Remembering the Shuttle, Forgetting the Loom: Interpreting the Challenger Disaster
| September 24, 2013 | Posted by Webmaster under Volume 04, Number 3, May 1994 |
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Ann Larabee
Dept. of American Thought and Language
Michigan State University
21798ANL@msu.edu
As in a play, the nation rises again
Reborn of grief and ready to seek the stars;
Remembering the shuttle, forgetting the loom.
Howard Nemerov
On an Occasion of National Mourning
Lifepod
In 1993, in the wake of the World Trade Center bombing, a made-for-TV American movie called Lifepod depicted brutal, claustrophobic conditions in a small space craft, containing a handful of survivors from the terrorist bombing of a much larger space transport. Looking very much like the ocean liner from one of the first large-scale disaster films, The Poseidon Adventure (1972), the large space transport holds not enough “lifepods” for its passengers, and the one vessel that does escape is in bad repair and not sufficiently stocked with food or water. Furthermore, its design is inadequate for space navigation, and its pilot, trapped in a small chamber without solar shields, dies a slow and gruesomely pustulous death from radiation bombardment. The rest of the survivors fight with each other and their depleted technological surroundings until only two remain to be saved.
Blaming the survivors’ harsh conditions on a vaguely belligerent, self-serving, and inefficient governmental authority, Lifepod contains a lesson about preparedness, with imagistic references to the Cold War’s abandoned fallout shelters and the exploding Challenger space shuttle, which carried no escape vehicles. Lifepod depicts a hostile technosystem that controls air, food, and water, as the survivors pant, sweat, bleed, freeze and starve, at the mercy of their drifting enclosure. While this psychologically tense, physically urgent, claustrophobic existence throws body-technology relationships into sharp relief, the film argues that preparedness–the prediction of all exigencies under any conditions–is possible and necessary. Unlike the negligent lifepod, a well-designed, well-stocked escape vehicle would maintain technological transparency–that is, its inhabitants would take its smooth functioning for granted, and the border between body and machine would be translucent, the oar an extension of the arm. Evoking crisis in post-industrial cultures, cybernetic relations would be stabilized in the ideal lifepod.
A symbol of preparedness and accurate prediction, the lifeboat is both a physical and psychological escape from technocultural terrors and, more ambiguously, a condensed version of that same technoculture. In a radioactive, terrorist, and generally chaotic world, one can only plan a move to a smaller, safer box–ideally the enclosed world of the harmoniously functioning and disaster-resistent spaceship. While enthusiasts herald the spaceship as a lifeboat, a way of escaping a doomed planet and sowing the seeds of homo sapiens across the universe, the Challenger space shuttle explosion on 28 January 1986, demonstrated that increasingly scaled-down lifeworlds are not especially life-sustaining. Like the unfortunate inhabitants of the negligent lifepod, the Challenger seven lived to experience a gruesome drift, the long descending spiral to the ocean where pressure crushed the crew cabin. Later, critics of NASA would ask why there were no lifeboats on the shuttle, no means of escaping a relatively untested, inevitably disastrous technology, comprised of over 700 critical components, any one of which might cause a fatal accident. One of the lessons of the Challenger disaster was that in complex closed environments, catastrophe is inescapable and its victims–even friendly school teachers–have no viable means of ejection. This televised spectacle of claustrophobia and futility riveted millions, who helplessly viewed the exploding microcosm of post-industrial life. Gregory Whitehead writes that the media’s construction of the Challenger disaster was a “thanaturgical excess of fire & fire & light,” a Futurist’s necrodrama provoking dread and shock.1
The 1980’s witnessed an unprecedented number of such media-fed disasters–core breeches in nuclear reactors, sinking ships, oil spills, chemical leaks. With a nearly continuous spectacle of large-scale technological calamity–the Bhopal Union Carbide Plant’s emission of methyl isocyanate (December 1984), the Challenger Space Shuttle explosion (January 1986), the Chernobyl nuclear reactor core explosion (April 1986), the Exxon Valdez oil spill (March 1989)–the mass media declared the 1980’s, the “age of limits.” As Charles Perrow wrote in the wake of the Challenger disaster, the culture of high-risk technologies had made a “habit of courting disaster.”2 Perrow, in Normal Accidents, suggests that uncertainty and error are normal in a complex, “tightly coupled” system.3 In such a system, many components are highly interdependent, so that the failure of one component quickly escalates into total catastrophe. The unfolding of these catastrophes can neither be predicted nor prevented. While Perrow carefully frames certain “systems”–nuclear power plants, petrochemical plants, aircraft and airways, genetic engineering–he uses metaphors that suggest a broader cultural paradigm. In his tale, “A Day in the Life,” he describes “your” apparently familiar encounters with overheated coffeepots, lost keys, bus strikes, faulty automobile parts, all interacting in unpredictable ways to undermine “your” daily schedule.4 Intended as a parable to illuminate complex, tightly coupled systems, “A Day in the Life” implies that normal accidents comprise the very texture of post-industrial culture. The plugged tea kettle is more than a simile for a nuclear plant’s core meltdown, it is a component of the relentless, complex, uncertain technological composition of postmodern life. Similarly, the many interpretations of the Challenger disaster not only sought to find the cause of the accident, but to make some broader statements about artificial life and its organization. The Rogers Commission investigation of the accident, and the interpretations that followed, attempted to restore safety and transparency to body-technology relations in the lifepod.
