Song Lyric of the Day (‘Eve of Destruction,’ on Returning From ‘Four Days in Space’)

“Ah, you may leave here for four days in space
But when you return, it's the same old place
The poundin' of the drums, the pride and disgrace.”—American rock ‘n’ roll songwriter P.F. Sloan (1945-2015), “Eve of Destruction” (1965), performed by Barry McGuire from the album of the same name

NASA’s successful launch of the Artemis II space program—marking America’s return to the moon for the first time in a half century—was rightly celebrated as a resumption of a scientific and technological marvel. 

But I was also struck by the conjunction of events in the above lyrics from Barry McGuire’s compelling protest song of the mid-Sixties, as well as a repetition of that today.

Even as the Gemini missions were taking the space program to another level six decades ago, tensions were rising in the Mideast, as Israel and its Arab neighbors confronted each other over control of water sources in the Jordan River drainage basin—or, as McGuire sang, “You don't believe in war, but what's that gun you're totin'?/And even the Jordan River has bodies floatin'.”

Now, even as so many eyes are lifted to the skies, the focus of so much of the world remains on the Mideast, only this time shifting from the Jordan River to the Strait of Hormuz, where America’s current President is unabashedly engaging in “the poundin’ of the drums, the pride and disgrace.”

Some may wonder if the current war actually represents “the Eve of Destruction.” But how else to interpret the current Oval Office occupant’s threat to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Ages, where they belong”?

Flashback, January 1986: Challenger Explosion Rocks Space Shuttle Program

With its new shuttle flight delayed repeatedly by high winds, a frozen hatch handle and other issues, the National Air Space and Space Administration (NASA) gave the go-ahead to launch Challenger STS-51L—and watched along with the rest of the world as it exploded just 73 seconds after blastoff in late January 1986.

Tremendous publicity had been building for the flight in the months before, largely because of New Hampshire educator Christa McAuliffe, a civilian who had been tapped for NASA's "Teacher in Space" program.

The shock was compounded because this represented the first set of NASA casualties since Apollo 1 crewmembers Ed White, Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee died during a launchpad exercise on Jan. 27, 1967. Space flight, once full of danger, had come to seem entirely safe and routine, with the space shuttle program in particular successfully completing 24 missions in a row.

That night, Ronald Reagan preempted his scheduled State of the Union speech to deliver perhaps the most memorable speech of his Presidency, quoting poet John Gillespie Magee Jr. to evoke how the seven deceased astronauts had “slipped the surly bonds of earth.”

But his more important action lay less in reassuring a grieving nation than in signing, with bipartisan support, Executive Order 12546 creating the Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident.

Tom Reinhardt’s December 2021 post on “The Days Forward” blog on his experience as a staffer for the blue-ribbon Rogers Commission pinpointed how the panel’s deliberations took a decisive turn.

Chairman William Rogers, a former Attorney General and Secretary of State, had just heard from NASA officials that they had seen a plume of flame escaping from one of the solid rocket boosters but had not passed the information up the chain of command. Rogers immediately left the room and phoned Reagan.

When he returned, Reinhardt was told by his boss, “the mission of the Commission had just changed from overseeing the Challenger investigation to conducting it.”

The 11 active commission members (General Chuck Yeager ended up attending only one meeting) were then divided into work groups with support staff tasked with particular investigative responsibilities. Meanwhile, several thousand personnel from NASA and the Department of Defense searched for and collected the surviving shuttle wreckage.

During the investigation, the commission discovered that sharply dropping temperatures on the morning of the flight led to a failure of the O-rings sealing the joints in the boosters. . Morton Thiokol, the manufacturer of the shuttle’s solid rocket boosters, had been alerted about this by structural engineer Roger Boisjoly, who as early as six months before the disaster had written a memo warning that the defect could result in “a catastrophe of the highest order–loss of human life.” On a teleconference the night before the launch between the company and NASA, he and other engineers at Morton Thiokol urged that the flight be delayed.

