in 1980, six years before the Challenger exploded, Gregg Easterbrook wrote a cover story for The Washington Monthly, where I was working. I had nothing to do with Easterbrook's piece, but I did feel guilty when we sensationalistically titled it "Beam Us Out of This Deathtrap, Scotty." (The even-more-irresponsible teaser hed was "5 ..4 ...3 ...2 ...1 ... Goodbye, Columbia.") Easterbrook's article was highly persuasive, unfortunately -- and looks gruesomely clairvoyant two decades later. These passages stood out when I reread it this evening:

"Columbia must be fitted out with 33,000 of these tiles, each to be applied individually, each unique in shape. The inch-thick tiles, made of pyrolized carbon, are amazing in two respects. They can be several hundred degrees hot on one side while remaining cool to the touch on the other. They do not boil away ... they can be used indefinitely. But they're also a bit of a letdown in another respect -- they're so fragile you can hardly touch them without shattering them. ...

Fixing them to the Columbia without breaking them is like trying to eat a bar of Bonomo Turkish Taffy without cracking it. ...

The tiles are the most important system NASA has ever designed as "safe life." That means there is no back-up for them. If they fail, the shuttle burns on reentry. ... The worry runs deep enough that NASA investigated installing a crane assembly in Columbia so the crew could inspect and repair damaged tiles in space. (Verdict: Can't be done. You can hardly do it on the ground.)

Easterbrook has written equally solid, mostly-skeptical (but sometimes supportive) articles about NASA in the years since. He works quickly, so I suspect we'll be hearing from him soon. I will link. Update: See links in item immediately above. ... 12:56 A.M.

Friday, January 31, 2003

Excellent Tina Brown point about how Americans don't want to go to war but "want to want to go to war.". ...[Link via Kurtz] 12:24 P.M.