The Washington Post is developing a serious born-yesterday syndrome in its reporting, perhaps understandable after years of veteran staff losses, a radical ownership change, and move to a new office building. How quickly the factual past is being replaced by entertainment. In its coverage today of the 30th anniversary of the space shuttle Challenger disaster, readers are informed by a young feature writer named Dan Zak that “no one imagined anything could go wrong” with the shuttle by the time of the 25th mission (actually the 21st so-called operational launch, the first 4 having been designated R&D flights–in reality, of course, they were all R&D flights). Zak and his editors are apparently oblivious to the flood of Congressional testimony and other expert technical commentary about ongoing problems in the shuttle program during those years. The fact that the Post sent reporter Kathy Sawyer, who by her own admission had “absolutely zero experience in space coverage” (which no doubt helped her rationalize applying for NASA’s dubious–in retrospect, darksome–journalist-in-space program), to Cape Canaveral on January 28, 1986, was evidence not of how routine the shuttle missions had become, but of the Post‘s own complacency.
In the same issue of the paper today, another young writer, who goes by the old-timey byline Justin Wm. Moyer, fawns over “Reagan’s amazing Challenger disaster speech” just as one might have done in 1986 if one had wanted a job in the White House. Moyer would have better served his readers by examining instead an issue less flattering to the Great Communicator that remains unresolved. Reagan was scheduled to give his annual State of the Union speech on January 28, which would have contained the following language submitted by NASA on January 8: “Tonight while I’m speaking to you, a young elementary school teacher from Concord N.H. is taking us all on the ultimate field trip as she orbits the Earth as the first citizen-passenger on the space shuttle. Christa McAuliffe’s journey is is a prelude to the journeys of other Americans and our friends around the world who will be living and working together in a permanently manned space station in the mid-1990s, bringing a rich return of scientific, technical and economic benefits to mankind. Mrs. McAuliffe’s week in space is just one of the achievements in space which we have planned for the coming year, however.” In fact, the teacher-in-space show had been Reagan’s idea, proposed in his 1985 State of the Union. For months after the disaster, the White House denied pressuring NASA to launch Challenger in time for the 1986 speech. No direct proof of such pressure has ever been unearthed, but the circumstantial evidence has grown over the years. The Reagan Administration admitted that nine White House staff members had telephoned NASA in the eight days before the launch, including Donald T. Regan, the Chief of Staff, Patrick J. Buchanan, the communications director, and Alfred H. Kingon, the Cabinet secretary–part of what is now known to have been massive pre-launch telephone contact among high-level officials at the Cape, NASA headquarters in Washington, and the White House (see Challenger Revealed, Richard C. Cook, 2006). In his 1988 book What Do You Care What Other People Think?, physicist Richard Feynman, a member of the Presidential committee that investigated the disaster, addressed the matter of political pressure by observing that “the people in a big system like NASA know what has to be done–without being told.”
The shuttle program is water over the dam, thank goodness, but the Post needs to tighten up its act. Or maybe current employees know which way the wind blows under space-nut Jeff Bezos, without being told.
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