Disaster of shuttle Challenger

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16 SOCIALIST ACTION MARCH 1986 The life of teacher Christa McAuliffe was sacrificed on Jan. 28 in a public-relations project that had fooled many people-until it ended in disaster.

By sending her up with the ill-fated space shuttle, the planners of the mission hoped to win more public support for their dead-end goal: To carve out parts of outer space on behalf of U.S. "national" military interests. The tragedy, which claimed the lives of seven astronauts, was a serious military setback for them.

It was candidate Ronald Reagan's idea in the 1984 election campaign to send up a teacher, whose only function on Challenger was to have been to televise two classes. Looking back, the idea appears as "nothing more than an effort to make space travel look mundane," according to the editors of the Boston Globe. That it was.

In August 1984, the National Education Association responded, "We don't need to send a teacher into outer space. We need to send teachers into classrooms fully equipped and ready to help students learn." That was correct. Still, many progressminded people looked forward with excitement to Christa McAuliffe's flight.

McAuliffe was deceived about the safety of the shuttle, as were most people. "Today's space shuttle," she said in an interview," isn't the type of thing, I think, that anybody really looks at with fear that there's going to be an accident. I feel, probably, safer doing something like that than driving around the New York streets."

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) knew differently, but deliberately fostered a cavalier attitude by including McAuliffe in the plans as a passenger-as if the shuttle were an ordinary airliner.

After the disaster, former astronaut Walter Schirra helped expose the deception, saying, "We don't even know how to fly the thing yet."

It appears that NASA needed to feed the safety delusion and to "include the public" by sending up a teacher because business and military support for the shuttle had fallen off. Contractor estimates of operating costs of $100 per pound for shuttle payloads had turned out to be low by a factor of 20. The Air Force, looking for a reliable way to put weapons in space, has increasingly leaned toward rockets without human crews.

For that reason, the public nonastronauts were recklessly invited aboard the shuttle. Christa McAuliffe and her family paid the price, and schoolchildren will have nightmares for some time.

Still, the promoters of the shuttle are continuing to push it. After all, the major contractors can only benefit financially from waste, sometimes even destruction, in the space program. Rockwell International, which built the four shuttle craft, reaped $595 million last year on revenues of $11 billion. Corporations such as Martin Marietta, Morton Thiokol, Lockheed, and Grumman are also at the trough.

General Dynamics is in the picture, too: James M. Beggs had to step aside as NASA director on Dec. 4, 1985, after he was indicted for fraud in connection with government contracts held by that corporation when he was a General Dynamics executive.

The governmental and corporate decisionmakers were aware of the three fatal accidents to U.S. and Soviet astronauts, the frequent malfunctions, and the recent launching failure in the French Ariane satellite program.

They were aware of the secret 1983 report, prepared by Sierra Energy and Risk Assessment Inc., a subcontractor to the Air Force Weapons Laboratory, which concluded that the chance of a catastrophic accident involving the solid-fuel booster rocket was 1 in 35. questioning the usefulness of a space program that focuses on sending humans up, the shuttle remains an important tool of the military. Paul Nisbet, an analyst quoted by the Wall Street Journal, expects the investigation of the Challenger explosion to go "as rapidly as possible to minimize the delays," because the shuttle is the only launch platform for the military space program today.

Future spy satellites depend on the shuttle. Before the explosion, classified cargoes were booked on three 1986 shuttle missions. One of the astronauts killed in the shuttle explosion, Ellison Onizuka, had flown on an entirely classified shuttle military mission in January 1985.

Such activities violate the 1967 Outer Space Treaty signed by the United States and the Soviet Union, which states that space exploration "shall be carried out for the benefit...of all countries...and shall be the province of all mankind."

That's an elementary principle for the space age, when everyone on earth has to stand under, and feel the effects of, humanmade objects in space.

"No secrets in space"

The entire shuttle project has been conducted in the opposite spirit—one of military secrecy. After the Challenger disaster, NASA took almost five hours to make its public statement, which said nothing, annoying even conservative commentators. Spokesman Jesse Moore did not even say that the astronauts were presumed dead, or answer a question about the amount of liquid fuel in the tank that exploded.

Of course, like anyone who witnessed the explosion, he knew the facts: Seven people had instantly died in an explosion of hundreds of tons of liquid hydrogen, one of the most powerful explosives.

The labor movement should consider boycotting a program that treats the public with such contempt. NASA even sought to silence its teacher-astronaut, who was an active union member, as she trained for the shuttle flight: Christa McAuliffe was forbidden to give interviews for weeks before the launch.

The unions have every reason to demand "No secrets in space" and respect for the 1967 treaty. The big military and space contractors are among the worst union-busters. Neither they nor the aerospace bureaucracy have any right to keep secrets from us. The little green box in Challenger that would "kill you in two seconds" if you found it on a beach? Tell us what it was!

Not just the shuttle, but the entire field of high-technology communications, from satellite links to disk-based data banks and cultural resources, cries out for an end to secrecy. Technology invites us to have access to more information and culture than ever before. But the corporations and the government deny it to us.

Working people not only have a right to know about the military and industrial risks to them, but also to put a stop to them. For that, we need public control and ownership of the large high-technology industries, which have already stained the U.S. space program with the blood of the Challenger astronauts—one of them a trusting teacher.

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