With its stars and stripes on the left wing and the letters “USA” on the right wing, the space shuttle Columbia was a potent symbol. She may have been technologically old, but every time she came home she worked her way a little deeper into people’s affections. Toy models of her were given to the boys and girls born in the eighties. She had a snub nose. She was “a good old girl,” and her disintegration over Texas was experienced with infinite sadness. Farewell Columbia.
The ship is loved, its controllers are not. To the outside observer, the government space agency NASA seems to be a constant target for criticism and thinly veiled ridicule, both from the media and other government departments. With the Columbia disaster it seems to have taken an even bigger beating than usual, with calls for its recently appointed director to resign. I can hear the charges already: ‘failing to safeguard a national treasure,’ ‘accident waiting to happen,’ ‘organic incompetence.’
The space agency itself seems almost too ready to blame its own apparent incompetence and stupidity. We read that the shuttle maintenance program has been neglected and under-funded. The federal government states publicly that funding of NASA is “ineffective.” And yes, even by the extravagant standards of the welfare-warfare state, a shuttle journey is a very expensive trip: you don’t get much change from $500 million.
All this is so much smoke. While all bureaucracies tend to scrabble furiously to cover their tracks when things go wrong, I would guess that NASA, given its responsibilities and high visibility, is actually better than other departments in respect of attention to safety issues. Repairs have been carried out, and flights have certainly been postponed when conditions did not allow for safe missions. Second, the success of previous missions demonstrates that, despite all the backbiting, NASA as a technical organization is manifestly not completely incompetent or stupid. Third, under-funding arguments are to be mistrusted: their hidden logic is that if the cause of accident is indeed proven to be the result of under-funding, no-one would be held responsible, because ‘they did the best they could with available resources.’ In short, they are a cop-out.
The rush to put the shuttle program on hold is also deceptive. As a mere interested observer with no knowledge of rockets, I believe the space shuttle is still the only reasonably functional vehicle which the US possesses for getting manned flights into space, and is scheduled to remain flying for at least another 10 years. News stories on the web have quoted a possible shuttle life-span of some 40 or 50 years, and Columbia was only 28. While there is some debate on the relative merits of manned and unmanned space flight, the reality is that everyone is anxious to get the shuttle program back on track.
That desire will not stop the recriminations and reorganizations, which are the lifeblood of bureaucratic politics. As they continue, so the state apparatus grows in size and appetite, notwithstanding all expressed intentions to achieve “better stewardship of American tax dollars” (bureaucratic translation: ‘taking money from your department, giving it to my department, and then getting some more’).
It is also axiomatic that those in command of the apparatus tend to try to increase their own power and reach over time. Fierce in-fighting takes place between government agencies as they compete for resources – money and people, and as individual directors compete for positions of power. In the specific and prestigious domain of space exploration and its uses, the hierarchy of US government organizations involved is incredibly complex, and is complicated by the overlap of civilian bureaucracy with all three arms of the military.
The military applications of space exploration have been brought into much sharper focus over the last 2½ years. New York professor Karl Grossman, who has written extensively on the dangers of the use of nuclear power in space, wrote in an article in December 2000 for example, how US preparations to wage war in and from space would be getting a huge boost with the assumption of power by George W. Bush and Richard Cheney. But these concerns are not new. There has always been something of a military flavour to space exploration, even in the early years when ‘superpower rivalry’ was expressed in the ‘space race.’ Soothing noises were made about the value of scientific experiments and the aspirations of all humanity, but the underlying reality was, and is, that it is in the nature of nationalist-statist undertakings constantly to be seeking a power advantage over real or imagined rivals. This has historically been done through the combination of technological superiority and territorial control, which expanded to aerial control (command of the air), and now increasingly is seen as ‘spatial’ or ‘universal’ control (command of space).
Greater emphasis on the military usefulness of space programs would be consistent with a bureaucratic tussle scenario in which, sooner rather than later, the monies spent on the ageing shuttle (ineffective in terms of actual weaponry although still militarily useful for tests of ancillary equipment such as long-range cameras), could be re-allocated to funding some faster and sexier form of rocket propulsion, thereby facilitating the aggressive military aim of the “conquest of space” in the future. 