The Rogers Commission determined that the shuttle exploded because of the hot gas breach of a seal, essentially comprised of putty and rubber washers (O-rings). Those parts, assembled by Morton Thiokol and familiar to anyone with a leaky faucet, were the central focus of testimony from engineers, who described evidence from earlier shuttle flights of “blow-by”–the leaking of hot gases from the booster seals. “Blow-by” was indicated by the presence of soot, ranging in color from gray to black. According to Morton Thiokol engineer and whistle-blower, Roger Boisjoly, black, which appeared when the seal was subjected to cold temperatures, indicated that the seal was going “away from the direction of goodness.”5 When the Challenger was launched under cold temperatures on the morning of January 28, the seal failed completely, and the shuttle caught fire. The Rogers Commission verified suspicions that the poorly designed seal of the right solid rocket booster was the technical cause of the accident. But it also accused the managers of NASA and its contractor for the solid rocket boosters, Morton Thiokol, of not heeding early warnings from engineers about the faulty seals.
Consisting of five published volumes, including 1700 pages of testimony and numerous appendices containing charts, graphs, and parts lists, the Rogers Commission report resembles product liability trials that set out to identify the responsibility for the technological failures of daily life–faulty wiring, exploding gas tanks, toys small enough to choke infants. According to Elaine Scarry, the product liability trial is a “cultural self-dramatization. The courtroom is a communal arena in which civilization’s ongoing expectations about objects are overtly (and sometimes noisily) announced.”6 Here, a narrative of disaster is constructed in order to restore civilization:
Implicit in this mimesis of restorability is the belief that catastrophes are themselves (not simply narratively but actually) reconstructable, the belief that the world can exist, usually does exist, should in this instance have existed, and may in this instance be “remakable” to exist, without . . . slippage.7
Part of this remaking is enacted through compensation for bodily damage, a healing of technological wounds through judgment and financial reward.
Like the judge and jury in a product liability case, the Rogers Commission was certainly engaged in a remaking of civilization and its projects. The trial was enacted before the public eye, a national demonstration to restore the narrative of technological progress with testimony from scientific experts. The commission’s broad mandate was to “investigate the circumstances surrounding the accident” and “develop recommendations for corrective or other action.”8 And this mandate was framed by a “firm national resolve” to restore the space program–a program that has reified cultural identity around a supposedly common endeavor that transcends cultural differences.9 In the many reiterations of the steps that led to disaster, in the meticulous documentation of the shuttle components’ performance and NASA decision-making hierarchies, the Rogers Commission report sought to reinvent the Nation–and indeed all human making–without blow-by and slippage.
The most spectacular moment in the Rogers Commission’s testimony was when Commission member and eminent physicist Richard Feynman dropped a bit of O-ring material into a glass of ice water to prove its lack of resiliency under cold temperatures. Immediately picked up by the press, who lionized Feynman, this simple impromptu experiment seemed to cut through the waffling, confusing, jargon-riddled rhetoric of the NASA decision-makers’ testimony. But perhaps more important, the experiment demonstrated that catastrophic failure occurs in basic technological parts and everyday household experience. As engineer Roger Boisjoly later claimed, “most failures occur because some minor subsystem gives: 25-cent washers, $2.50 bolts, $25 clevis pins.”10 The press claimed whistle-blowers Feynman and Boisjoly as heroes precisely because they seemed to expose the simple truth about quotidian life in the technological age. Our most familiar objects carry incipient, unforeseen, body-threatening dangers: in his discussion of technological accidents, sociologist Ron Westrum writes, “A computer chip smaller than a thumbtack can send an airliner crashing into a hillside.”11 The preface to the Rogers Commission report states:
The Commission construed its mandate somewhat broadly to include recommendations on safety matters not necessarily involved in this accident but which require attention to make future flights safer. Careful attention was given to concerns expressed by astronauts because the Space Shuttle program will only succeed if the highly qualified men and women who fly the Shuttle have confidence in the system.12
As a public hearing on body-technology relations, the Commission report attempted to restore confidence in even minor sub-systems, to reinstate a national faith in technological existence, made safe through vigilance and the most minute surveillance, down to the thumbtacks.
Disappearing Bodies
What is most strikingly absent from the remade world of the technocractic Rogers Commission report is any effort to reconstruct and assess bodily damage. While it opens with the now famous photograph of the smiling shuttle astronauts and payload specialists in their shiny sky-blue space suits, posed with an American flag and a toy model of the Challenger, the report contains no discussion of the bodies. The corpses were found in March by salvage divers, working on their hands and knees in low-visibility conditions, feeling about in the debris until one spotted a space suit.13 The Rogers Commission took testimony until early May, but almost no forensic evidence was given, nor did the commission publicly express any desire for such evidence. The only exception lies in the testimony of FBI special agent Stanley Klein on February 7, who reported that:
we do have human hair, Negro hair, Oriental hair, and hair from two different brown-haired Caucasians, and what is interesting, according to the laboratory, is that there were no signs of heat damage to any of the hair, which was surprising. The hair came from face seals, fragments of helmets, and helmet liners, and headrests.14
This reduction to anonymity of NASA’s highly-touted racially and ethnically diverse shuttle crew was quickly passed over in favor of a discussion of possible laser terrorism by Libyan dissidents and Puerto Rican pro-independence groups.
