I
have always loved space flight, and all the rockets and liftoffs and the moon
suits that go with it.
I remember the three major incidents that
have blemished an otherwise wonderful and courageous effort to not only orbit
the earth in near space, but to sail across the Unknown Void towards the Moon.
1967, the year I graduated from high
school. Early that year, three men sat on a launch pad. It was only a training
mission, and the immense Saturn rocket was scheduled to go… nowhere. Gus
Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee were strapped in, and performed various
tests of the equipment. Then the unspeakable happened. A flash fire burned
quickly through the craft, trapping the men inside. The astronauts panicked
voices screamed for assistance. The escape hatch had not been designed to be
opened rapidly. The 100% oxygen environment nurtured the contagious spread of
the fire, offering no hope of escape.
1986 and the Moon had been long since
conquered, and men were once again circumnavigating the earth in winged craft
that looked more like airplanes, than spacecraft. The Space Shuttle was a
marvel of technology. Space flight had become so common that a civilian teacher
was strapped in, and prepared to “travel to the stars.” Christa Mc Cauliff was
excited about the opportunity. Then the unspeakable happened, again. Seven
brave astronauts died 73 seconds after liftoff. I was working a hundred miles
from the Cape that day, and though I didn’t witness the explosion, I remember
the white, wispy smoke that hung in the sky long afterwards.
2003, and a veteran space shuttle had
descended to four hundred thousand feet above the continental United States.
Sixteen minutes from landing everything literally began to fall apart. The
Columbia burned up in earth’s low atmosphere, and small pieces were scattered
over several states.
Gus Grissom and his fine crew died as a
result of faulty wiring, a too rich oxygen atmosphere in the cabin, and a door
that was not designed for quick exit. The Challenger was doomed as a result of
an poorly designed “O-Ring” that allowed hot gases to escape the main rocket, made
less durable, as a result of cold weather conditions that day. The Colombia was
damaged in the first few seconds after liftoff, as a large piece of insulation
bounced off it’s left wing.
I heard a sermon once that sounds just
about right. We learn three ways; by insight, through crisis, or finally as a result of catastrophe. If insight is ignored, the next incremental step is
crisis. If crisis is somehow taken for granted, the subsequent and final step
becomes catastrophe.
We were in too big a hurry to get to the
Moon. President Kennedy had promised we’d be there before the new decade began.
Designs were hurried up, and too much was overlooked. The Saturn test vehicle
ought never have caught fire, and the door ought never have been so difficult to
open. An oxygen-rich environment and a poor escape design spelled disaster. The
Challenger needn’t have exploded on that cold day in 1986. Seven wonderful
people needn’t have died. The sub-contractor had warned NASA against launching
on such a cold day. The Columbia accident was tragic, and unnecessary.
Insulation had fallen off the main fuel tank in the past. Potentially, a spy
satellite could have been used to identify the wing damage, and another shuttle
might have been “prepped” and rushed to the doomed spacecraft, and the
unfortunate astronauts.
Time and space would fail me to list the
hundreds of famous “accidents” among ships, and planes and all manner of
vehicles over the past hundred years. And in so many of these instances,
insight was tossed aside in favor of crisis and catastrophe.
And to summon up one further example.
There was a bridge which spanned a rather small river in a rather insignificant
town in West Virginia. The bridge was built in the mid-twentieth century, and
had stood for over thirty years. On one particular day the metal structure
began to sway and creak and buckle. Dozens of cars and multiplied people fell
into the river that day… to their doom.
The final accident report revealed that one small, and seemingly insignificant
bolt had shattered. It was a “time bomb waiting to go off,” for you see, the
flaw was there when the bolt was originally fabricated.
It is imperative that we learn through
insight. There’s just nothing like it. It has the potential to save us from so
much harm, and abject suffering. God would spare us crisis and catastrophe, so
much of the time, if we would but grasp insight and embrace it with all our
might!
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