AIAA San Francisco Section Newsletter September 1995 Risky Business Danger: The Space Program's Neglected Asset by Brenda Forman Last month's shuttle-Mir docking was a spacenik's dream, meticulously prepared, flawlessly executed, a hugely difficult feat done with the apparent ease that only consummate skill can produce. Two spacecraft, each weighing a hundred tons or more, slid smoothly together with hardly a thump to form the largest spacecraft ever to orbit this planet. So why didn't the country get excited about it? That elegant docking maneuver was a fiendishly difficult thing to do -- and if it had not gone precisely according to plan, the consequences to both shuttle and Mir might well have been horrendous. Yet nobody in either the media or the public at large stood up to cheer. Polite notices in the press, yes, but enthusiasm? Not discernibly. There's a paradox here. The public lavishes praise and applause on athletes for performing amazing feats with seeming ease, yet when astronauts perform even more astounding feats with equal seeming ease, the public largely yawns. A ball player gets major product endorsements for batting 350 but an astronaut has to bat a thousand without fail -- and nobody seems to notice. Maybe it's because the space program has always downplayed the sheer, naked danger of spaceflight. Americans might get a lot more involved with the program if they realized that anybody who goes into space has by that very act put their lives on the line. At launch, a balky rocket could blow you to smithereens. On orbit, a hull breach or a debris collision could kill you (and do so particularly nastily) by explosive decompression. At landing, your shuttle's brakes might fail, your tires might blow, or if you happen to be a Russian, your drogue chutes might not open, causing you to hit the steppes of Central Asia with terminal velocity. Instead, determined, even obsessive understatement has been the space program's idiom since its inception. Apparently deciding that continued Congressional funding required that space flight never seem particularly risky or dangerous, NASA never copped publicly to the difficulty and diceyness of the whole undertaking. Trouble is, the effect conveyed is dull and banal -- the very antithesis of space flight's true nature. Instead of romantic figures, the astronauts come off looking like automatons. "Houston, we've had a problem," for example, hardly conveys the dire peril of the Apollo 13 crew. But it is revealing that as soon as the peril was recognized, the whole world's attention was riveted on the crew's fate. (It is equally revealing that applications for astronaut training tripled in the wake of the Challenger disaster.) Americans love excitement and suspense, not dullness and banality. They are ecstatic when somebody survives a dangerous situation by skill and nerve. But first they have to know the situation is dangerous! Look at the homecoming welcome we gave that pilot downed in Bosnia. He deserved it. His rescuers deserved it. But who would have noticed if nobody had ever told us how vicious that war is, how murderous his pursuers were or how deathly his danger was? There's a moment in the movie, "Apollo 13" (SEE it, folks, it's terrific!) where Jim Lovell's wife is told that all the networks have refused to broadcast the astronauts' telecast from space because they "have made landing on the moon as boring as going to Pittsburgh." Only after death threatens the mission does the media converge on the story. Danger, in short, is news; success, unassociated with peril, is not. That's not the media's fault, either. They cover what we will watch. Yet none of this is dramatized in any of our public announcements about space travel. Hell, it was years before any of the astronauts even 'fessed up to getting nauseous in space! As a result, few Americans seem to realize that every success in space is a triumph against major odds. There's the additional problem that success seems to excite us only in the context of conflict. We thrive on partisanship, not cooperation. Political campaigns, football games and Oscar nominations get us excited. We adored the Apollo program until we decided we had "won" the "space race." Now we are cooperating with that old adversary instead. That's a pretty mind-bending concept to anybody old enough to recall the bad old days of the Cold War and the "Evil Empire." But by that very token, we've subtracted the crucial ingredient for public enthusiasm, conflict. Now, I am certainly not advocating any return to East-West conflict. But competitive or cooperative, space efforts will always be dangerous, and arguably, that deserves a little dramatization. The renowned opera diva, Bererly Sills, once advised a rising your singer not to make the high notes seem too easy. The audience wants the excitement, she said. Wise advice. The space program might usefully consider it. Space flight is an adventure, not a routine. It is exciting, not run-of-the- mill. It is dangerous and if any one of a thousand things goes wrong, it is scary as hell. Maybe it's time to let the American public in on the secret.