CBC ARROGANCE UPDATE: I reported earlier (and here) about a CBC interviewer (her name, apparently, is Jennifer Gates) who blamed the Columbia crash on American “arrogance.” It turns out that Canadian science fiction writer Spider Robinson saw it too. He writes:

Many will spin this new disaster to support their political agenda. Within minutes of the shuttle’s destruction, a CBC newstwit was asking my colleague, novelist Rob Sawyer, on the air if he didn’t agree that the tragedy was caused by American arrogance in the Middle East? He was so stunned by the question he answered it.

But the rest of his column is what’s really worth reading. Here’s an excerpt:

We need to put people on Mars, and in orbit, and keep them there. As the world simmers and stews in its own madness, the one thing we cannot afford to cut is our only means to rise above it.

Robert Heinlein said this planet is too fragile a basket for humanity to keep all its eggs in. We’re easily dumb and quarrelsome enough to drop the basket one of these days. If that happens, it would be nice if there were grandchildren somewhere to whom the cautionary tale might be told.

Indeed.

KEN LAYNE’S POST ABOUT COLUMBIA is a must-read. This guy needs his own newspaper, or something.

NEWS FROM THE OLD EUROPE:

Chirac is walking a political tightrope at home, where public opinion is set against any military action not sanctioned by the UN and where an immigrant population of four million Muslims exercises an unspoken influence on policy.

Muslim youths in Paris and other cities are carrying out a low-level “intifada” against French authority, burning cars in nightly raids, mostly unreported in the national news. The risk of escalating violence is real.

In other words, French policy is the victim not of American imperialism, but of Arab colonialism, no?

BRIAN CARNELL REPORTS that the spray-on foam insulation used on the Shuttle external tank was reformulated to be CFC-free — and that one of the side effects is an increase in flaking. He has more on the subject — including a report that the reformulated foam led to flaking that caused significant damage to tiles on an earlier Shuttle mission — here. Very interesting. This New York Times story mentions the foam problem, but not the reformulation.

CHARLES KRAUTHAMMER WRITES:

The risk of catastrophe for a commercial jet is 1 in 2 million. For a fighter jet, it is 1 in 20,000. NASA’s best estimate for the shuttle was 1 in 240. Our experience now tells us that it is about 1 in 50.

That is a fantastic risk. It can be justified — but only for fantastic journeys. The ultimate problem with the shuttle is not O-rings or loose tiles but a mission that makes no sense. The launches are magnificent and inspiring. But the mission is to endlessly traverse the most dangerous part of space — the thin envelope of the atmosphere — to get in and out of orbit without going anywhere beyond. Yet it is that very beyond — the moon, the asteroids, Mars — that is the whole point of leaving Earth in the first place.

We slip the bonds of Earth not to spend 20 years in orbit studying zero-gravity nausea, but to set foot on new worlds, learn their mysteries, establish our presence.

Yes. As Robert Heinlein said, once you’re in orbit you’re halfway to anywhere. It seems odd to get that far, and then stop, but that’s what we’ve been doing.

UPDATE: Meanwhile, Jim Pinkerton writes:

In the wake of the Columbia tragedy, the arguments of the pro-space constituency are strong, but not strong enough. If space advocates can’t bring themselves to make the most powerful arguments of all—that space is vital to human freedom, even to human survival—then their cause will falter as the soaring spirit of heroism and martyrdom fades, and as the counter-arguments of the cost-benefiting, bean-counting critics gain footing.

He’s right. Read the whole thing.

IT’S NOT PALESTINE, ABU, — it’s Nineveh.

READER TIM KRAMER SENDS THIS PHOTO, which he says is of debris that landed at an airport he was using, and a firsthand account that I’ve posted over at InstaPundit Extra! It’s over there both because it’s long and because it raises a few odd questions. I should stress that while I have no particular reason to doubt it, I haven’t confirmed the details, either. So treat it with caution, and apply the critical intelligence of the Blogosphere.

HERE’S THE STATEMENT by the astronauts’ families.

DAVID JANES has an interesting picture that seems to show cracks in the Columbia left wing.

UPDATE: More, including some skepticism, here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Still more skepticism here.

Meanwhile reader Woody Emanuel writes:

The supposed photo of a shuttle wing is totally bogus. Someone had fun conning a paper to publish it.

There is no possibility of viewing either the upper or lower wing surfaces from the shuttle unless on a spacewalk, and then only the upper part of the wing. You can’t see the wings from any window in the shuttle; the cargo bay doors are always open during flight blocking any view of the wings anyway.

There would be no “crack” anyway. Tiles don’t crack – they get damaged. And NASA saw no need for for a wood stove pipe extending from the wing.

Several readers had similar comments.

INTERESTING POLL:

82% said the U.S. should continue manned space flights.

71% expected that an accident such as the one that occurred Saturday would happen sooner or later.

Count me “yes” in both categories.

