Author: Daniel Castellano

The Future of Manned Space Flight

The most recent mission of the space shuttle Endeavour has drawn attention once again to the fundamental deficiencies of the shuttle program. Although the damage to Endeavor’s tiles was not a threat to the safety of the crew, it served as a reminder of the problematic basic design of having the orbiter mounted alongside its solid rocket boosters and external fuel tank. Whether the debris striking Endeavour shortly after launch was foam or ice, it clearly came from the mounting bracket, and would not have struck the shuttle had it been possible to mount it atop the boosters and tank, as was the case in the Mercury and Apollo programs. The last shuttle missions will fly in 2010, and hopefully the successor vehicle will correct this basic design flaw, returning to the more successful earlier model, rather than banking on the supposed reusability of the orbiter.

In truth, the space shuttle as it exists is not properly reusable, as many of its parts need to be replaced or rebuilt after each mission, and there are extensive safety inspections needed to find fractures or other failures. NASA’s model of tolerating stress failures of individual parts, so long as they do not fracture sufficiently to cause the loss of a vehicle, and replacing them after each mission, was exposed by Richard Feynman in the wake of the Challenger disaster. At the time, there was an alarming propensity among NASA administrators to overstate the safety factor and grossly underestimate the probability of failure, which we now know from experience to be at least 1 in 100, consistent with the prediction of engineers in the 1980s. A culture of secrecy and concern for public relations prevented realistic assessments of risk, and prevented certain facts about the Challenger disaster from reaching the public. NASA prevented state authorities from performing autopsies on the astronauts, and downplayed evidence that the astronauts likely were alive and conscious during their free fall before impacting the ocean’s surface.

Among Feynman’s findings regarding NASA’s attitude toward safety was the irrational practice of regarding a situation (such as certain structural damage) as safe if missions have been successfully flown in that condition, regardless of any probabilistic assessment of failure. This posture resulted in the Columbia disaster, as NASA engineers mistook the success of previous missions as an indication that there was no intrinsic danger to the model of having the shuttle alongside its rocket boosters. Worse still, although the impact of foam against the shuttle tiles was recognized during the mission, the shuttle was authorized for re-entry, denying the possibility that there was a threat to the vehicle.

Now that the dangers of the space shuttle are more fully and publicly understood, it is increasingly cumbersome and expensive to assure mission safety. The space shuttle is also burdened with antiquated electronics and computer technology, so that its reusability has become a liability. A new manned space vehicle needs to be developed, more along the lines of the earlier successful American programs, and the currently successful Russian model.

The development of a new space vehicle, as part of NASA’s new objective of returning to the moon and landing astronauts on Mars, will undoubtedly limit its ability to fund other endeavors. Already, basic scientific research unrelated to manned spaceflight has seen reduced funding by NASA, even though important questions in astrophysics and particle physics can be explored with unmanned vehicles that are much more cost effective. Manned space flight increases the cost of research well over a hundredfold, and it provides no data that unmanned probes cannot provide, save for the effects of space flight on humans. Such a circular justification should not be the basis for an enormous investment. Even if scientific research on humans in space is necessary, this can be achieved on the International Space Station, which is also in danger of losing NASA funding. Considering that NASA advocated destroying Mir in favor of a new station that would not be in exclusively foreign control, it is understandable that European partners strenuously object to its plans to scuttle the ISS as soon as 2016, only six years after completion. The enormous cost and complexity of the ISS make comparisons to the space shuttle program inevitable, and given NASA’s recent track record, it is unclear whether they are institutionally capable of leaner, more efficient design for the moon and Mars programs.

Perfidious Journalists Need a Latin Lesson

Pope Benedict’s motu proprio authorizing wider use of the Tridentine Rite has evoked predictable outrage from the liberal media, a product of their ignorance and malice. Rather than address the usual calumnies against the Catholic Church hurled by the historically ill-informed, I will focus on a particular accusation regarding the Good Friday prayer for the Jews in the traditional Latin Rite.

It is a telling measure of the irrational hatred against traditional Catholicism that an objection should be raised against a prayer that is said only once a year in a language that few understand. Moreover the prayer is said for the Jews, not against them, unlike the litany of curses still uttered in some orthodox Jewish liturgies. The real crime, of course, is that it is a prayer for their conversion to Christianity, a sentiment that is intolerable to those who do not wish to see the Church grow at the expense of others. Failing to see how ludicrous it is to expect the Church to renounce evangelism and adopt a platform of religious indifferentism, liberals are astonishingly narrow-minded in their expectation that everyone else should share their ideological assumptions, or be banished to the dustbin of history. The more independent thinkers have learned not to expect intellectual coherence in mainstream liberalism, so let us proceed to hard facts rather than ideology.

A more concrete accusation against the Good Friday prayer is that it slanders the Jews as “perfidious,” which in English means “treacherous” or “lying”. This misunderstanding is based on an inadequate understanding of medieval Latin. In classical Latin, perfidus did have a meaning similar to its present English analogue, derived as it was from the phrase per fidem decipere, “to deceive through trust.” However, by late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, perfides and perfidia simply meant the opposite of fides and fidelis. (K.P. Harrington, Mediaeval Latin (1925), p. 181) Thus perfides in medieval Latin is best translated as “faithless” or “unbelieving”, meaning lacking the Christian faith.