But his listeners, in thrall to the recent shuttle safety record, the notion of “acceptable risk,” and the existence of a backup O-ring, dismissed these concerns. As Boisjoly remembered:

I then grabbed the photographic evidence showing the hot gas blow-by and placed it on the table and, somewhat angered, admonished them to look and not ignore what the photos were telling us, namely, that low temperature indeed caused more hot gas blow-by in the joints. I too received the same cold stares as [fellow engineer] Arnie [Thompson] with looks as if to say, ‘Go away and don’t bother us with the facts.’ At that moment I felt totally helpless and felt that further argument was fruitless, so I, too, stopped pressing my case.

The next morning, Thompson couldn’t bear to watch the launch live on TV. After denouncing the dismissal of his warnings and his colleagues’ admonitions as “unethical” at the Rogers Commission hearings, Boisjoly felt the attitude towards him at Morton Thiokol uncomfortable enough that he eventually resigned.

(Olivia Burgess’s excellent post about Boisjoly’s dilemma as participant-turned-whistleblower can be found here.)

The NASA decisionmakers, according to the Rogers Commission, “were unaware of the initial written recommendation of the contractor advising against the launch at temperatures below 53 degrees Fahrenheit [11.7 degrees C] and the continuing opposition of the engineers at [Morton] Thiokol after the management reversed its position."

The final report of the commission, released four months after it was formed, made the following recommendations on how to avoid future disasters, including in the areas of:

*design;
*independent oversight;
*shuttle management structure;
*astronauts in management;
*a shuttle safety panel;
*criticality review and hazard analysis;
*safety organization;
*improved communications;
*landing safety;
*launch abort and crew escape;
*flight rate; and
*maintenance safeguards.

Although Morton Thiokol executives never faced criminal charges over the disaster, they, along with NASA, absorbed blame for it, and were hit where it hurt—in the pocketbook (a reported $4.6 million settlement paid to the families of four crew members and a $10 million penalty taken out of future profits) and reputational loss (as an avatar for engineering negligence and prioritizing financial contract pressure over safety).

This Day in Scientific History (Death of Robert Goddard, Secretive Space Pioneer)

Aug. 10, 1945— Robert H. Goddard, a physicist who shook off academic bewilderment and even public derision to perfect the principles of rocketry that helped launch the Space Age, died at age 62 from throat cancer in Baltimore, Md.

The importance of Goddard to American aerospace can be summed up quickly enough. C.D.B. Bryan’s The National Air and Space Museum ranks the scientist’s March 1926 launch of the world's first flight of a liquid-propelled rocket as comparable to the Wrights’ maiden flight at Kitty Hawk in 1903. More than 200 patents led Goddard, along with Russian Konstantin Tsiolkovskiy and the German Hermann Oberth, to be considered among the three “fathers” of modern spaceflight. In 1959, the National Air and Space Administration (NASA) established the Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, in his memory.

But, listed in such a fashion, the facts in the preceding paragraph are as inert as lines in a deadly high-school science text. Fundamentally, they tell us little to nothing about this pioneer.

They take on more significance—and more interest—when we understand the human being who achieved all this despite society’s misunderstanding and his own imperfections. That is when reading history is transformed, and that is what I’ll try to do in this short space.

Elon Musk’s Space X venture, for instance, would have been inconceivable without Goddard’s advances. (Indeed, another Musk concept, the futuristic “Hyperloop” transportation mode, owes much to another one Goddard’s speculations, contained in a 1905 paper that proposed traveling in a train-like vehicle inside a vacuum tube at very high speeds.)

The irony is that, while thousands around the world applauded in May as Space X carried humans once again, this time in a private commercial venture, into Earth's orbit—and as countless reporters and investors tracked the billionaire Musk’s every Tweet—the socially awkward Goddard was so appalled by ridicule directed towards him that he worked on many of his projects in utmost secrecy—and committed close associates to do likewise.

