We're living the timeline of a disaster report not yet written ... and more cheerful news!
Thoughts on what we learn from disasters, the weekly recap, and, oh, yeah — some career news I'd like to share with you.
Happy Sunday, Code 47 readers. I teased an announcement last week, and I can finally make it. But I want to make another point first. Consider this your value-add for the week.
So, wanna know a weird thing I find fascinating? I enjoy reading reports into disasters and incidents. The 9/11 Commission? The Challenger explosion reports? The Columbia Crew Survival Investigation Report? The U.S.-Canada Power System Outage Task Force report about the 2003 North America blackout? I gobble these things up.
A friend of mine once commented that this was a very morbid habit of mine. I was surprised by that. There isn't usually anything graphic or particularly, well, morbid to be found in these reports. Discussion of death and injury is handled blandly and directly, but not colourfully. These reports aren't lurid — I mean, they're official reports, and they are, if anything, overly dry and technical. To be honest, I find this more sad. The technical descriptions of how a crew of astronauts died hits me harder than a depiction of their final moments in more colourful prose (or some other format) would.
No, the reason I read these reports is because I am fascinated not with disaster, per se, but with how human beings react to disaster. Most of these events can actually be broken down into very, very small increments, and understood in isolation. And with the benefit of hindsight, and the ability to zoom in on something that only would have taken milliseconds to unfold, we can understand the event, and ask what could have been done to avoid the tragedy.
Sometimes the answer is nothing. I spent some time this weekend reading about the loss of the Columbia in 2003, specifically, the crew survival report mentioned above. Columbia is an example of a disaster that couldn't have been realistically averted (at least not without making changes well before the mission ever launched). For those who don't recall the details, a small piece of insulation foam broke off the ship's external fuel tank as she was launching, and despite being small and light, this little bit of foam — it weighed less than two pounds! — hit the fast-moving ship with enough energy to blow a hole in the port-side wing. When the ship re-entered the Earth's atmosphere 16 days later, the superheated air caused by Columbia's contact with the atmosphere (compression, not friction, yes, nerds, I know) leaked into the ship through the hole. The wing broke apart, the ship spun out of control and the incredible forces of this event basically tore the shuttle into pieces. NASA only realized something was catastrophically wrong when the ship never appeared on the radar that tracks ships coming in to land in Florida, around the same time that local TV news in Texas began reporting that the streak of light that was shooting across the early morning sky had, in fact, become many streaking lights. And then bits of the ship, and the crew, began to land all over Texas.
And it was all inevitable from the moment the foam hit the wing. There was no way to repair the damage. The ship didn't have enough fuel to make it to the space station as a safe harbour. And there was no realistic chance of launching another shuttle in time to mount a rescue — it would have been possible, if NASA had immediately realized there was a problem. But they didn't. They saw the foam piece hit, studied it, and concluded there was no danger.
It was a horrible tragedy. All seven aboard were lost. I remember it well. I was watching at home in Richmond Hill (I was back from university for the weekend) and I knew a young lady from Texas who was also home at her family's place that weekend. She was a photographer, and got pictures of little bits of metal and debris landing on her family's property. It was very sad ... but it was and is fascinating.
The Columbia crew survival report examined the accident in extreme detail, often down to the millisecond. There is understandably some uncertainty about the exact timing and sequence of the catastrophic events, but the general picture is clear. The report identified five separate events that would have been fatal to the crew, and the order they took place in. The first was the crew cabin depressurizing as the shuttle broke up. The second was the cabin module, which was still mostly intact, beginning to spin out of control, which would have bashed the crew from side to side with sufficient force to cause fatal injuries. The third was the breakup of the cabin. The fourth was the astronauts becoming exposed to the extreme conditions at very high altitude after the cabin broke up. The fifth and final, of course, was impact with the ground.
The report concluded that the astronauts probably died at some point — and not necessarily all at the same point — during the first two events, and had certainly all died by the third. None of the seven were fully inside their pressure suits — some were missing gloves, for instance, and others hadn't lowered and locked their helmet visors. NASA could not determine how quickly the cabin depressurized, but those crew who were fully suited, and who would have only needed to lower and lock their helmet visors, did not do so. NASA concluded from this that the event was so sudden that the crew was incapacitated almost instantly. They would not have died instantly, but were almost certainly unconscious before they knew what was happening. Death would have been swift at this point, and NASA could only conclude that the physical trauma the astronauts experienced as the cabin began to spiral out of control would have been fatal to any who remained alive at that point. Any who remained alive, though fatally injured, died when the crew cabin disintegrated.