An example of such matter-of-fact usage can be seen in St. Bede the Venerable’s account of the life and martyrdom of St. Alban, with my translation:

Qui videlicet Albanus paganus adhuc, cum perfidorum principum mandata adversum Christianos, saevirent, clericum quendam persecutores fugientem hospitio recepit.

Alban, who was clearly still a pagan, with mandates of the unbelieving rulers taking violent action against Christians, received a certain cleric fleeing persecutors into his hospitality.

Here the phrase perfidorum principum mandata is best translated “mandates of the unbelieving rulers,” and the context shows there is no implication that the rulers were treacherous or dishonest. Perfidus simply refers to the state of unbelief with respect to the Christian faith. Such usage is in fact typical of medieval Latin writers.

With this understanding, we see that the Church prayed for the perfidus Iudaeus as part of the Good Friday prayer for all the various groups of non-believers: first the heretics and schismatics, then the unbelieving Jews, then the pagans. It is necessary to specify the unbelieving Jews, since these prayers do not apply to those Jews who have already converted to Christianity. The Church does not accept the position of some Jews that those who convert to Christianity are somehow less authentically Jewish or not Jewish at all. On the contrary, the Church sees Christianity as the perfection and fulfillment of Judaism.

Of course, it is unacceptable to liberals for Christians to portray the New Covenant as supplanting the Old, or to suggest that the Jews lack the light which is Christ, as the Good Friday prayer states. As no one denies that the non-Christian Jews do not believe in Christ, the only possible source of objection to the Good Friday prayer, once clarified linguistically, is its clear implication that Jesus is the light of the whole world, not only for Christians, but for Jews and pagans. It is that sentiment that is the essence of the Good Friday prayer, and what makes the adversaries of Christianity seethe with rage, for they would rather be let alone and have Christianity renounce its historic claims. More absurdly, with respect to liberal notions of tolerance, they expect Christians to renounce such claims even when praying amongst themselves.

The West Lied About Kosovo

It should be obvious by now that the idealistic rhetoric of American and Western European hegemonists is a whitewash of their neo-imperialist ambitions, as evidenced by their reversal over the sovereignty of Kosovo. Prior to the 1999 NATO invasion of Yugoslavia, the Western allies agreed to UN Security Council Resolution 1160, which affirmed “the commitment of all Member States to the sovereignty and territorial integrity of the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.” During the bombing, the G-8 countries agreed to “an interim administration for Kosovo … under which the people of Kosovo can enjoy substantial autonomy within the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia.”

As the Russians and Serbs recognized, these assurances were empty lies, as the West in practice has shown little regard for Serbian sovereignty over the province, which dates back to the Middle Ages. After the NATO bombing, the Yugoslav army was forced to withdraw from Kosovo, resulting in the ethnic cleansing of 250,000 Serbs from the province under the intimidation of the Kosovo Liberation Army, a Muslim guerrilla organization with a history of kidnappings and reprisal killings. Historic Orthodox churches and monasteries were vandalized or destroyed, erasing much of Kosovo’s cultural legacy.

The aftermath of the war revealed that NATO accusations of Serbian war crimes were greatly inflated, but nonetheless the West relentlessly pursued the prosecution of Slobodan Milosevic, while neglecting similar crimes committed by Croats and Muslims during the Yugoslav wars. This ploy of magnifying the threat posed by a weak adversary is a common imperialist tactic used to justify lopsided military interventions.

Now, President Bush’s statement that Kosovo should be independent is nothing more than a logical culmination of Western policy designed to weaken Serbia to the point of irrelevance. Since the bogeyman of Milosevic can no longer be invoked, it is clear that the real crime of Yugoslavia was its strength and independence of the West. With its dismemberment, the West can easily impose its interests throughout the Balkans as it has done in the rest of Eastern Europe.

Putin knows better than to trust the West, which is why he had the prudence to send troops into Pristina ahead of the NATO forces. He also knows that the U.S. claim that Eastern Europe needs a missile shield against North Korea and Iran is a clumsy lie, so he has sought to defuse this claim with a counterproposal for a shield based in Azerbaijan. The destruction of Yugoslavia and expansion of NATO are an affront to Russian ambitions that will not pass without firm resistance.

Apart from exacerbating tensions with Russia, the West’s reversal on the independence of Kosovo undermines the credibility of claims to support a unified Iraq. Once again, the real goal of invasion was to squash the regional ambitions of a second-tier power, in this case rendering Iraq militarily impotent. With the systematic destruction of the Baath regime down to its lowest levels, economic chaos and sectarian violence were the inevitable results. Finally, some U.S. presidential candidates are recognizing the consequences of this destructive policy, and calling for a partition of Iraq, contrary to the long-standing assurances of the current administration. The moral of the story: when the West pretends to help your nation, prepare to be dismembered.