The Rogers Commission followed NASA’s lead. NASA’s official position in the disaster’s aftermath was that the astronauts and payload specialists had died instantly, an assumption easily accepted by television viewers who had watched the fiery explosion. And yet careful study of footage from the explosion clearly revealed that the forward fuselage containing the crew compartment hurtled to the ocean intact. Neither NASA nor the Rogers Commission were very willing to admit this dangerous fact as they attempted to restore public faith in technology. Indeed, while NASA now displays the Challenger’s barnacled, carefully arranged debris in a hangar at the Kennedy Space Center, the crew compartment is not part of the reconstruction.
The strict control of information surrounding the bodies of the lost Challenger astronauts and payload specialists had purposes beyond delicacy and respect for the crew’s loved ones. Their relatively long and horrifying deaths had to be suppressed in the interests of continuing manned space flight. With two eminent astronauts–Sally Ride and Neil Armstrong–participating, the presidential investigative committee remained committed to manned spaceflight, hearing from other astronauts who testified that “man can do many wonderful things in orbit.”15 However, former Challenger pilot Paul Weitz suggested that:
Every time you get people inside and around the orbiter you stand a chance of inadvertent damage of whatever type, whether you leave a tool behind or whether you, without knowing it, step on a wire bundle or a tube or something along those lines.16
While the enormously complicated technologies of the space shuttle might, in ideal circumstances, provide a secure enclosure for experimental human and animal bodies, those bodies are marked by mundane clumsiness, inadvertent behaviors, everyday chance and uncertainty.
Furthermore, bodies are not especially suited for life in space. On long flights they are subject to muscle and bone deterioration and weight loss, and ubiquitous radiation may damage reproductive organs. As NASA consultant Harry L. Shipman has explained in his book about the future of space flight after the Challenger accident, bodies pollute spacecraft, transforming them into smelly “urine dumps.”17 While male astronauts in the good old days used catheters and plastic bags, the presence of women requires more elaborate plumbing–the shuttle’s zero-gravity toilet, the “slinger,” gave “serious problems in actual use and . . . required a good bit of cleaning.”18 During the May 1985 flight of the Challenger, twenty-four rats and two squirrel monkeys being tested for their responses to weightlessness produced an unanticipated “flood” of feces, so that the uncomfortable crew had to wear face masks.19 The scatological body, especially the female or animal body, mars the strictly hygienic myth of the clean machine. A dead body is even worse.
The fundamental question in the decades-long argument over manned space flight is whether bodies need to be present at all. As the eminent physicist James A. Van Allen wrote in the wake of the Challenger disaster, “all the truly important utilitarian and scientific achievements of our space program have been made by instrumented, unmanned spacecraft controlled remotely by radio command from stations on the earth.”20 Thus, the loss of the Challenger seven called into question NASA’s commitment to the “man-machine mode” in space travel. In its The Human Role in Space (THURIS) study, NASA laid out its theory of cybernetics, its rhetoric vacillating between technological mastery and autonomous technology:
There is no such thing as an unmanned space system: everything that is created by the system designer involves man in one context or another; everything in our human existence is done by, for, or against man. The point at issue is to establish in every system context the optimal role of each man-machine component.21
THURIS created a taxonomy for human-machine interactions: manual (hand tools), supported (manned maneuvering units), augmented (power tools, microscopes), teleoperated (remote control systems), supervised (computer functions with human supervision) and independent (artificial intelligence). These categories do not make much sense in themselves–clearly some manual manipulation is required for power tools and microscopes, wrenches and hammers augment and support human capabilities. But the taxonomy inscribes a fossil record, a technological evolution towards “self-actuating,” “self-healing,” independent machines.22 The THURIS authors hoped that such independent machines would require “human intervention” and attempted to describe uniquely human contributions to largely automated space enterprises. Humans, they argued, possess the unique capacity for visual evaluation, motor coordination appropriate to complex assembly, and mental powers of interpretation, innovation, deduction, and judgment. (Recent developments of artificial neural networks and fuzzy logic call even these “human” powers into question.) According to THURIS, the least important aspect of human intellect is memory: “Man’s memory, of all intellectual capabilities, is the one most easily duplicated and surpassed by computer activities.”23 Memory, the basis of culture, becomes unnecessary when humans function to service the machine.
THURIS did not present a particularly attractive justification for the human presence in space, especially in the midst of virtual reality’s popularization. If humans on Earth can operate finely sensitive space robot arms and eyes or drift remotely through hallucinatory worlds more fantastic than alien planets, why are their bodies necessary in space? In NASA’s continuing efforts to sell its programs, bodies were inscribed with socially charged markings of liberal democracy. The Challenger seven crew consisted of a social studies teacher, an electrical engineer, a physicist, and a corporate representative from the Hughes Aircraft Company. Malcolm McConnell observed that Christa McAuliffe was “a little chubby” and that Greg Jarvis “could have easily lost ten or fifteen pounds.”24 The Challenger crew represented a populist presence in space. Dwarfed by the massive shuttle, their mission was to mediate the machine for a young television audience–Christa McAuliffe was to have taken her remote students on a video field trip around the Orbiter. After the explosion of the homey, domestic world presided over by a teacher mom, psychologists and grief specialists raced in to erase the spectacle of graphic technological violence and the imagination of Christa McAuliffe’s body. In the discourse of the Challenger disaster, the bodies of the shuttle crew had to remain behind the technological veil, in the interests of continuing manned space flight.
