“Challenger, you are go at throttle-up.” The last earthly words seven astronauts on that space shuttle heard.
Here behind the lines, 25 years ago in 1986, something happened that caused more than a bit of grief and commotion. The space shuttle Challenger blew up, in a frightfully bright stream of white plumes. All aboard died, we all hoped in a quick manner. There was initially an air of unreality. Thoughts of “how could this happen?” passed through more than one mind. The NASA announcer made a couple of height, speed, and downrange announcements even after the plumes had been seen on television, and then noted, a bit shaken, that there was clearly something wrong. Twenty-five years later, it is not inappropriate to ask whether anything was learned from this event. At the time, it appeared that not much had been learned from previous events.
Three astronauts, Grissom, White, and Chaffee, had died in Apollo 1, on the launch pad, during a test. At Senate hearings, another astronaut, Col. Frank Bormann, said no one imagined that the test they were conducting was such a high-risk undertaking. Lessons were learned. Somewhat.
Apollo 13 was to be the third moon landing. There had been four flights to the moon, with two landings before it. The risks? Well, they were not generally perceived, at least. Television viewing was down, and scheduled coverage cut, until the famous call to Houston that there was a problem. Had the lessons of Apollo 1 really been learned, or were needed corrections made without acknowledging the nature of the undertakings themselves? Twenty-five years ago, 18 years after Apollo 1, Challenger gave some insight into that question.
Thanks to a very colourful, very brilliant, and very unorthodox physicist, Dr. Richard Feynman, the insights were set out. Not willingly, of course, because the established structures were very much in damage control and image optimization modes in the process of dealing with the tragedy. Dr. Feynman’s findings were first excised from the final enquiry report, but were put back in, as an appendix, when Dr. Feynman, rather than throwing a tantrum over the doctoring of the report, simply ordered that his name be removed from it. He had made the news by presenting, in the midst of essentially bafflegab testimony, a simple, understandable demonstration that what was at the root of the tragedy was that the launch took place when it was so cold that the sealing material lost its elasticity. The rest flowed from that. Dr. Feynman described the thought processes that led to this happening. We would do well today to reflect on them.
Dr. Feynman found a pattern. Using available knowledge, limits had been established, essentially engineering tolerances, within which the operations could be undertaken safely. There had been a number of successful flights – Challenger was number 25 – completed successfully within these limits. But thinking now got foggy. Considerations pertinent to non-technical items, such as public support, political support, funding, image, and the like, led managers to behave as if the successes within the limits provided a basis to relax the stringency of the limits. Dr. Feynman found that this was happening in an environment where the perception of the chance of a possible major problem had come to be several orders of magnitude (orders of magnitude can be thought of as “multiply by ten repeatedly by the number of the order”) smaller by managers and administrators than by the technical people. So non-technical people were changing technical parameters, for non-technical reasons, using reasoning that had no place in technical considerations. Safe operations within limits do not provide evidence that it is appropriate to relax the limits. New knowledge is needed to determine if limits can be varied. The fact that I can drive my car safely at a 100 kph speed limit on a stretch of road does not provide evidence that I can safely do so the next time at 120 kph, or that the limit can be safely raised. Concluding otherwise is a failure in thinking. A failure in thinking contributed significantly to the fire on Apollo 1; a similar failure resulted in misperceptions on how routine an effort Apollo 13 was; and it led to the launch of Challenger when it was so cold, the sealing material was no longer elastic. How are we doing, not just in space flight, but in other areas, about avoiding the types of failures in thinking that were manifest in these space flight examples?
Dr. Feynman had succeeded in demonstrating the applicability of an old saying to the particulars of the Challenger disaster. It is an old saying because it labels a long evident phenomenon, one that was pertinent to the Apollo 1 and Apollo 13 events as well. “Familiarity breeds contempt.” After the Mercury and Gemini projects, no one imagined that a ground test could be a great hazard. Flight, yes, but ground? There’d been countless ground tests, tests in which no one was going anywhere. Yet there was a fire, because a number of small things overlooked due to familiarity added up to a huge hazard. Apollo 13 was moon flight five, to undertake moon landing three. Things were so familiar one couldn’t even attract a TV audience. And they very nearly lost Lovell, Hayes and Swigert on what many except those close to the technology viewed as a routine milk run. Challenger’s flight, the 25th for shuttles, carried a civilian schoolteacher. Those who made decisions found the flight so familiar that they acted as if the past successes justified relaxing the tolerance of safety limits. Who needs tight limits when it’s number 25? Afterwards, Dr. Feynman noted, on examining the events, “For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.” Have we learned that lesson about trying to fool nature, and not just in the area of technology and space flight, 25 years later?
Well it seems not. NASA’s managers who thought that the safety of the technology was about a thousand times greater than the line engineers estimated went ahead and tinkered with the technology. They ignored the limits that were in place in acknowledgement of its characteristics. And Challenger was sent flying, for 73 seconds. Nature wasn’t fooled. But in the past few years, something much more intricate, much more woven into the human nature, has been abominably tinkered with, and the limits set around it made almost non-existent. That something is nothing less than marriage and the family.
