Page 2/The Battalion/Monday, February 17,1986
Opinion
Tantrums for Liberty
The firing of Lee lacocca as head of the government advi
sory commission on the Statue of Liberty was a good idea, de
spite the Chrysler Corp. chairman’s ongoing temper tantrum.
The decision was one of ethics, not conspiracy, for Interior Sec
retary Donald Hodel.
lacocca claims his removal after four years was linked to a
plan by the National Park Service to build a luxury hotel on Ellis
Island. lacocca is vehemently opposed to the project.
Hodel’s decision made sense. lacocca also is head of the
Statue of Liberty-Ellis Island Foundation, Inc., a private group
that has raised $233 million for the Statue of Liberty restoration
project.
It is unethical for the man who is in charge of awarding such
huge contributions to the project to have control over where the
money goes.
lacocca has managed to win the sympathy of the press and
the nation because Hodel’s decision comes four years too late.
The Chrysler chairman should stop stamping his feet over
his dismissal and concentrate his efforts toward thwarting the
hotel construction — a detriment to the national park.
lacocca’s interests are sincere. Model’s decision will keep
those interests from conflicting.
The Battalion Editorial Board
United Feature Syndicate
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Space flight
Man has a need to test personal and technological abilities
BRi
D/
Fo r we cannot
tarry here.
We must march
Lora
j i- Best
my darhners, we must ;
, y ° ^ Guest Columnist
bear the brunt or
danger,
We the youthful sinewy races, all the
rest on us depend.
Pioneers! O Pioneers!
Walt Whitmans’ words are just as ap
propriate to the space program as they
were to the movement West. The hu
man race depends on pioneers and in
the 1980s — the astronauts who brave
the journey into space. Where would we
be if those first settlers had given up
their dreams and turned back with the
first death on the long and difficult trail
westward?
But it is not a human trait to give up a
dream. Man is an adventurer and an ex
plorer. We have a constant need to test
our personal and technological
strength. And the explorer is a romantic
figure: brave, intelligent and even stub
born.
The seven crew members of the Chal
lenger possessed these qualities. It is
what we expect of our astronauts.
NASA unselfishly allowed us to watch
heroes through broadcasts of the shuttle
launches, press conferences and the
like. The agency always kept the public
involved in its triumphs: the first
launch, the first black and the first
woman in space. We also were deeply
involved in the first in-{light tragedy.
The tragedy of the explosion is that
the people onboard were not just seven
astronauts. The Challenger crew was a
sampling of Everyman. There was a
Jewish woman, an Oriental and a Black
on board. They came from places as di
verse as Concord, N.H. and Hawaii.
The crew of every shuttle mission allows
us to vicariously become the astronaut,
the pioneer.
But the triumph of manned shuttle
missions does not affect Americans
alone. The Soviet cartographers who
created the first maps of the surface of
Venus have decided to name craters af
ter Judith Resnick and Christa McAu-
liffe. We must realize that our manned
space program affects the peoples of
other countries as well.
Technically, manned space missions
have proven themselves. In the April 6-
13, 1984 Challenger mission a Solar
Maximum Mission satellite was re
trieved, repaired and returned to orbit.
Astronauts have completed space walks
and tested the Manned Maneuvering
Unit, which can be flown over 300 feet
from the spacecraft to make minor re
pairs. Scientific experiments, such the
study of crystal growth, motion sickness
and the effects of weightlessness on man
would have been impossible without
manned space flight.
Future shuttle-related experiments
include the launching of two satellites —
Galileo and Ulysses. Ulysses will fly past
Jupiter and then go into a polar orbit
around the sun. It will give us a first
time view of the North and South poles
of the sun. These poles have never been
seen by man because the earth is in orbit
around the sun’s equator.Galileo will or
bit Jupiter and send a probe into the
planet’s atmosphere.
The Hubble Space Telescope, which
would orbit above the earth’s distorting
atmosphere and show us the rest of the
universe, and a proposed flight to Mars
are dependent on the success of
manned space shuttle missions.
Another shuttle-dependent program
is the manned space colony. The station,
which will be assembled in space by as
tronauts, is targeted for completion by
1994. The shuttle will be necessary to
ferry men, women and supplies from
the earth to the station.
Apart from the scientific purposes of
the shuttle, it also has economic bene
fits. The shuttle has been able to deploy
45 percent of the satellites going into or
bit. Arianespace, the commercial arm of
the European Space Agency, deploys
the other 55 percent.
A manned shuttle is commercially at
tractive because it is able to correct some
of the problems that arise at launching.
Three of Arianspace’s 15 launches have
failed and a total of $150 million was
lost because of them. Another benefit of
the shuttle over rockets is that the space
craft and its booster rockets are res
ble.
The shuttle disaster was not the
time human life was lost whilereadj
for the stars. On Jan. 27, 1967 the
manned Apollo spacecraft burst
flames on the platform, killing\f
“Gus” Grissom, Edward White!