However, folklore scholars have noted that the many popular jokes emanating from the Challenger disaster often involved those bodies in quite graphic ways. These jokes present the body/technology interface as a spectacularly violent one, as opposed to the cultural ideal in which interaction between the human body and the machine is a flow state.:
Q: What do you call a burnt penis on the Florida shore?
A: A shuttlecock.25
Q: What was the last thing that went through Christa McAuliffe’s head?
A: A piece of fuselage.26
Q: Why didn’t they put showers on the Challenger?
A: Because they knew that everyone would wash up on shore.27
Based on familiar rhetorical patterns and cycles, these “sick” jokes have been called political cynicism, a rebellion against the mass media’s pompous reverence, a critique of national institutions, and an alleviation of death anxieties in the nuclear age.28 Don Ihde has written that we expect our technologies to be transparent so that ideally we are scarcely aware of the machine’s presence. For example, we expect our telephones to bring us the voices of our loved ones as if they were really present, rather than coded into energy impulses in fiber-optic cables. Skilled operators are supposed to become one with their machines; distinctions between the organic and the technological disappear in harmonious signal and response. Technological disaster shifts the terms of that interaction, for here technology violently entraps, penetrates, and chars the body locked in its embrace. It is this possibility that evokes both national efforts at repression and the return of the repressed through the joke cycle. In a national spectacle of disaster, the body is the pain of technological violence that can never be represented, but only displaced by word and image. Thus, the body is reconstructed within an organizational safety model, a new lifepod, that denies any further possibility of collapse.
Groupthink
The Rogers Commission Report made it clear that NASA’s organizational decisions were to blame in the decision to launch the space shuttle, despite icy weather and faulty booster seals. Thus, NASA’s management, as well as failed machine parts, became an object of study. NASA’s organization was represented in the Rogers Commission report as a self-regulating system without external surveillance or intervention, a situation sociologist Diane Vaughan credited, in part, to NASA’s secret military projects.29 An effective external regulator would have had access to classified materials, an unacceptable risk in the Cold War climate. Without external reality checks, many critics suggested, NASA had become isolated in its own delusional can-do ideology, derived from its Apollo mission successes. Furthermore, media coverage of the Rogers Commission hearings displayed the homogeneous make-up of NASA administrators and its corporate engineers–all middle-aged white men with a life-long devotion to NASA and the aerospace industry. Observing the “shocking” and “rancorous” displays of agency in-fighting at the hearings, the New Republic suggested that NASA itself seemed to be experiencing a “mid-life crisis.”30 The modern organizational man was exposed and displayed through the figure of the NASA administrator, locked in a decaying air-tight compartment of his own making and possessed of the “wrong stuff.”
In the scientific press, especially in the first assessments of the disaster, some attempt was made to blame NASA’s rank and file. A few weeks after the disaster, Science magazine twice reported that an internal review of the shuttle had found “relaxed workplace standards” including “worker inexperience, lack of motivation, and faulty equipment.”31 Furthermore, it indicated that NASA’s investigation included speculation that workers had forgotten to plug a hole in the faulty booster after a leak test.32 Despite the search for “inadvertent damage” caused by flawed workers, blame was soon leveled at NASA’s and Morton Thiokol’s decision-makers who came to represent a nation-wide corrupt power-elite, now open to investigation. Charles Perrow, whose study of accidents in complex systems would often be evoked in discussions of the Challenger, decried the “Pentagon effect” at NASA that created a climate of managerial self-aggrandizement and toadying to corporate and military sponsors and the media.33 Journalist and long-time NASA observer, Malcolm McConnell, wrote that “the rank and file people in NASA are among the hardest-working, most productive, and most talented employees in the federal government.”34 McConnell blamed ambitious policy makers engaged in “the political intrigue and compromise, the venality and hidden agendas” that led to disaster.35 In another account, Joseph J. Trento also called the disaster a political failure, quoting shuttle mission specialist John Fabian on the Challenger investigation: “It just unraveled like Watergate.”36 Thus, discussions of the Challenger disaster spread beyond mechanical error to wide critiques of post-industrial capitalists, skilled at political manipulations in a secretive high-tech world.
The mass media harkened back to NASA’s glory days, benevolent and safety conscious, suggesting that the organization had devolved, degenerated, decayed from a golden age of right rule–benevolent and safety-conscious. The same space journalists who attacked a highly politicized NASA, rhapsodized about the pride and the glory, the “heroic neoclassical elan of the moon race.”37 Little connection was made to NASA’s ever-recurring technical failures, including the horrifying Apollo space capsule fire that entrapped three screaming astronauts in a fiery furnace and melted them into a nylon puddle. Nor was much mention made of NASA’s origins–the “Rocket State” developed in tandem with nuclear weapons, ignited by Nazi rocket scientists, and fueled by Cold War paranoia.38 This lack of a thorough cultural critique left a way open to NASA’s salvation.