What the report looked at next was whether anything could have been done to save the crew. The first two events were likely survivable. If the crew had been fully in their suits, the cabin depressurization would not have killed or incapaciated them. The violent tumbling of the cabin would still have killed them, NASA concluded, but a differently designed helmet and restraint system could have rendered that survivable. The third event, the cabin breakup, was not survivable; and it was actually the restraints themselves that caused injuries to the crew, as they were torn from their seats. ("This event was not survivable by any means currently known to the investigative team," is how the report describes this phase of the disaster.) The fourth event was actually survivable, at least in theory — if the astronauts had somehow survived the disintegration of the crew cabin, and if they had been fully suited, the report concluded that survival was possible but not certain. A U.S. Air Force pilot had survived ejecting from a plane at a comparable altitude while wearing a pressure suit, so it was at least conceivable to survive a drop from that altitude and at high speed. The fifth fatal event, ground impact, would only have required a parachute to survive.
The bad news here is obvious: even if you could have solved four out of these five fatal problems, the fifth fatal problem was, as noted, fatal. The violence of the crew module's disintegration was simply not survivable by any known means. But NASA still learned a lot from this report, and thanks to it, future astronauts will be safer. It seems glib to say that, but it's true. Not everything learned from the loss of Columbia (or Challenger before it) could be applied to the shuttles, which had design limitations. But they'll make future ships and crews safer.
It occurs to me, and I suspect it's occurred to some of you while reading this, that we're living in a similar moment now. Columbia was destroyed in seconds and we've been living with COVID for a year. But the same general rules apply. We can already see some mistakes that we made, and some lessons that can be learned. Others will only become clear with the benefit of hindsight and thorough study. But this is something I think about a lot. A lot. We are living out the timeline of a future report very much like the one I just read this weekend about Columbia. We will discover, too late, what we could have done better, or sooner. Maybe it never would have been enough — maybe like that doomed shuttle, we could only realistically have stopped four of the five things that were gonna kill us. But maybe not. I sincerely hope that the lessons of the last year are learned, and remembered. Our suffering may be some future generation's salvation.
It's nice to think so, anyway, isn't it?
As promised, an announcement. I'm very pleased to report that I am, starting Monday, hosting a new show at SiriusXM. I'm staying on my current channel, Canada Talks (channel 167), but I'm shifting from an hour-long show at 7 a.m. Eastern time to a longer, two-hour show, from 10-12 a.m. eastern every weekday morning. SiriusXM has been a delightful place to work. It's been a genuine thrill to host an hour-long show there this last year and a bit, but I have missed having a second hour. Two hours is, to me, the perfect length of time for a radio show. Much longer than you feel like you're stretching, but any less and you feel like you're leaving material on the table that you'd like to get onto the air. I'm also very pleased that I'll be able to finally bring on some guests from western Canada — getting someone up at 4:30 Vancouver time to chat is a lot harder than getting someone up at 7:30 local time, so this will mean I'll be able to do a better job covering stories across the country. Since I stepped down as an editor at the Post last year, I've had the time, believe me, so I'm thrilled by this. This is all upside for me. I hope you'll be able to tune in — again, it's every weekday morning at 10 a.m. Eastern time, on Canada Talks, channel 167.
It's going to be a bit of an odd launch this week, actually. My kids are still home for virtual schooling due to the lockdown in Toronto, so that'll be interesting. And for at least the next week, maybe two, I'll still be hosting the hour from 7 to 8, as we get the host who'll be replacing me up to speed and hammer out some technical bugs. (This was all a lot easier when we just used the studio downtown!) So yeah, it'll be a weird week for sure. But hey. At least, given the time we live in, there'll be a lot to talk about.
OK, now onto the recap.
First, here at Code 47, I geeked out bigly and wrote a huge review of Star Trek: Picard's first season, and what it meant to me. A lot, is the easy way to say it. Check that out here.
Over at the National Post, I was busy! I had two columns and two videos this week.
The first video, from early in the week, was about Europe possibly putting a halt to our imports of critically needed vaccine.
And then later in the week, as the news firmed up and became more alarming, I did a video getting everyone updated. The news isn't great.
As for my columns at the Post, I agreed with Erin O'Toole, and said that Justin Trudeau should consult with the opposition, or basically anyone else than his advisors, when seeking a replacement for now-former governor-general Julie Payette. Whatever he was trying last time obviously didn't work out. Read that here.
Also, later in the week, I noted that Trudeau saying Canada will require a mandatory in-hotel quarantine for travellers entering Canada from abroad is a good idea. But it would have been a good idea months ago. What was the delay? Check that out here.
At TVO.org, I had my regular two columns. The first was one I'd wanted to write for a while, but hadn't really had the moment until a quiet Monday finally presented itself — I wrote about high-speed internet access in Ontario. If you live in a big city, or even a small down, you probably have it. If you live even slightly outside of one, though, you're likely cut off. In an era when everything is moving online, this is a major challenge. But thanks for technological changes — satellites in space! — we might be close to a solution. Read that here.
Later in the week, I unloaded on the Doug Ford government for continuing to struggle with vaccination. Some of the problems are absolutely out of Ontario's control. That's fair. But Ontario is struggling with even the stuff that's fully within its jurisdiction. If we are ever going to get out of this mess, we need to get people vaccinated. We can't afford to screw this up. But we're screwing this up.
Anyway, folks, as always, thanks for reading. Stay safe, stay happy. And tune into my new show if you can.
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