Roger Chaffee. The space program 1
new and could easily have beetu
doned. But it continued andtwoaa
hall years later Apollo 11 landedot
moon. Had NASA given up, manw
have never been able to set foot on
other world.
Today, seven more pioneers-
Scobee, Michael Smith, Ellison On®
Judith Resnick, Ronald McNair,t
gory Jarvis and Christa McAuliffe-
dead. The nation will mourn
deaths but just like the early settlers
manned space program must fo
ahead.
Who can imagine what we ma'
able to accomplish two and a
from now?
Spo
MS(
Febru
Ticket
Lora Best is a senior journalism
but better to reach for the stars with our feet on the ground
We have ig
nored the chal
lenge posed by the
space shuttle Chal
lenger on Jan. 28,
1986: To question
manned space
flight, its practical
ity, feasibility and
purpose. We do
not dare — allow
ing our emotions
Cynthia
Gay
to cloud scientific reasoning in the wake
of Challenger’s fumes.
While television blitzed Americans
with five hours of shuttle disaster cover
age, not one of our political leaders
stepped forward to denounce the hoist
ing of homo sapien into space.
The media repeatedly gave us the
facts, the personalities, the tears, the dis
belief, and they pondered what went
wrong. But neither our boobtube bud
dies, nor NASA officials cared to con
sider abandoning our man-in-space
dreams.
The Battalion
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Member of
Texas Press Association
Southwest Journalism Conference
The Battalion Editorial Board
Michelle Powe, Editor
Kay Mallett, Managing Editor
Loren Steffy, Opinion Page Editor
Jerry Oslin, City Editor
Cathie Anderson, News Editor
Travis Tingle, Sports Editor
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Kennedy suffered the Soviet’s send
ing the first man into space and resolved
to one-up them with the first man on
the moon. We did it in 1969, but at the
loss of three lives in 1967 and a persist
ing loss of priorities. During our scram
ble to beat the Soviets, we failed to see
that they were entrenched in a deadlier
contest: Cold War.
The military’s dependence on the
shuttle insured the program’s continua
tion in the 1970s, yet our defense inter
ests are now in unnecessary jeopardy
because of the NASA’s commitment to
provide commercial and scientific serv
ices.
NASA decided in 1971 that the shut
tle was the ultimate vehicle to meet all
our galactic needs. Fifteen years and
$14 billion later, some decision makers
in commercial and military fields say
they feel hindered by our government’s
one-way faith in the shuttle.
When the first shuttle, Columbia, fi
nally reached the launching pad in
1981, it was 20 percent over the bud
geted cost and two and a half years be
hind schedule.
We refused to spend much time on
the uncomfortable figure of $1.2 billion
— the price of Challenger — because we
were focused on the crew’s noble wish
that America push full-speed ahead
with the shuttle program. That’s a costly
catharsis.
Repurcussions from the shuttle disas
ter may mean a vital reconnaissance sa
tellite, part of the Stategic Defense Ini
tiative program, won’t be aloft in time
for the Reagan-Gorbachev arms talks in
early 1987. Anxious to get on with SDI,
the Pentagon is now spending $2 billion
to build new rockets to launch these sa
tellites. In the meantime, old Titan
ICBMs are being refurbished to send
the satellites up. Reliance on an alterna
tive carrier will aid the military’s need
for secrecy; for although only two of the
24 previous missions were defense-
oriented, they were skeptically viewed
by the news media.
In addition, satellite insurance proba
bly will skyrocket because the Chal
lenger did not. Before 1986 the govern
ment kept insurance running about $38
million a satellite, but increasing costs
forced NASA to up its charges to $71
million this year. Some analysts on Wall
Street predict further rate increases,
worsened by the flat reluctance of the
military and U.S. companies to trust the
shuttle’s safety.
Not only are manned spacecraft more
expensive to design and build, many sci
entists claim most of their research
could be accomplished without men.
They also complain that continual fund
ing to manned spacecraft has set back
the cause of science.
For example, following the Apollo 1
fire in 1967, two “soft-lander” space
craft designed to carry experimental
equipment were scrapped to pursue this
man-on-the-moon endeavor.
Right now we have robots that can do
almost anything man can do in space.
Robots won’t sneeze or squirm — harm
less human actions that could destroy an
experiment in the low-gravity environ
ment of space. What’s more, engineers
can radio commands to robots to make
adjustments if necessary. And if exten
sive repair work is required, it may be
cheaper to build a new satellite than to
send an astronaut-repairman, since
most spacecraft are useful for only
about 10 years.
At the same time we were mourning
Challenger, scientists were toasting
ager 2. NASA launched this unn»j
satellite five years ago, aridity
into Uranus Jan. 26 just one
late. This 1,800-pound “eye
already had sent home revealiaf
tures of Jupiter and Saturn, i#* 1
reached Uranus to tell usabouti [5 :
ity fields and the planet that cnj
into Uranus millions of years f
other words, Voyager 2 worked 1
than expected.
So could our space program' ■
kept man on the ground and sen
chines to the stars.
Cynthia Gay is a junior journalistj
jor and a columnist for The Bato^r