The appointment of Sean O’Keefe to the directorship of NASA in early 2002 should be seen in this light. At a simple level, the appointment can legitimately be regarded as an effort at greater budgetary rigour, based on his good reputation as a manager and prior experience in the Office of Management and Budget. A closer look at his background however – almost exclusively in defense and national security-related issues – would confirm the much more plausible hypothesis that his appointment was designed to ensure NASA is placed under the military wing, and brought firmly into line with the overriding objectives of ‘pre-emptive hegemony’ as defined in the National Security Strategy.
For NASA, the current situation is described semi-officially as being a cross-road, or dilemma. At the basic level, that’s a clear signal that more money will be required. Sure enough, we learn from the director that the agency faces a “distance and time dilemma” – meaning in essence that it needs to find faster systems of propulsion and to deal with the problems of keeping humans in space for longer periods. These and other problems may be couched in the language of a universalist, peaceful and scientifically-based space program, but they are quite transparently “dual-use,” in that faster propulsion systems and “longer dwell times” will be also required to achieve the vital (read ‘nationalist-imperial’) goal of racing to seize the military high ground of space against an adversary who “might have space capabilities.”
The problem with all this has always been that it is impossible to know if you are ahead of or behind the phantom menace. When the adversary does not exist, it has to be invented. So now we get the insane abstraction of the “war on terror” being used to justify a ratcheting up of the discourse and language of “space supremacy.”
To confirm this, I strongly recommend a reading of a speech given by Peter B. Teets to the Air Force National Symposium in Los Angeles on November 15th 2002, which includes these memorable words:
“We in the military space business are part of the nation’s warfighting team, and we will make a vitally important contribution to any conflict that we face!…. The work we are doing now will make a very real difference to the outcome of our war on terrorism.”
The appointment of Teets, almost at the same time as Sean O’Keefe took over at NASA, to the dual roles of Under-Secretary of the Air Force and Director of the National Reconnaissance Office, has to be understood against a slightly different background. It is a classic example of the ‘revolving door’ between industry and government. Teets retired from the chairmanship of Lockheed Martin in October 1999, reportedly admitting (graciously, it would seem) that he was in part responsible for the company’s lack-lustre performance at the time. Lockheed Martin and Boeing are equal partners in United Space Alliance, a company which, “as a contractor for NASA, is responsible for the day-to-day operation and management of the U.S. Space Shuttle fleet.” Finally, Teets’ appointment should be viewed in the light of the work of the so-called “Rumsfeld Commission,” also known as the “National Security Space Commission,” which in January 2001 issued its massive report containing recommendations on the management and organization of ‘National Security Space.’
A few weeks after his appointment, Teets announced:
“I intend to create an integrated national security space capability… In moving ahead with this war on terrorism, it’s going to be important for us to have persistent intelligence – universal in terms of time, but also universal in terms of space, and on the surface, under the surface, etcetera…. ” ~ US Air Force Press Briefing, February 7, 2002
The newspeak buzzwords of national security space capability are “space transformation,” the “joint warfighting concept” and “usa” – which stands not for United States of America, as it did on Columbia’s right wing, but for “universal situational awareness.” In plain language, that means knowing what’s going on everywhere, all of the time. And it is one of the goals of National Security Space Integration.
This “paving of the road of 21st century warfare,” with its triple objectives of gaining and maintaining control of the high ground, applying the capabilities of the new medium to all conceivable forms of warfighting and developing a new cadre of “space professionals” reads a little bit like something out of “Alice in Wonderland” – a Mad Hatter’s Tea Party. Meet players like the “National Security Space Architect,” who brings to the party not only “impressive space credentials, but a strong warfighter perspective to space”; meet also the “Director of National Security Space Integration,” the Director of Air Force Space Acquisition” and the at the time as yet unappointed (NRO) “Deputy for Military Space.”
It is tempting to think of all these members of the team as fighting each other, and of reorganizational and resource allocation battles taking place all over the shop: indeed, just as one example, the US Space Command was last year absorbed by the US Strategic Command. And all this ‘warfighting’ talk ignores a small legal problem. Just as in the parlance of “homeland security,” bureaucrats refer to the “civil liberties hurdles which still need to be overcome,” meaning they haven’t yet managed to destroy all freedom, so in the race to militarize space the would-be space warriors face the small matter of international law, although in all their utterances they sound blissfully unaware of it. The US is a signatory to the United Nations Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which effectively bans the weaponization of space.
