Don’t let a better understanding of the space program stand in the way of your correct feelings of sadness and loss at this setback. My wife doesn’t understand why I was crying out loud seconds after I found out. Even now, after I tried to explain it to her, I’m not sure she does still.
The space program represents our future as a race. I feel a special pride that I come from a nation that cares enough about our future to be doing this. I feel a special sense of protection toward the program, and by extension, my descendants who will reap its rewards. Truly, there is no higher calling short of religion. I only wish I had been physically capable of astronaut training.
Those people out in east TX and west LA had better leave that stuff alone. It’s simply priceless, the information it contains.
Hey, even a fellow space cadet like Miles O’Brien couldn’t remember Roger Chaffee’s name yesterday. It was a bad day for all of us.
Chin up, TV Guy. President Bush was the governor of TX and won’t let anything happen to the program.
The one I liked was asked of a reporter in a helicopter from someone in the news room.
The chopper was circling a couple hundred feet above a small piece of debris. The question was - Can you smell anything?
And over and over, it was stated that the shuttle was going as fast as a bullet. I know they are trying to give people a frame of reference, but why not whip out a calculator and tell them that is was going about 17 times faster than your average pistol bullet.
12000 miles per hour = 200 miles per minute = 3.3 miles per second = 17424 feet per second.
I think it’s interesting that people are ignorant of these aspects of how the space shuttle works- it’s just not big news, I guess- but can tell you which Survivor is likely to win. (My local stations report that shit as “news”)
What I can’t figure out is whether the simple misunderstandings point to our lack of good public education about the space program and its various parts or whether folks just plain don’t care.
I’m not sure it’s all the latter, for I have heard SINCE yesterday, many, many heartfelt comments about keeping going and even (however unlikely) increasing funding.
OTOH, most folks don’t know how their cars work. I may be asking too much for the “average Joe” to be bothered with the details of the space program.
I do find it interesting, however, that most people seem to at least understand the basics when an airliner crashes - I guess more familiarity due to frequency.
One last one - this morning on NPR, Liane Hansen pronounced Roger Chaffee’s name “CHAY-fee” - yes, I know that’s a MAJOR nitpick, but I’m sort of “Columia’d out” this morning.
well see, you forget that when people just see the video the first time or first hear about it they do not get magically telephoned the exact details. some of the questions are stupid only if you don’t know the details.
was it shot down?
a dumb question if they eploded at the edge of space, a more reasonable question if they were a mile up. “the space shuttle exploded!” does not indicate the hight to the nonpsychic listener. same with all the escape questions, sure you can’t do it from the edge of space, but space shuttles are not ALWAYS at the edge of space, at some point they ARE landing and flying basicly like an airplane. no faster than a fighter plane landing, and THEY have methods to escape.
and the terroism question, yeah, mabey not likely, but answer honestly 5 years ago how likely would you have belived that someone could crash not one but TWO airliners into the world trade center and take it down. that sounds pretty darn unlikely. and I mean, its not SO stupid a question, its not like terrorists don’t like destroying symbols of america… AND people from israel. mabey the answer is no.
basicly some of your ‘stupid’ questions are just due to the fact you watched more tv than them and know some of the details of the crash, your knowlage of what stage the accident happened at makes alot of the answers odvious, lacking the information they are not.
and how will they X the ISS. its a valid question, there is an answer “Y will” but why does that make it a stupid question? if my friend had a car that broke down, I would ask “how will you get to work?” and they might say “oh I have another car” but that doesn’t make me dumb or even uninformed
Ok, the question itself is kinda dumb, but at least it shows some level of knowledge about the shuttle. Better than pure pig-ignorance, though perhaps not much better.
I spoke to an in-law last night on the telephone. This particular person is notoriously ill-informed, so I said to her, “I assume you heard the news today.”
Her response: “What news?”
My answer: “You know, about the shuttle.”
Her response (disdainfully): “Oh, that.”
It was painfully clear that she couldn’t have cared less about the tragedy.
There are also many different disciplines of science. I have heard people who are brilliant in one area admit to little or no knowledge in even a field related to theirs.
Sheesh!!! Do you expect everyone to be a walking encyclopedia of all things scientific or they’re “stupid”?
Pretty insulting and small-minded attitude, IMNSHO.
Now, granted, there are a few different issues in the OP.
One is the basic lack of knowledge regarding the space program. Another is the commonly asked “stupid” questions by the media.