It is hard to think of a better characterization of the recent attempts to tinker with marriage and the family than that of an attempt to fool nature. A marriage can take place between a man and a man or a woman and a woman. Really? Even though conception is impossible for them to accomplish, a pair of men or a pair of women can be parents in the same way as can a man and woman who can accomplish it. You don’t say?! Whatever the makeup of a group of people, if they band together and claim the label, then they are as much a “family” as a genetically related grouping. Fascinating! One is left to wonder: Now that these people have tried to convince me of this, what will be their next endeavor? Will they try to sell me a bridge somewhere? Will they try to convince me that they have a potion that will turn rust into gold? No, that’s a hopeless task. But, how about passing laws that will require me to pay for the bridge whether or not it exists, and pay the price of gold for what is produced when the potion and rust are comingled, no matter what its chemical formula turns out to be? Here behind the lines, this last endeavor has indeed met with the success that would be unthinkable for the former ones. It even appears that those who undertook it actually think they have fooled nature, rather than actually having demonstrated the link between the words “fool” and “buffoon.”
Challenger disintegrated 19 years after Apollo 1 incinerated because of similar faulty thinking. The fault was not just that everything was under control, but that everything that needed to be controlled had been identified, and was capable of control. And there had been development in the fault. Apollo 1 happened because factors that should have been considered were not considered appropriately. For instance, the oxygen pressure used in the test to simulate flight conditions in the vacuum of space was so high that combustion was much more highly supported. And burn Apollo 1 indeed did. But by the time of Challenger, it was as if space flight had become that which was defined in the operations and maintenance manuals. The safe margins for undertaking it were those defined by the program managers, and they chose the factors, such as public relations, pertinent to the manipulation of these factors. Factors such as the loss of elasticity of O-ring material at freezing temperatures were simply ignored. And Challenger disintegrated. A failure in thinking was accompanied by a failure in learning.
A chilling parallel exists in the areas of marriage and the family. Even from a purely secular perspective, marriage and the family were seen as being important items. Laws were enacted to guard these important items. However, slowly and steadily, the tail began to wag the dog with respect to these items. Rather than being an item offered protection through the application of contract law principles, marriage became an item that was defined through considerations of contract law. Contracts can be terminated by legal processes. So it came to pass that marriages could, ostensibly, be terminated by legal processes. This was fundamentally erroneous, because it assumed that marriage was an item that existed only because laws had been passed. Worse yet, many ecclesial communities saw fit to take their cues from the law crafters, not from the principles of their faith and the nature of the institution of marriage, and accommodated the error. Indeed they went so far as to utterly abandon attempts to protect marriage, and disavow it as any of their business whatsoever. By 2002, a Canadian Anglican Archbishop was saying, “Well– the church can’t decide who gets married– the government, the provincial government controls marriage, and when clergy marry people, they do so as agents of the provincial government– licensed agents– and they have to abide by the laws of the country, the laws of the province, in terms of marrying people.” The day Challenger blew up, people behaved as if space flight were governed only by the contents of the manuals. Here behind the lines today, there prevails, evidently, the assumption that marriage is governed only by the contents of the law books.
The family, not unexpectedly, is not faring well, since it flows from marriage. As with marriage, it is being treated as if it were merely a legal construct, without any basis for existence outside the law books. Any group of people, and any children (my God, what will become of them?) they can manage to cause to be begotten through perversions of science or outright promiscuous fornication is, it seems, to be considered to be a “family.” And there is a trap here, and it could be sprung at any moment. If one eliminates the concept of a family as a faithful married man and woman and their children, what is the basis for assisting broken families? If anything can be as much of a family as anything else, then why is a broken family, say, a woman and her children who are destitute because the husband has abandoned them, and absconded with the available resources, worthy of society’s assistance? A family is a family is a family in this brave new world. Sometimes, though, imposed equalities can be as unjust as imposed inequalities, particularly in cases where mere legal constructs define a situation exclusively. There is a terrible disconnect here, and the separation gap is being force wider by those who worship the law and hold humanity in contempt. It is hard to imagine a more dangerous situation.
Lessons from Apollo 1 were badly learned, it seems, and the bad learners gave the world the Challenger tragedy. What does not seem to have been grasped, on a wider scale, is that policies, procedures, and even laws do not define reality. Rather, if these things are formulated in a vacuum, as if no other factors or principles were pertinent, bad things happen. It was bad when a spacecraft burned on the ground, and three men were incinerated. It was worse when a space shuttle disintegrated, and seven astronauts likewise perished. How bad will it be for marriage and the family if the course of action in society continues for much longer to be predicated on assumptions arising from comparable thought processes? Marriage and the family are not human constructs. They derive from considerations of the natural law. And to quote someone with a Nobel Prize in Physics whose work was predicated on only secular and natural considerations, “nature cannot be fooled.” Here behind the lines, there have been many attempts to fool nature of late. And it is time, past time, to put a stop to this buffoonery.