Even in this context, however, it seems (and we should perhaps no longer be surprised) that international treaties do not count for much. When in November 2000 a resolution reaffirming the outer space treaty was voted on in the UN, nearly all member countries voted in favour. Just three states abstained: the US, Israel and Micronesia (What’s that, you may well ask. Answer: “a small developing island nation in the Western Pacific”).
I am prepared to go along with arguments that the UN is redundant, and that there is not much point to “all that useless talk” when states can ignore resolutions as it suits them and the final resolution comes down to military power and the will to inflict absolute annihilation. Also, in terms of free enterprise, the outer space treaty is a poor instrument, insisting as it does that only states have rights when it comes to space exploration. But none of that makes it morally right for any one state to wield absolute power in an aggressive manner, be it over its own people, a small portion of humanity or, who knows, the whole of it some day.
In closing, I come back to Columbia.
It is premature to jump to any conclusion, though it is well worth reading about the possible explanations for the disaster circulating on the Internet, many of which have fascinating ramifications. To me the most promising explanation so far seems to be that leading-edge experiments involving the use of spectral imaging were being carried out on board, both for the purposes of obtaining “see in the dark” long-range pictures from space and for testing possible new, highly radioactive, propulsion fuels. In the process of these experiments an unintended and probably unforeseeable miscalculation of the effects of electromagnetic energy may have occurred, leading to a devastating lightning or similar electrical strike on Columbia’s left wing.
The plausibility of this explanation increases if you bear in mind what I mentioned earlier about the military focus behind the appointment of O’Keefe a year ago, the stated need for quicker launches and much faster propulsion in the future, the publicized key role of universal surveillance from space in “times of war,” and the increasingly tight integration of NASA into military planning.
However, if it were true, this explanation of the event would involve considerable loss of face, and might also be judged to be too revealing of the military applications of the space program. In a sane world, it would not be difficult for NASA to admit to such things: that experiments do sometimes go wrong, and in this case that the ultimate price was paid for one that went totally wrong. But given the insane world of the “war on terror” in which we find ourselves, and the time-honoured cult of conspiratorial secrecy which prevails in all matters governmental, there is a strong likelihood, despite all assurances to the contrary, that the panel of military brass now charged with investigating what caused the disaster would not be permitted openly to publish what went wrong. The all-encompassing shroud of ‘national security’ is pretty thin and threadbare, but time and again, investigators are either told to put it on, or themselves decide to wear it, so as not to let the cat out of the bag.
For the time being, there seems to be no alternative to the shuttle for manned space flight, so the only real conundrum the investigating panel would thus be likely to face is how to devise and offer up for public consumption an explanation which would enable the program to get going again. For this purpose their explanation would have to point preferably to some plausible outside factor, rather than to any structural faults in Columbia, or, if such could not be found, to a fault on the shuttle which could subsequently be demonstrated to have been successfully repaired. This was how the Challenger disaster was handled in 1986, and provides a politically expedient precedent. Note
The composition of the panel, known as the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, is interesting, and seems to suggest that some may believe Columbia was zapped by a bolt from the blue: apart from the chairman of the panel, Rear Admiral (Ret.) Harold Gehman, who was in charge of the military investigation of the bombing of the USS Cole in Yemen, and Rear Admiral Stephen Turcotte, commander of the U.S. Naval Safety Center at Norfolk, Virginia, other members are:
- Major General John L. Barry, director of Plans and Programs, HQ Air Force Materiel Command at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. This base is the home of the notorious top-secret “Hangar 18” which houses relics from the 1947 Roswell, New Mexico “UFO incident.”
- Major General Kenneth W. Hess, U.S. Air Force Chief of Safety, Kirtland Air Force base, New Mexico. The base runs the Directed Energy Directorate of the Air Force’s Directed Energy Laboratory: its charter is to improve the Air Force’s ability to track missiles and then destroy them with laser energy through the atmosphere.
- Brigadier General Duane W. Deal, for whom the USAF website provides the following information: “Brig. Gen. Duane W. Deal is Commander, 21st Space Wing, Peterson Air Force Base, Colo. The Air Force’s largest wing geographically and organizationally, the wing consists of a work force of more than 6,000 officer, enlisted, civilian and contract employees. This work force provides missile warning and space control for combat forces and the governments of the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom through its 35 units operating 14 space weapon systems at 20 worldwide locations in six countries spread across 10 time zones.”
Thanks to Jim Rarey for the above information.
February 15, 2003
Richard Wall (send him mail) is a freelance translator, specializing in the social sciences, who lives in Estoril, Portugal.
