Budgeting for Disaster

Nobody knows, or has any way of knowing, what caused Saturday morning's horrific explosion of space shuttle Columbia, with its gruesome rain of metal and flesh across the pine woods of East Texas. It will take the various commissions and panels months, or longer, to even agree on a reasonable theory of the cause and sequence of events that led to the tragedy.

But that sequence started before, say, the loss of a piece of foam during Columbia's launch; it started, in fact, far before the launch itself.

For years, NASA has suffered from what a number of its critics charge has been a steady erosion of the agency's culture of safety. The shuttle program itself has been plagued in the last three years with an unusual string of highly visible safety-related problems. They include: a 1999 delay in the launch of Columbia due to a hydrogen leak; the grounding that year of Discovery with damaged wiring, a contaminated engine, and a dented fuel line; a delay in Endeavor's January 2000 launch due to wiring and computer failures; an October 2000 launch delay due to a misplaced safety pin and concerns regarding the external tank; the April 2002 cancellation of a scheduled Atlantis flight due to a hydrogen fuel leak; and the grounding last August of the shuttle launch system after fuel line cracks were discovered.

In August, 2000, an inspection uncovered 3,500 wiring defects in Columbia. Last July, the Inspector General blasted the management of the shuttle safety program. And in the wake of the Columbia disaster, numerous stories have emerged detailing the unsuccessful efforts by engineers, over the last several years, to convince NASA to fund the inclusion of an emergency escape mechanism for shuttle astronauts to have available in the event of exactly the sort of disaster that struck Saturday.

As has been endlessly reported, the Columbia's science-oriented mission in its last, ill-fated voyage was a rarity these days. Such reports rarely explained why science is such a low priority for the modern NASA: It has become an agency almost entirely given over to military, and secondarily corporate, priorities. Those priorities are on display each time satellite imagery enables the United States to send precision bombs down some Iraqi air vent or on to some Afghan wedding party. The civilian commercial priorities will be on increasingly visible display in coming decades, as mechanized missions begin exploring, and exploiting, the mineral wealth of the rest of our solar system.

Ever since the first Star Wars research funding, NASA has steered sharply away from the program remembered by most Americans (and most of the rest of the world) over the age of about 45. At one time, the American space launches, especially the moon shots, were widely seen as representing the aspirations of not just the United States, but all humanity. Now, the U.S. space program is mostly more pedestrian and parochial: an effort to seize the military high ground and to ensure for American companies the wealth of all the planets, including ours.

With that shift, NASA's annual budgets have increasingly failed to invest in the safety of its astronauts and the maintenance of its physical assets -- and NASA's bureaucracy has become increasingly resistant to criticism or change.

As goes Columbia, so goes America.

It's a fluke of timing, but today's White House release of President Bush's proposed 2004 budget is eerily reminiscent of exactly the sort of NASA budgetary priorities that have preceded and accompanied the last three years' worth of safety incidents, up to and including Saturday's tragedy. Like the modern NASA, George W. Bush's America circa Fiscal Year 2004 will make unprecedented, secretive, and largely unaccountable investments in militarism. As with NASA, Dubya's proposed $2.2 trillion FY 2004 federal budget downplays investment in the basics. Even by the notoriously optimistic economic estimates of the White House, it also carries a staggering $304 billion deficit. One out of every seven federal dollars spent next year will not actually exist. Over half of that spending will be for military purposes, without even including the cost of a possible war with Iraq or an ensuing occupation -- or the possible counterattacks throughout the Islamic world.