Singing Potatoes
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Saturday, 1 February 2003
Columbia

As anyone not living under a rock already knows, the space shuttle Columbia exploded over Texas today.

We turned on the TV to see the endlessly repeating loop of the shuttle breaking up on the local Fox station, seventeen years and four days after the explosion of the Challenger. Just the loop playing visually, while the Fox anchors spoke over and over again about Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon and Indian-born Kalpana Chawla; the five other astronauts were mentioned only in the scrolling news ticker at the bottom of the screen, in between assurances that Homeland Security Director Tom Ridge had been briefed. (I will be mightily pissed if the White House tries to manipulate this tragedy into an excuse for war.)

I was going to write "I wonder how long it'll be before space shuttle debris shows up in on eBay", but less than two hours after the explosion, some asshole had already put up an auction of SPACE SHUTTLE COLUMBIA DEBRIS! (Link is to screen capture, as eBay took it down promptly. While I was writing this entry, another Columbia debris auction went up, and it too was taken down.)

Having tired of Fox's endless tape loop, we had switched over to NBC to watch the statements from NASA and the President, but NBC followed in Fox's footsteps; though they showed the group photo of the astronauts a couple of times during the President's speech, they showed an infographic of only one individual astronaut: Ilan Ramon. Apparently, the American astronauts (Rick Husband, Willie McCool, Dave Brown, Laurel Clark, Mike Anderson) and Ms. Chawla were too insignificant to show.

It was interesting listening to the warnings about not touching the debris. Fox News stated over and over again (in the scrolling ticker) that it was contaminated with toxic fuels, even though one of the people they interviewed said that any toxic contaminants would have been burned off in the upper atmosphere. I suppose they felt that the best way to keep people from disturbing the debris was to scare them, rather than to state (as the NASA administrators did) that it needed to remain undisturbed for the investigation into what went wrong.

But, given the two morons who apparently tried to sell it on eBay, perhaps that wasn't an unwise choice.

Posted by godfrey (link)
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Comments
FoxNews, yucko.

I habitually keep CNN on (a bad bad habit) so when I heard "NASA lost contact with the shuttle" when I woke up I figured it was some communications glitch, CNN as usual overreporting every little thing. Then it sunk in, as the voices of the people on TV kept sounding more and more worried....

CNN's actually doing a pretty good job today. Miles O'Brien did some not-so-bad on-the-fly explanations of what might have happened with a model shuttle, and they carried the press conference in full, where one scientist talked quite movingly about how he had grown up in the same area as Mike Anderson and the two of them had a friendly rivalry and he had told Anderson "I'll be your pathfinder." The guilt and grief in the room was palpable. I tend to avoid network news like poison, even (no, especially) though my father made his living in it for over thirty years. They're sort of repeating themselves now, as the investigation begins and there is less and less new stuff to report, but I think they haven't disgraced themselves too badly. They also had an interview with a man who had been making a documentary about Kalpana Chawla for four years -- I think she's something of a cultural heroine in India. They've also been showing little tidbits about all the astronauts all day long, so Ilan Ramon isn't the only focus.

I think what really bothers me is I heard the explosion happened something like sixteen minutes before they were due to land. It seems almost like if something had been one-square-inch-to-the-left different, they would have been able to slip sideways through and come home. That just bothers me.

I think it's just fine of NASA to tell people (and have CNN repeat it endlessly) that the debris is DANGEROUS, given the idiots who are likely to pick it up for souvenir status, even if they're not eBay-minded. I think that's smart.
Posted by Moira on 1 Feb 2003 18:46
Sorry that got so long, it's just been bugging me all damned day.
Posted by Moira on 1 Feb 2003 18:47
No apology needed.

Posted by Godfrey on 1 Feb 2003 19:50
Nobody ever went poor betting on the ignorance of the masses.
Posted by Lunchbox on 3 Feb 2003 11:20
I think what you want is "Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public" (Mencken).
Posted by Moira on 4 Feb 2003 18:20
it's been about a year-and-a-half since the Columbia disaster, and i've had a personal fascination with Ilan Ramon since the space shuttle's liftoff. If you find it so difficult to understand exactly why the media had such a great fixation on Ilan, then you are highly deficient in your understanding of history. This Israeli -the first in space, as well as the son of a Holocaust survivor- brought with him more than five thousand years of baggage with him, no ordinary burden. Not every astronaut has had to deal with such an obligation -that of being the first and only representative of his people while giving his people something to smile about. As a Jew, I remember watching the launch with a sense of relief because it had been the first time in a long time that Israel had earned the media's attention without being the victim of a terrorist attack. I personally believe that Ilan sacrificed himself for two nations and is therefore deserving of every second of the attention that has been given to him. Just something to think about.
Posted by elul2746 on 29 Jul 2004 22:00
I never said he wasn't deserving of it. If you'll go back and actually read what I wrote, I was complaining that the other five astronauts were given almost no mention, as though their deaths didn't matter.

Understand now?

Posted by Godfrey on 29 Jul 2004 23:26
Did any one else notice that the 'rocket fuel injector' in the e-bay auction is actually just a garden hose nozzle with the spray adjusting sleeve removed? And someone actually put a bid on it!? What a dumbass...
Posted by Andrew on 10 Aug 2004 18:56