HIGH-SCHOOL BLOGGER DAVID RUSSELL WRITES:

We didn’t watch astronauts land on the moon, we don’t have many notable space achievements, it’s all been done for us. My generation has always had astronauts, they aren’t heroes to us, we haven’t discovered anything new through them. We take astronauts for granted, space travel is supposed to be easy; we’re going to live on the moon. Today’s discoveries and feats are made through computers, how can I make that my hero? The people most effecting my generation are the computer programmers, the game makers, and those who brought us Napster and Kazaa.

The people who have accomplished great during our time on Earth are invisible to us. When was the last time you saw a poster of a computer programmer on your child’s wall?

Our ignorance is not an excuse but look at what we are left with. Generations before have explored many of the conceivable frontiers. We have no New World, no Oregon Trail, no gold rush, no Alaska, and no man on the moon. You’ve left us to do the almost impossible. We are lucky, and happy we have the things we have today. We’re glad we didn’t have to grow up without the Internet, cable TV and video games. But look at where you’ve left us.

We must achieve the almost impossible to go further than you. To go further than you we have to establish human life beyond the confines of our home. That is a mighty task you have left us with. Hopefully we can do that while finding the solutions to earthly problems in the process. We need a place to go, and we’ll find that place. Then we will go there, with our kids in the backseat (of the spacecraft) asking “Are we there yet?”

Until then, please forgive us as we learn just how much these events really mean to you.

Nice post.

THERE’S AN INTERESTING DEBATE ON SHUTTLE SUCCESSORS AND PROBLEMS over at JerryPournelle.com — just keep scrolling.

IT’S NOT WORTH THE RISK TO SEND PEOPLE, writes Scott Ott. We should send robots, instead.

DAVE WINER GRADES COLUMBIA COVERAGE:

I think they missed the big one. How about teaching us something about space and the universe. Seems like the perfect opportunity. They say we wouldn’t understand, but I’m not sure they’re right. I think maybe they’re just lazy.

Instead, he says, they’re covering it the way they cover everything: as a political story.

JOHN LOTT will be on the Larry Elder show at 7pm eastern time. It says you can listen live by clicking this link, once the show’s on.

UPDATE: The link didn’t work, but Arthur Silber blogged the show. Conclusion: “Lott sounds very, very weak. He knows he was wrong — and I guess he just thought he could get away with it. And he knows Larry has been a great champion of his, so he’s obviously very uncomfortable.”

I CAN’T TELL THE CONSPIRACY THEORIES WITHOUT A SCORECARD: Concern about voting machines being untrustworthy used to show up in email from militia types. Now it’s a staple of the left.

Which isn’t to say it’s wrong, necessarily. Anyway, I’ve already proposed a solution to the problem that’s eminently workable. I’d love to see Congress require it in federal elections, along with other anti-fraud measures like a requirement for photo ID and measures to ensure that people don’t vote twice. But I think that both parties have too much invested in voter fraud to get behind something like that. Cynical? Maybe. But that’s not the same as wrong.

THIS ANALYSIS OF COLUMBIA MEDIA COVERAGE — which I found through Romenesko, natch — mentions Bill Harwood, who used to edit my opeds at the University of Tennessee Daily Beacon. (“Your paragraphs are too long,” I remember him saying. I hope I’ve fixed that now. . . .) Here’s what it says:

Stern fans notwithstanding, at least this weekend belonged to the science guys and the space enthusiasts.

There was “CBS News” space consultant, Bill Harwood, who’s covered the comings and goings of the shuttle for at least 15 years, doing the kind of explanatory journalism that makes us all a little smarter while breaking the news that NASA’s suspicions were focused on the shuttle’s left wing.

I wish I’d seen that. I lost touch with Harwood years ago, but the last I heard he was covering Cape Canaveral for UPI. Then again, the story notes:

(It’s not Harwood’s fault, or even Rather’s, that CBS, which was the first of the Big Three to get its main anchor on the air Saturday morning, was also the first to ditch coverage, cutting away from a much-delayed NASA news conference to carry the Bob Hope Chrysler Golf Classic.)

Oh, well. Interestingly, though, it never occurs to me to turn to the Big Three when there’s breaking news: I generally alternate between CNN and Fox. I guess that’s because they never break to a golf tournament. Meanwhile this story from Mark Jurkowitz in the Boston Globe notes:

Yet, as often happens in today’s interconnected, high-tech universe, much of the reporting was done not by journalists, but by ordinary citizens: witnesses, video camera owners, and law-enforcement officials. In midafternoon, CBS interviewed Raymond Cervantes, a video camera ”hobbyist” who captured the shuttle’s breakup over Texas and described it as ”an unbelievable fireball.”

Thomas Kerss, the sheriff of Nacogdoches, Texas, told NBC what he knew about conditions on the ground where debris was landing. Throughout the day, on-the-scene observers provided insight and details.

I think that the network that manages to bring together this kind of reporting best will have a leg up on the others. Here’s a piece with tips for journalists on how to make use of the blogosphere.

THERE WILL BE A PRO-WAR RALLY at the Colorado state capitol building on February 16. Here’s a link to the press release. I hope a lot of Denver-area bloggers will go, and take their digital cameras.