The vision of NASA as a once-effective, decadent organization was very appealing to academic theorists who set about to “fix” the agency, using it as a research model. In the flurry of sociological studies that followed the Challenger disaster, NASA’s homogeneity and in-group ambience, its hidden agendas, political maneuvering, and back-stabbing, came to signify the internal workings of all corporations. Social theorists searched for ways to explain and heal the breach in organizational systems, dissected and exposed in a public hearing, fanned by a nationally televised tragedy. Academia, in itself a largely homogeneous entity with its own industrial and military affiliations, responded to the Challenger disaster with a corporate consultant’s enthusiasm.
Ensconced in university government documents sections, the five-volume, disembodied Rogers Commission report provided an easily accessible text for applications of organizational theory and systems models, based on information flow within conveniently closed circuits. According to organizational theorists, NASA was, like the space shuttle itself, a malfunctioning, but correctable, system with faulty components–namely, NASA’s and Morton Thiokol’s managers, and NASA’s external and internal regulatory units. NASA had experienced blow-by and slippage in its communication linkages: some of Morton Thiokol’s engineers had attempted to voice their fears about the faulty booster seals and cold-temperature launches to their bosses, who had essentially ignored what they considered unproven speculations.
Many theorists attributed the communications failure to NASA’s fall from grace. According to this scenario, NASA once had “a less hierarchical and flexible matrix structure” that relied on “nurturing consensus.”39 From these days of childhood innocence, the agency had grown increasingly isolated, streamlined and pressurized, indulging in overweening bureaupathological fantasies about its abilities, despite budget cuts. In addition, NASA’s components had become highly specialized in their activities, languages and fundamental world-views so that, for example, the professional ethics of engineers did not match the expedient decisions of managers.40 Isolated from engineers, NASA’s management engaged in “groupthink,” driven by fantasies of invulnerability and a need for unanimity and cohesion.41 Thus, the decision to launch the Challenger was a technocracy’s “major malfunction.”
Despite rumblings in the media that the space agency was in its last hours after an apocalyptic failure, academic theorists accepted NASA’s continuing existence at face value. Like the shuttle, it was a machine that could be repaired through better interactions and linkages among its components. The machine was wearing out, but it could be restored through an overhaul. Engineers and managers could be realigned. Better brakes could be put on quick decisions. Communications and regulatory valves could be cleaned of soot and debris. The processing system could be repaired to allow the correct flow of information energy, to prevent lacks or excesses of data, to turn away maladaptive codes. Then, tires kicked, the ship would be ready to sail to Mars with human and animal bodies safely enclosed.
The Challenger disaster provided organizational theorists with an opportunity to show that the systems model applied equally well to machines and human societies. Using Charles Perrow’s work on accidents in complex systems, Diane Vaughan wrote that technological failures could not be separated from organizational failures, and that the language of systems applied to both. NASA “malfunctioned” because: “The failure of one component interacts with others, triggering a complex set of interactions that can precipitate a technical system accident of catastrophic potential.”42 The use of systems theory in critiques of post-Challenger NASA was disputed by G. Richard Holt and Anthony W. Morris using Yrjo Engestrom’s “activity theory,” acknowledging that human “activity” is “‘messy,’ disorganized, seemingly chaotic, and hence endlessly fascinating.”43 To ensure safer space flights, Holt and Morris argued, NASA had to accept the internal contradictions and wide possible outcomes inherent in such activity. While the authors exposed gaps in systems models of NASA, their aim was to fix the agency as an information processing system, a contradictory position in itself.
The Challenger catastrophe threatened political mythologies of the final frontier, and, in a larger sense, cast doubt on systems theories and the entire cultural project of systems building. In his Evolutionary Systems and Society, Vilmos Csanyi writes that systems models, despite their predictive value, can only approach the “ontological complexity” of nature, but “the interactions of matter . . . are infinite and immeasurable.”44 Thus, the systems model can only represent a semiotic, self- referential complexity. The models of organizational theorists reflected the strict methods of disciplines and vested interests in the national space program. A radical sense of discontinuity, uncertainty, potentiality, and violence–the ontological complexity of catastrophic events–threatened the fundamental order of disciplines, apparatuses, and methods. Charles Perrow put this in the strongest terms reminiscent of the 1960s radical left: “Risky systems are full of failures. Inevitably, though less frequently, these failures will interact in unexpected ways, defeat the safety devices and bring down the system.”45 Thus,the academic response to the Challenger explosion was an effort to restore stable systems, and, in an entirely self-referential mode, to reassure its academic audience that their systems, ideologies, disciplines, and bodies were still in place and all was right with the world. There might yet be a teacher in space.
To the Stars
One of the outcomes of the Challenger disaster was a massive public relations campaign by space enthusiasts to resell the idea of manned space flight. The National Commission on Space, appointed by Ronald Reagan, produced a strategic planning report in 1986 on the future of space ventures that included renewed shuttle flights, construction of space station Freedom, increased space surveillance of the biosphere, and human settlement on the moon and Mars. In 1989, George Bush called for a lunar settlement by 2004 and a manned trip to Mars by 2019. In 1990, the U.N. endorsed 1992 as International Space Year (ISY), the quincentennary of Columbus’s landing, inflaming the usual cant among U.S. politicians and space enthusiasts about human destiny, pioneering spirit, and life on the new frontier.