Introversion had so hamstrung Goddard at the start of his career that he almost gave up what would become his life’s work. Frail from a youthful bout with tuberculosis, he often proved preoccupied and absent-minded in chairing the physics and math departments at Clark University in Massachusetts. Early on, so few colleagues saw value in his work that in 1915, he had to look to the Smithsonian Institution for a lifeline to continue his research.

Not surprisingly, Goddard did not enjoy the instant name recognition that came to Wilbur and Orville Wright as aerospace pioneers. A few years after they made their breakthrough at Kitty Hawk, the brothers demonstrated their machine publicly. 

Unlike Goddard, they remained in the public eye because they formed a business and were ready to battle competitors in court for the credit for their invention. And unlike Goddard’s initial experiments with rockets, which carried neither human beings nor cargo, the ultimate purpose of the Wrights’ invention was easy for the human imagination to grasp: manned flight.

Yet Goddard differs from the Wrights in another sense that might make him more attractive to those fascinated by the lives of inventors: the deep devotion of a spouse. 

Neither Wilbur nor Orville ever married, and they depended crucially on their sister Katharine not only as a sounding board for their ideas but, in the case of Orville after a devastating injury, as virtually a nurse. (When she finally decided to marry, at age 52, Orville stopped speaking to her, only ending their estrangement two years later when she became fatally ill with pneumonia.)

In contrast, for all his shyness, Goddard was able to gain a wife who supported him personally and professionally. During a period in the 1930s, when he worked in Roswell, N.M., with a crew that never numbered more than seven people, Esther Goddard served as official photographer and was responsible for dousing fires caused by rocket exhausts.

Believing her husband to be a great man who never achieved his due in life, she worked unstintingly to ensure that he would in death. It wasn’t only that Esther filed more than three-fifths of the patents eventually credited to him after his demise, but that she mounted a herculean effort to document and promote his achievements. As recounted by biographer David A. Clary in Rocket Man: Robert H. Goddard and the Birth of the Space Age, this included:

*hiring two typists who helped transcribe her husband’s research—a voluminous collection of notes, photographs and photostats of his drawings that eventually amounted to 22 volumes;

*transcribing Robert’s diaries and lab notebooks (a task she was uniquely suited for, as she appears to have been one of the few who could decipher his frequently illegible scrawls);

*kick-started an authorized biography of her husband—then hired another biographer while the first suffered a nervous breakdown;

*helped compile her husband’s papers; and

*lectured extensively on Robert, attempting—successfully, as it turned out—to elevate him into what Clary calls “the Mount Rushmore of rocketry.”

Robert Goddard was fortunate that he had the love of Esther, as well as the support of three influential friends: Charles Greeley Abbot, Assistant Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, who helped him secure funds for his work; aviator Charles Lindbergh, who helped him secure grants from the Guggenheim Foundation; and philanthropist Harry Guggenheim, who not only provided Goddard with funding that amounted to $188,500 but helped bankroll Esther’s effort to preserve her husband’s memory.

But for them, he might have lived out his days in bitter disappointment. The media of the time did not help matters. His 1919 paper outlining his vision, “A Method for Reaching Extreme Altitudes,” led to the derisive nickname “Moon Man.” A New York Times editorial attacked him for lacking “the knowledge daily ladled out in high schools.” (The Gray Lady didn’t get around to a correction until 1969—after the launch of Apollo 11.) 

Even a particularly crucial breakthrough of Goddard’s in July 1929—a rocket that reached twice the altitude of his 1926 liquid-propelled launch—provoked snickers because of the noisy proceedings on his Aunt Effie’s remote farm in Auburn, Mass. (The next morning, one Worcester paper ran the headline, MOON ROCKET MISSES TARGET BY 238,799 ½ MILES.)

If man has been able to reach beyond his orbit, it is because figures like Goddard remained undeterred by such ignorant naysayers.