Monday, October 19, 2015

Insight, Crisis, Catastrophe


      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 Columbia was damaged in the first few seconds after liftoff, as a large piece of insulation bounced off its 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 should never have caught fire, and the door should 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 once 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 information leading to 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!
 
By William McDonald, PhD. Excerpt from "(Mc)Donald's Daily Diary" Vol. 11

 

 

 

 

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