In that same year, Philip Robert Harris, a “management and space psychologist” and NASA consultant, published Living and Working in Space: Human Behavior, Culture and Organization, an attempt to justify the use of the behavioral sciences in space settlement design, using James Grier Miller’s living systems theory. The book was introduced by Jesco von Puttkamer, a NASA program manager and strategic planner, who briefly described the post-Challenger NASA as rejuvenated, ready to “penetrate the new frontier of space.”46 Von Puttkamer argued that the Challenger explosion had provoked a public outpouring of support for manned space flight because of an “unconscious, unspoken feeling that we are dealing here with evolutionary forces at work.”47
In behavioral science, evolutionary biology, and artificial intelligence research, systems theory proposes that the biosocial world is comprised of systems with interactive components, allowing flows of information and energy.48 According to these theorists, a natural, intuited law dictates that systems evolve into more and more complex entities: for example, molecules-cells-organisms-ecosystems-biospheres, or cells-organisms-groups-societies–supranational systems. The evolution of Earth systems under the influence of matter, energy, and information flows has resulted in a global, biocultural, technologically regulated super-system. Thus, the world-wide cybernetic information exchanges of the post-industrial world are seen as the result ofthermodynamic, evolutionary processes leading to higherorganizational levels.
Systems theorists associated with space programs see human expansion into space as the next organizational level beyond the biosphere. Thus, von Puttkamer writes that manned space travel allows “Man,” “Earth,” and “Space” to be “one single creative system,” an “intricately closed-loop feedback system, a super-ecology.”49 In addition, the formation of extra-planetary biospheres will be designed for what von Puttkamer predicts will be a new cybernetic species, a weightless species, floating in a space womb, transcending gravity and “entropic deterioration.”50 These ideas of evolutionary expansion into space reflect the principle of plenitude, a persistent idea in Western culture that God created life to reproduce richly and diversely and fill the Void. Thus, John Allen, creator of Biosphere II, the desert amusement park disguised as a scientific experiment in space living, explains that his project will expand life’s quest to fill all available econiches, hedging its bets against catastrophe.51
The idea of an impending catastrophe, by nuclear war, environmental disaster, or cometary collision is the favored reason for human extra-planetary expansion. During International Space Year, Charles D. Walker, assistant to the president at McDonnell Douglass and president of the National Space Society, explained his support of manned space exploration:
Human survival. Political and economic survival in technical competition within the global economy, sure. But more than that: All human creation, all life as we know it, is here on earth. All our eggs are in one basket, one planet. But our embryonic resources are diminishing, and our nest becoming fouled. Our technological nature has given us the means to remove that risk.52
Here, haunted by the specter of catastrophe, the dreams and aspirations of the postindustrial knowledge class 53have been given the shape of science fiction and justified through the nineteenth-century language of “evolution” and “nature” and the twentieth-century language of systems. The rhetoric of eggs and nests reminds us of the dinosaurs, now popularly recognized as warm-blooded, egg-laying, and nurturing creatures wiped out by a cometary collision that brought nuclear winter to the earth. Frequent evocations of “eggs,” “embryos,” “cradles,” and “wombs” reinscribe sexual reproduction within an entirely mechanical environment, a protective exoskeleton of metal plates that will protect, control and manage the human body, and ensure the genetic continuation of the Chosen spacefarers. Ironically, human sexual reproduction in space may actually be impossible, under weightless, radioactive conditions.
The political and social meanings of this consensual future are quite apparent in the imagined space settlements of Living and Working in Space. Philip Robert Harris refers to the expansion of the human species, the global human family, into the solar system, fulfilling a natural urge for frontier exploration. But his space settlements are built and inhabited by only a segment of that family, the postindustrial knowledge class, envisioned as a cross-disciplinary group of scientists, engineers, technicians, corporate managers, psychologists, sociologists, anthropologists, physicians, teachers, journalists, lawyers, politicians, architects, film makers, and designers. Harris writes:
the colonists to the New World during the eighteenth century were largely poor, ill-used white artisans and indentured servants, as well as African slaves. The prospects are that the space colonists of the twenty-first century will be more affluent and self-directed, better educated and chosen. Expertise is required of specialists in cross-cultural relocation and living in exotic environments to design systems for deployment and support of spacefarers.54
Thus, the Challenger disaster provided the text for the post-catastrophe survival of the knowledge class, constructed and maintained through systems theories. The Challenger disaster suggested that technological and organizational systems were ever on the verge of collapse; the massive public relations campaign for space settlements imagines a safe new biosphere, a closed ecology, for academics, civil servants, and corporate managers, freed from environmental disaster, atmospheric impurity, starvation, poverty, disease, and gravity. Harris suggests that this cross-disciplinary community will result in a transformation of human consciousness, a spirit of collaboration that will trickle down to the problematic Earth populations left behind.
A compendium of recent work in space settlement planning, Living and Working in Space promotes the use of the behavioral sciences in mediating a technological environment for human habitation. As part of the space team, anthropologists, psychologists, and sociologists will maintain continual surveillance of human bodies, studying reproduction, sleep cycles, time sense, physical and mental stress, and the effects of weightlessness, isolation, and noise. “Artificial life” may produce time sense warps, “psychotic reactions,” “spatial illusions,” interpersonal conflict, depression, boredom, “anger displacement,” a “need for dominance,” motion sickness, water retention in the face, and a loss of body mass.55 In addition, conflict among disciplines, cultures, and ethnic groups might arise.
