NASA Chooses Environmentalism Over Astronaut Safety
by Andrew Bissell
Space Shuttle Discovery’s current mission, dubbed Return to Flight, was supposed to be a triumphant occasion. It was supposed to be a celebration of American astronauts’ return to the stars, and of NASA’s recovery from the tragic loss of Columbia in 2003.
Instead, a pall of dread and uncertainty has been cast over the mission. During the Shuttle’s ascent, a piece of foam insulation separated from the Shuttle’s external fuel tanks and struck the orbiter’s right wing. A similar mishap caused Columbia’s demise when its compromised heat shield failed to withstand the intense heat of atmospheric reentry. While NASA’s engineers do not believe that Discovery faces similar danger (at least according to their public statements to the media), they have already conducted a spacewalk to attempt minor repairs to the shuttle’s exterior—a measure without precedent in the history of manned space flight.
NASA has grounded all future shuttle flights until the chronic problem of foam separation has been resolved. But besides the obvious peril that the astronauts face, the truly dismaying element of this situation is that it could easily have been avoided. You see, the foam on the Space Shuttles used to work quite well, and kept astronauts safe during dozens of missions. But it also contained Freon, a chemical believed to deplete ozone from the atmosphere, and ultimately banned by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
As a result of the ban, NASA engineered a new, “environmentally friendly” foam, for use in future missions. It was never as effective as the earlier insulation. The Cato Institute’s Steven Milloy dubbed the new material “PC foam,” and reported, “[It] was an immediate problem. The first mission with PC foam resulted in eleven times more damaged thermal tiles on Columbia than the previous mission with Freon-based foam.” In 2001, NASA secured a special exemption from EPA to use Freon, but—like the plucky hippie who drives a dangerously small car because it emits less carbon dioxide—they decided to keep using the new foam anyway. Even the loss of the lives aboard Columbia did not move NASA to reconsider that dangerous choice.
Environmentalists like to pretend that their regulations pose no danger to human life and well-being—in fact, they usually succeed in convincing the public that they wish to protect people from the “rapacious greed of big corporations” (whom the greens seem to think earn profits in direct proportion to the amount of pollutants they release). Columbia’s destruction and Discovery’s predicament are stark demonstrations of the real impact of environmentalist regulation, which is, to hobble human industry and arrest the progress of life-enhancing (and life-saving) technologies. These atrocities are played out on a less publicized scale whenever a third world child loses his sight, because his diet lacked the vitamin A contained in genetically engineered rice; whenever an elderly person perishes in a heat wave because thirty years of anti-energy policies have made it too expensive for him to run his air-conditioner; whenever a poor inhabitant of Africa succumbs to the malarial mosquitoes that run rampant thanks to the ban on DDT.
Ironically enough, Mission Commander Eileen Collins decided to make the Shuttle a platform for the very ideas that have placed her and the other astronauts in mortal danger. Broadcasting from orbit, she pleaded with us planet-dwellers to “take good care of the Earth and replace the resources that have been used.” This from someone whose society has used massive amounts of resources to launch her into outer space! She went on to say, “The atmosphere almost looks like an eggshell on an egg, it's so very thin. We know that we don't have much air, we need to protect what we have.”
I doubt the atmosphere will feel quite so thin when she and her fellow astronauts reenter it, and the friction becomes so great that temperatures around the shuttle exceed two thousand degrees Fahrenheit. I hope against hope that their heat shield holds. If it doesn’t, NASA’s fetish with the anti-human ideas of environmentalism will be to blame.
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