Meanwhile, Denver’s own Dave Kopel is criticizing media coverage of the anti-war movement.

HERE’S MORE ON THE L.A. BLOGOSPHERE CONFERENCE being organized by Susannah Breslin, Xeni Jardin, and Beverly Tang. If you’re in the L.A. area, or can be, on February 15, don’t miss it!

SOME FOLKS AT NSF sent this photo of the flag at half staff on the South Pole. Like space explorers, Antarctic explorers do something dangerous and important that a lot of people would like to do despite its dangers and discomforts.

Meanwhile, over at GlennReynolds.com, I’ve posted a bunch of reader email. It was foursquare in favor of doing more, not less, in space. Since I sent them that posting I’ve read hundreds more emails, and what’s posted is still representative.

RAND SIMBERG has a column at NRO about the manned / unmanned space exploration debate. Excerpt:

If history is any guide, policymakers won’t ask the right questions, the useful questions, those fundamental metaquestions that haven’t been asked since the dawn of the space age and NASA’s founding. First and foremost among them are: Why do we have a “space program”? What are we trying to accomplish?

Every press interview, every congressional hearing, every blue-ribbon commission assumes answers to that question, and the assumption is assumed to be shared, and none of those assumptions are ever questioned. . . .

The debate about the future of space exploration should include the American people, and what they want to do in space, not just what they want, like voyeurs, to watch either government employees or robots do.

But it all starts by asking the right questions. And, by the way, that’s not robot work, either.

Read the whole thing.

MORE ON THOSE RADAR IMAGES: Reader Timothy Lang emails:

Research scientist at Colorado State University here. My specialization is radar meteorology. You expressed hope that the NEXRAD loops of the space shuttle plume would be saved. NOAA is actually doing this, with a Lake Charles radar loop of the debris cloud specifically at: Link.

There is a general archive of NEXRAD imagery at the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The following web page has data for the past month or so, from every radar:Link.

The debris cloud was tracked by multiple NEXRADs over a period of 6 or more hours. The backscatter signal from the debris was equivalent to a very weak rainstorm, but showed up clearly given the sunny weather at the time. Tough to speculate about exactly what kind of particles we’re seeing in these images, but I would suspect small (< 1 mm diameter) with slow fall speeds, as it took them a few hours to settle out. The radar reflectivity factor goes as the sixth power of particle diameter, so only a small handful of the largest particles will give the kind of signal we saw.

The radars would have a hard time picking up the big pieces that fell quickly to the ground, due to the slow scanning schemes employed in radar meteorology (as opposed to, say, military scanning). You have to be lucky to have the radar looking at the right angle at the right moment for fast-moving targets. But small stuff that takes a long time to fall out would be no problem to see.

Yes. Some people have told me that the big orange smear is probably an ionization trail, but others have told me that it’s small debris, and I think that’s right. If you look at this loop there’s a star-shaped pattern in the very first frame that I think is caused by bigger fragments, but I’m not sure. It’s not ground clutter because it changes. It appears in this loop too.

FORGET “BALLISTIC FINGERPRINTING” — TalkLeft reports that ordinary courtroom bullet-matching isn’t what it’s cracked up to be. I remember a lawyer telling me 20 years ago that he always challenged scientific evidence, and that even where the FBI lab was concerned, independent experts got different answers about half the time.

This seems to be a problem with “forensic science” in general. Hair, fiber, polygraphs, etc., all turn out to be rather more forensic than science.

OMENS AND IDIOTS: Lee Harris has a response to people who think that the Columbia explosion was a message from God. Excerpt:

The essence of human intelligence is the search for pattern. We seek it everywhere; and, if we are not terribly careful, we succeed in finding it everywhere—even where it is not. Yet it would be folly to condemn this instinctive craving for an imagined order that would mirror the true order of things, since this is the same drive that has produced the great edifice called Western science.

And nowhere is the distinctive Western-ness of Western science made clearer than in Arab response to the shuttle disaster. It is not that they feel the ominous whereas we do not, since I am convinced that, however inarticulately, we do—but that is where the similarity ends. We feel it—but we insist on going beyond the mere evidence of own feelings; and how hard this is to do is nowhere clearer than in the case before us. Yes, we see all the signs, but we must force ourselves to step back and to ask, “Does it really make sense to see this disaster as somehow magically attached to the fate of our nation—no matter how strongly we may make such a connection at the visceral level? Is it possible that the world could really be organized like that?”

The answer we give is a resounding, No. But this answer is only forthcoming because we exist in a civilization that has achieved the unique distinction of having successfully banished magical thinking from all those critical realms of life that were once and everywhere haunted by the spooks and spirits of primitive mind.

Well, mostly. There’s a lot of “magical thinking” in contemporary politics, even in Western nations.

The Stirrer has some observations on this subject, too. And my rather uncharitable response to such concerns can be found here.

UPDATE: Meryl Yourish has more.

MY TECHCENTRALSTATION COLUMN is up early this week. It’s about space.