The answer to controlling these human disturbances in techno-utopia is the application of James Grier Miller’s “living systems theory,” a complex symbol language of subsystems and processes. In a space environment, bodies become ingestors, distributors, converters, producers, extruders, and decoders, components in a bio-technical system for control of matter, energy, and information flows.56 Thus, differences are transcended as humans become synergistic, ergonomically conditioned components in the metamachine. Here, the “informating” of knowledge workers in a postindustrial economy based on instantaneous communications, erosion of managerial hierarchies, the formation of strategic alliances and teams in electronic exchanges, the potential for “virtual” universities and corporations, is given stability under the rubric of mission success and safety.57 Living systems theory provides the paradigm for a new, entirely planned macroculture that will determine every facet of a spacefarer’s existence, from decor to diet, from language to sex, for harmonious system functioning. For example, Living and Working in Space, sounding much like an L.L. Bean or Land’s End catalogue, extols space shuttle fashion: a “custom-fitted, cobalt blue, soft cotton, line zipper jacket and pants with coordinated blue shirts,” having the functional attraction of being fireproof; other suits are of “light and heat reflecting metallic mylar which also serves to protect from meteorites.”58
Still, cobalt-blue, fireproof uniforms did not save the interdisciplinary, ethnically and racially diverse Challenger seven from utter destruction. Thus, in its designs for the space station, NASA has considered emergency escape vehicles. Jerry Craig, head of NASA’s Crew Escape and Reentry Vehicle planning office, has suggested that the space station have enough “lifeboats” for everyone. In answer to critics who feel that the space station should be made safe enough to do without lifeboats, Craig says, “That’s kind of like saying the Titanic would never sink.”59 Still, space planners are not especially interested in discussing escape vehicles, for then they would have to admit that space travel is overwhelmingly dangerous and that their dreams are as fragile as the Hubble telescope and the Mars Observer, notoriously failed systems. Since space settlements are promoted as lifeboats in themselves, lifeboats for the lifeboats seem superfluous and lack political weight. Instead, space planners stress the safety of their rationally managed synthetic biospheres which include “storm shelters” for protection against solar flares.60
In this Thorstein Veblein fantasy of a postindustrial army in space, fears of impending accidents make all cultural expression a safety function. Indeed, space planners have invented a culture of catastrophe based on faith in prediction. Catastrophe provides the rationale for subsuming the disciplines under “spaceology,” the transformation of the body into a stable energy-matter-information channel, and the continual mapping and surveillance of system biotechnical components. This national vision of the human future counters (and is thus dependent on) the construction of the thrilling and threatening mass media cyborg, imaged as the Terminator or Robocop, who perform destabilized and penetrated social identities.61 Furthermore, the national science fiction of space travel seems reassuring next to the spectacles of disaster in the 1980s and 1990s, not only the real life disasters of leaking toxic chemicals and exploding machines, but those designed for entertainment: graphic nuclear holocausts with shriveling humans in flames; raging dinosaurs ripping men in half; artificially intelligent computer systems trapping and suffocating workers; buildings exploding and falling into gaps in the earth, crushing their inhabitants; planes crashing in an elegant bloody montage of flying shrapnel. Space planners reassure us that catastrophe is our origin and our nature: the Earth-crossing asteroid or comet that destroyed the dinosaurs “allowed a tiny creature, the ancestral mammal, to grow, differentiate, and fill vacated ecological niches, giving rise eventually to homo sapiens.”62 Those asteroids can now be mined for hydrogen, carbon, and nitrogen to feed the transcendent bio-technical organism of the postindustrial knowledge class, emptied of troublesome memory, safe at last.
Notes
1. Gregory Whitehead, “The Forensic Theatre: Memory Plays for the Post-mortem Condition,” Performing Arts Journal 12 (Spring 1990): 100-101. For a discussion of the Futurist tradition of the self-destroying machine, see William Leiss, “Technology and Degeneration: The Sublime Machine,” in Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress, ed. J. Edward Chamberlain and Sander L. Gilman (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985).
2. Charles Perrow, “The Habit of Courting Disaster,” Nation 11 (October 1986): 329.
3. Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies (New York: Basic Books, 1984): 3.
4. Perrow, Normal Accidents, 5-9.
5. Testimony of Roger Boisjoly, Report to the President, U.S. Presidential Commission on the Space Shuttle Challenger Accident (Washington, D.C.: The Commission, 1986): 784-5.
6. Elaine Scarry, The Body in Pain (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985): 304.
8. William P. Rogers, “Preface,” Report to the President:1.
9. Report to the President, 1.
10. Roger Boisjoly, “Interview with Tony Chiu,” Life 11 (March 1988): 22.
11. Ron Westrum, Technologies & Society: The Shaping of People and Things (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1991): 259.
12. Report to the President, 1.
13. E. Foster-Simeon, “Picking up the Pieces,” All Hands (June 1986): 22.
14. Testimony of Stanley Klein, Report to the President, 213.
15. Testimony of P. J. Wietz, Report to the President, 1437.
16. Testimony of P.J. Weitz, Report to the President, 1437.
17. Harry L. Shipman, Space 2000: Meeting the Challenge of a New Era (New York: Plenum, 1987): 315.
19. Anastasia Toufexis, “Good Data and a Feces Crisis,” Time 13 May 1985: 61.
20. James A. Van Allen, “Myths and Realities of Space Flight,” Science 30 (May 1986): 1075.
21. Stephen B. Hall, ed., The Human Role in Space: Technology, Economics and Optimization (Park Ridge, NJ: Noyes, 1985): v.
