Phil Brennan
Wednesday, Feb. 5, 2003

Given that, it was inevitable that hosts of people to whom the money-solves-everything credo is first among their articles of faith would quickly come forward to lay the blame for the tragedy at the doorstep of all those stingy scrooges who allegedly bled NASA dry with their budget cutting.

That the the current federal budget and the proposed budget for the next fiscal years ponied up an increase of $600,000 million for NASA's budget did not seem to bother the critics - in the arena where they play the blame game, facts don't really matter, and, after all, in the scheme of things, $600 mil is peanuts.

There's a long history to this farce. Take education, for example. We keep hearing that America's schools are routinely turning out functional illiterates who can't add two and two, nor identify historical figures such as George Washington or Thomas Jefferson beyond possibly knowing these Founding Fathers were slave holders. The blame for this, we are told, is insufficient funding of America's educational system.

This of course ignores the reality that we keep pouring billions of dollars into that system, and the more we spend, the worse it gets in results. The dolts we've been putting through the government elementary and high schools come in as dolts and emerge 12 years later as dolts, knowledgeable only about the alleged joys of sex of all varieties, and trained in the art of putting condoms on bananas.

I've yet to hear how an alleged lack of funds could have led to the shuttle tragedy. If, as now appears to be the case, the spacecraft's heat shield was damaged during lift-off, how could having more funds prevented the disaster? Can the blame for it be laid at the feet of the budget cutters - who in this case didn't cut, but actually added hundreds of millions to NASA's budgets?

So what we have here is just another case of the spendthrifts who worship at the shrine of big government spending exploiting a disaster as a means to bleed more tax dollars for all their pet projects. Give us more, and more, and more, and this sort of thing will not happen again.

Look, accidents happen, and they will keep happening. When somebody trips and falls, nobody suggest that he wouldn't have tripped and fallen if somehow he or Uncle Sam had coughed up more money to the anti-trip-and-fall administration.

More sinister is the avid hunt for somebody to blame. It is abundantly clear that NASA officials, fully aware that the risk of disaster is ever present in a shuttle mission, relied on their best judgment, based on past experience, in letting the mission go forward. Maybe this was a failure of judgment, but it was a honest failure, and setting the hounds of blame after any of them will not bring the seven astronauts back to life.

Sure, we have to find out what happened, because until we do, we can't take steps to see that it doesn't happen again, but we don't have to crucify anybody for an honest failure of judgment.

But keep in mind the fact already mentioned: that accidents happen and will keep happening no matter how many laws we pass or rules we change. That's the way things are in this vale of tears.

Instead of setting out with our blood up and fury in our eyes in a hunt to pin the blame of some poor scapegoat, we should simply acknowledge that we are, all of us, flawed human beings, and one of those flaws is the tendency to goof. And I'm not saying that somebody's goof led to the destruction of the space shuttle, but simply observing that if that was indeed the case, we should look at our own frailties before casting stones.

In the frenzied hunt to fix blame, another target is the space shuttle program itself. Everybody with any experience in observing this program has at one time or another warned that it is an exceptionally hazardous undertaking - an accident waiting to happen, and, at some point, certain to happen.

In short, the risks have always been known, and judged to be worth taking in view of the benefits to be gained. The astronauts on Columbia, and on Challenger before them, knew full well they could die in the effort - but they believed that the risk of death was the price they paid to be included in that small and exclusive brotherhood of heroic space explorers.

It is a slur on their memory to set out to exploit their deaths to make political points or justify one's personal views about the space or any other government program. As a number of their survivors have pointed out, they loved what they were doing and were always prepared to pay the price for the opportunity to keep doing it.

I can't mourn over their fate - we are all born to die, and in death they let slip the chains of life in the here and now and entered into a far better existence. As one clergyman friend of a couple of the astronauts said, they wouldn't come back here if given the option. They have reached their final destination and undergone an adventure far greater than a ride into the far reaches of space.

They are at peace - the only real peace. It is for their families I mourn, and for whom we should all pray. They have lost a loved one, and that loss will haunt them until that moment when they too, will let slip the chains of life and soar into the heavens beyond space to spend eternity with those they lost last Saturday.

Orate

Phil Brennan is a veteran journalist who writes for NewsMax.com. He is editor and publisher of Wednesday on the Web (http://www.pvbr.com) and was Washington columnist for National Review magazine in the 1960s. He served as a staff aide for the House Republican Policy Committee and helped handle the Washington public relations operation for the Alaska Statehood Committee, which won statehood for Alaska. He is a trustee of the Lincoln Heritage Institute.

He can be reached at phil@newsmax.com.

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