Most of your list of questions I did have at least some grasp of the right answer (but then, my bf is a space geek and former Marine), but I took particular offense at your being insulted that your “friend who should, how did you put it?, ‘know better’” asked the question about re-firing and re-routing the shuttle or some such.
I was fairly sure (but by no means certain) that they couldn’t re-fire the engines, but would have liked to know the science behind why they couldn’t have re-routed etc.
See…the fact that other people may not know particular facts regarding your chosen or pet discipline leads to curiosity and questions and one person getting to tell his/her friends and acquaintances the “real story” and that’s good, not bad!!
Don’t be such a “knowledge snob”. (smiling and saying that in the Nicest, friendliest “maybe you could learn something” way. Not a mean, snide, snotty way, okay?).
I was at work yesterday (retail) when a customer told us about the Columbia explosion. Most of the rest of the day was spent running downstairs to listen to 1010 WINS until I could leave for the day.
Fucking piece of shit bosses kept switching to a local rap station. Couldn’t have cared less.
Sigh. I’m with you. There are some really cold people in this country. It really amazes me how some people can be that way. Just not care.
Even if I don’t understand all of the technical facts, the loss of human life, (and the loss of such talented people too!!) hit straight home, no confusion there.
Well I don’t know about when this came about but I turned on the TV right about the time they broke the news they had lost contact. They knew nothing else at the time except they couldn’t find it. One of the first questions out of the reports was can they excape if something goes wrong and the answer was yes they can. Now obviously one can not jump 40 miles from Earth but at the time they had no idea what had happened so it’s not that bad of a question.
It was pretty stupid though to keep saying crap about terrorists.
CNN also had a graphic indicating, at the time of the tragedy, the shuttle was travelling 15 times the speed of light. I agree that much of the ignorance is forgivable but violating the principal law of the universe is pretty bad.
It was during the live technical briefing a few hours after the disaster. As the NASA representatives would talk, a minute or so later, the subtitle — above the ticker crawl, below the talking head — would change to reflect some key point that had been mentioned. Clearly some keyboard monkey was just listening and typing in phrases as they were spoken, getting them vetted in seconds by a producer, and throwing them onscreen, the idea being a running recap of highlights for anybody who had switched to the network at that moment.
Yeah, the misused vocabulary is annoying, but it’s really a minor thing given the remarkable advances in media coverage we’ve seen in the last ten years. I mean, starting just minutes after it happens, we get video of the splitting contrail (from multiple angles, no less), followed by helicopter views of accumulating debris, followed by in-person briefings from the actual people involved, all within hours of the actual incident.
Yes, you can say that this fanatical need to fill the air with important information creates feeding frenzies over trivia when nothing much is going on (can you say Robert Blake?), but when something really important happens, the performance of the news machine is nothing short of amazing. I’ll take an occasionally inappropriate homonym as a tradeoff, no problem.
Can I vote as being someone who is willing to wait an hour for detailed, accurate news rather than having uninformed inference and repetetive blather from people who are paid to talk but not think right now?
I’m offended by the commercial rush to cash in on a tragic event.
These people were taking tremendous risks in an effort to help all of us who will never know space travel.
I’m with you TVGuy. I felt myself getting misty this evening listening to Garrison Keillor speaking about this anniversary of the Four Chaplains aboard the Dorchester who gave their life jackets to soldiers, and held each other in prayer as the ship went down.
What has become of our basic caring for one another? Is it a lost concept?
I remember a cow-irker bitching back when NASA crashed the probe on the Moon to see if there was water up there, and hearing people bitch about Shepard’s Lunar golfing. These people can only think of themselves and their short lives, not the future of humanity, which is why they never bother to learn even the basics of science.
A freind of mine, a very intelligent friend of mine insisted for about an hour one night that while the astronauts were on the moon they could open their visor. He insisted that when they lifted the tinted part of the visor the only thing between their and face and space was some sort of ‘air curtain’. After about an hour I gave up. A few days later after he spoke to another friend of his that worked for NASA in Houston he apologized to me. Apparently during the moon mission, when he was nine, he asked his dad and that was the explaination he got and he always just accepted it.
My lame rant about this shuttle accident is the utter lameness of the models that some of the news people were holding up and pointing to on the weekend. What? Did you spend about seventy-nine cents on that at Wal-Mart? I remember the really cool Apollo models they always had on the news. (I still want those)
