THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS A ROUTINE TRIP. Yes, that's the point behind a recent
Scrapple Face post, but there's a serious point to it. We seem to recognize the non-routine-ness of space exploration, as
Transterrestrial Musings explains, and
Pathetic Earthlings rebuttal to Gregg Easterbrook spells out.
It's a point daily commuters would do well to bear in mind
as well.
InstaPundit's comparison of the Shuttle failure with a
fatal train collision in Zimbabwe (there was one in
Australia recently as well, noted at
Where Worlds Collide.) misses the mark in three ways. "
What makes the Columbia's
loss more striking than the deaths of train passengers is that space exploration is forward-looking, not just part of ordinary life, and such a loss is a setback to something important, and noble. It's not that astronauts' lives are worth more than those of anyone else; it's what they do, and what it stands for." First, that depends on your perspective. My well-worn 1991 edition of
Jane's World Railways describes the National Railways of Zimbabwe as 2759 route-kilometers, 313 km electrified, of 1067 mm gauge (3'6" or Cape gauge, use S track to model it in O scale) in a country slightly larger than Montana. By contrast, the New Zealand railways operate 4227 route-kilometers, 519 km electrified (at two different voltages) of 1067 mm gauge on two islands together about the size of Colorado, with mountains to match, and the Boston and Maine Railroad operates 2532 route-kilometers of 1435 mm gauge (4' 8.5") track on a much-shrunken network of tracks in Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Vermont, and bits of Maine and New York. The railway is still an instrument of prosperity and progress in much of the world (yes, even new steam locomotives on the
Jingpeng Pass are more of a great leap forward than anything Chairman Mao envisioned) and a train crash remains a setback to the aspirations of many people. Second, our attitudes toward risk are much different now than they were when the railroad was opening up the North American hinterland. Every rule in the
Consolidated Code of Operating Rules is written in someone's blood. It took a long time, and a lot of maimed and dead trainmen, before the automatic air brake and the automatic coupler became standard equipment, and we still tolerate rather a lot of carnage at the highway crossings. We ought not let that carnage harden us to the loss of seven astronauts; rather, we ought to contemplate the costs and benefits of making other things that seem routine safer. Finally, there are commonalities between the space program and railways in much of the world. Consider Professor Reynolds's
recommendation to Congress: "
Although the United States has made significant progress already in developing a truly commercial space sector, it has a considerable distance yet to go. For decades, all space activity was undertaken by governments, leading to the creation of institutional structures, bureaucratic cultures, and ways of doing business that are poorly adapted to the commercial marketplace. In trying to promote the growth of commercial space industries, the U.S. government must overcome these inbuilt biases, and encourage the formation of new structures and cultures that are well-suited to the realities of the commercial marketplace." That is the nature of railroading around much of the world. Professor Reynolds's colleague, Brock Yates, is able to
demonstrate his ignorance of railroading realities in part because the structure and culture most suited to the commercial marketplace in transportation in the United States is one of freight service only, with single-shipper trains often of a single cargo (including a shipload of containers) for a single destination. I am sympathetic to the suggestion that space exploration is not exclusively a government function. Perhaps our space policy makers can learn a few things from our railroads.
