AN UNFORTUNATE SERIES OF EVENTS

Sometimes people’s fates really do come down to an unfortunate confluence of circumstance and lives do literally hang by a thread or a split second. There was a DC10 flight in the year 1989 which was brought down by one of the fan blades in the engine shearing at one particular moment, and damaging all three of the flight control hydraulics as it destroyed the engine. There were no other backup systems because no-one believed that any aircraft could possibly lose all three of those systems at once because it was just too unlikely, and yet it happened.

The engine fan that disintegrated was made of metal which had a flaw in it dating back to the day that the blade itself was manufactured, and even though that flaw had been in the metal all that time and the aircraft that engine was attached to had successfully completed hundreds of flights across all those years in between, one day it just failed and catastrophe ensued. Totally unpredictably. If you just happened to be on that flight, on that day, there was nothing to tell you that it would have been any different to any other flight on any other day. The fates just rolled their dice and there was nothing anyone could do.

Equally, the Silver Bridge over the Ohio River collapsed on a December evening, ten days before Christmas nearly forty years after being built due to a flaw in just one of the links in the chain supporting it that again could be traced right back to the day it was forged in the factory and it chose that precise moment to corrode enough to fail. People who stopped at the traffic lights before entering the bridge survived, those who went through the lights did not, and there was nothing at all anyone could have done to know what was about to happen or to prevent the cards that fate had in its hand for them from being dealt.

Then there was the Challenger Space Shuttle and the catastrophic end to its 73 second flight which it turned out was all due to a design flaw in one of the booster rocket  “O-Ring” seals which had stuck because of a spell of particularly cold weather despite being built to withstand the most extreme forces during takeoff, and yet precisely the wrong set of circumstances occurred to destroy all those hopes and dreams. Spectacular failure due to bad weather, bad design and sheer bad luck.

Nearly twenty years later it was Columbia that failed to return from its multi-million mile journey into space, catastrophically disintegrating whilst struggling to get through that last dozen or so miles that make up our atmosphere. This time a chunk of insulation had fallen off during take off and collided with part of the orbiter, doing just enough damage to fatally destroy the ship two weeks later. Nowadays the Shuttle gets a quick once over from the crew of that modern day miracle, the International Space Station before heading back to earth to check for any such damage, which is another hard lesson learned.

Of course the Space Shuttle programme is about to fly its final mission, the 135th, after nearly thirty years of service, leaving the American government-backed space programme without an operational manned vehicle for the first time since the immediate post-Apollo era, and without the actual capability to launch a human being into space for the first time since Alan Shepard was shot into the air in a tiny tin can way, way back in 1961. After this, the final flight of the Space Shuttle Atlantis, the sixth and newest vehicle built for the fleet, and one of only four to survive (or, if you prefer, one of the surviving three of the five that actually went into space), everybody who wants to fly into space must either go by private, commercial means, or hitch a ride in a Russian or Chinese capsule. Somehow that makes me feel just a little bit crestfallen when you consider the achievements of NASA in the 1960s, and whether the knowledge to even do such a thing will now be passed on to future generations, and it is to my eternal regret that I never personally got to witness a shuttle launch for myself, but then the end of the Space Shuttle programme in itself is the result of an unfortunate series of events.

Once upon a long time ago, of course, the inevitably much-delayed Space Shuttle was itself the great new hope for space exploration. This was due in no small part to the fact that there had already been numerous complaints about the cost of the Apollo programme, and a reusable vehicle was seen as being a much more cost-effective option. Even so, it still cost a fortune, not least because of all those delays. The film “Moonraker”, for example, was supposed to be released in the same year as the first flight to capitalise upon the free publicity of real launches, but ended up being three years too early. Whether or not that “cost” has been recovered by the technological gains achieved by all those brilliant minds and eventually pumped into the economy is a debate that only history will judge, not least because of the environmental impact of all those shiny new toys and gadgets. Mind you, looking back, you would like to believe that all those delays were due to there being a perceived need for astronaut safety to be a priority, but hindsight tells us a different story, especially when economy becomes of greater importance than safety, but it is an old story, and we seldom learn it well.

To me, the Space Shuttle remains one of those all-too-rare modern day miracles in itself and proves what the inventiveness of the human mind and the human spirit is truly capable of when it looks to expand its knowledge and achieve something rather wonderful. People do still constantly complain about the cost of the space programme whilst rather conveniently forgetting about all those truly great strides in engineering and technology that have been made because of it, and that many of the modern-day miracles so many of us carry around with us every day are largely due to the research and development done for that very same space programme.

The bravery of those astronauts prepared to ride that fireball up to the heavens constantly amazes me, too. So many things have to go right, and only one thing has to go wrong, which brings us right back to where we started and that tiny flaw in the engine of that huge jet airliner. A few years ago, I watched a documentary about the battles at Arnhem, the ones the movie “A Bridge Too Far” attempted to tell the story of. Apparently, during one particularly fiercely fought battle, one group of soldiers tried to cross one of the rivers and were completely wiped out, and, after they had witnessed this happening, a second wave went across. “The first wave were brave men” the commentator told us, “but the second wave were braver still, because they had seen what happened and still they went anyway…” I feel that it’s much the same for the crews of the next shuttle flights that flew after Challenger and Columbia, and, I suppose, all the subsequent missions. There are those who will tell you that the next flight is obviously the safest because they will have made absolutely sure it is, but the people saying those things are seldom the same people who are actually making the flight. I don’t know whether I ever could or would be quite so brave, and I hope that I’m never put into the position of having to find out.

So, assuming that your final launch window remains open today, God speed Atlantis, and happy landings. I think we’re all going to miss you and your sisters more than we yet know.