24. McConnell, Challenger: A Major Malfunction (New York: Doubleday, 1987): 94.
25. Collected by Elizabeth Radin Simons, “The NASA Joke Cycle: The Astronauts and the Teacher,” Western Folklore 45 (October 1986): 269.
27. Collected by Willie Smyth, “Challenger Jokes and the Humor of Disaster,” Western Folklore 45 (October 1986): 244.
28. Simons; Smyth; Patrick D. Morrow, “Those Sick Challenger Jokes,” Journal of Popular Culture 20 (Spring 1987):175-185; Elliot Oring, “Jokes and the Discourse on Disaster,” Journal of American Folklore 100 (July-September 1987): 276-287; Nicholas von Hoffman, “Shuttle Jokes,” New Republic 24 (March 1986): 14.
29. Diane Vaughan, “Autonomy, Interdependence, and Social Control: NASA and the Space Shuttle Challenger,” Administrative Science Quarterly 35 (June 1990): 232.
30. Robert Bazell, “NASA’s Mid-Life Crisis,” New Republic 24 (March 1986): 12.
31.Science 14 (February 1986): 664; Science 28 (February 1986): 911.
32. Science 28 (February 1986): 911.
33. Perrow, “The Habit of Courting Disaster,” 354.
36. John J. Trento, Prescription for Disaster (New York: Crown, 1987): 4.
38. Dale Carter, The Final Frontier: The Rise and Fall of the American Rocket State (New York: Verso, 1988): 6-7.
39. Barbara S. Romzek and Melvin J. Dubnick, “Accountability in the Public Sector: Lessons from the Challenger Tragedy,” Public Administration Review 47 (May/June 1987): 227-238. See also Howard S. Schwartz, Narcissistic Process and Corporate Decay: The Theory of the Organizational Ideal (New York: New York University Press, 1990): 107-126; C.F. Larry Heimann, “Understanding the Challenger Disaster: Organizational Structure and the Design of Reliable Systems,” American Political Science Review 87 (June 1993): 421-435.
40. Michael Davis, “Thinking Like an Engineer: The Place of a Code of Ethics in the Practice of a Profession,” Philosophy and Public Affairs 20 (Spring 1991): 150-168. See also Vaughan, 252.
41. Gregory Moorhead, Richard Ference and Chris P. Neck, “Group Decision Fiascoes Continue: Space Shuttle Challenger and a Revised Groupthink Framework,” Human Relations 44 (June 1991): 539-551.
43. G. Richard Holt and Anthony W. Morris, “Activity Theory and the Analysis of Organizations,” Human Organization 52 (Spring 1993): 101.
44. Vilmos Csanyi, Evolutionary Systems and Society: A General Theory of Life, Mind, and Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1989): 15.
45. Perrow, “The Habit of Courting Disaster,” 354.
46. Philip R. Harris, Living and Working in Space: Human Behavior, Culture and Organization (New York: Ellis Horwood, 1992): 9.
48. This work stems from Ilya Prigogine’s hypothesis that chaotic systems may take up energy and begin to manifest orderly behavior. See Ilya Prigogine and I. Stengers, Order Out of Chaos (New York: Bantam, 1984).
49. Puttkamer, in Harris, 17-18.
51. Jim Robbins, “Biosphere II: Our Western Home in Outer Space,” American West 24 (August 1987): 42.
52. Charles D. Walker, “International Space Year,” special insert, Ad Astra 4 (January/February 1991): 7.
53. Daniel Bell predicted that the industrial labor force would be replaced by workers skilled in the production and dissemination of information in The Coming of Post-industrial Society: A Venture in Social Forecasting (1976; New York: Basic Books, 1973). For a discussion of the cybernetic goals and fantasies of these knowledge workers in the late twentieth-century, see Grant H. Kester, “Out of Sight is Out of Mind: The Imaginary Space of Postindustrial Culture,” Social Text 35 (Summer 1993).
56. Harris, 102. James Grier Miller and Jesse L. Miller, “Living Systems Applications to Space Habitation,” in Space Resources: Technological Springboards into the 21st Century, ed. M. F. McKay (Houston: NASA Johnson Space Center, 1992); James Grier Miller, Living Systems (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1978); James Grier Miller, “Applications of Living Systems Theory to Life in Space,” in From Antarctica to Outer Space, ed. A.A. Harrison, et al. (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1991): 177-198.
57. The term, “informate,” was first used by Shoshana Zuboff to describe the computer’s effects on mid-level professionals. See her In the Age of the Smart Machine (New York: Basic Books, 1984). For the managerial view of the growing information economy, see Stephen P. Bradley, Jerry A. Hausman, and Richard L. Nolan, eds., Globalization, Technology, and Competition: The Fusion of Computers and Telecommunications in the 1990s (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1993).
59. Quoted in Karen Boehler, “Lifeboat to Safer Shores,” Ad Astra 1 (March 1988).
60. National Commission on Space, 71-2.
61. Cynthia S. Fuchs, “‘Death is Irrelevant’: Cyborgs, Reproduction, and the Future of Male Hysteria,” Genders 18 (Winter 1993): 114.
62. National Commission on Space, 65.