Lost in Space; Were both space-shuttle disasters the result of putting environmentalism ahead of the lives of the astronauts?

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 19, 2003

And the really tragic part about it, says Ross, is that the use of asbestos in the space shuttle and in office buildings, and other modern employment of it, poses only minimal risk to the public. Indeed, removal of asbestos poses a greater risk of exposure in many instances, critics say. In the Word War II shipyards of the 1940s, "there were indeed a large number of asbestos workers who were greatly harmed, but as usual the environmentalists take this to a point where they want to abandon the use entirely because of a little bit of misuse," Ross says. "The trouble with the environmentalists is they keep twisting the screw, and there's no end to it."

Insight tried to talk to leading environmentalists about the space tragedies but to no avail. A spokeswoman for Environmental Defense, which has sounded the alarms against both asbestos and Freon, told this reporter, "We're not really working on this." A spokeswoman for former EPA director Browner said she was "out of the office" for a few days. The publicist for Al Gore's office in Nashville said Gore wasn't giving interviews at the present time.

In the years between the Challenger and Columbia explosions, NASA lent its name and prestige to many green crusades, particularly those of Gore for "spaceship Earth." And ironically, critics say, in the early 1990s the politicians at the agency curried favor with the left by playing a crucial role in hyping the ozone scare that led to actions partly responsible for the predicament it found itself in with the Freon-free foam. In February 1992, for instance, NASA announced that satellite and other measurements showed chlorine-monoxide molecules thought to be derived from chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) and to destroy ozone were increasing inside the arctic polar vortex. At a press conference, NASA raised the specter of a rapidly approaching hole in the ozone layer, which deflects the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays.

"We believe now that the probability of significant ozone loss taking place in any given year is higher than it has been before," said James Anderson, the NASA project leader. Media stories immediately followed with horrific scenarios predicting hundreds of thousands of cases of new skin cancer resulting from ultraviolet exposure. Then-senator Gore, who chaired a Senate subcommittee responsible for NASA funding, captured the moment to warn that there soon would be an "ozone hole over Kennebunkport," the Maine summer home of then-president George H.W. Bush, if Congress didn't rapidly phase out Freon and other CFCs. Spooked by an international campaign to bless all this as indisputable and scientific, the Senate passed a resolution 95 to zero to phase out CFCs by 1995, five years sooner than the 1987 Montreal Protocol required, and Bush issued an executive order requiring a phaseout by this date.

But, as Micah Morrison documented in Insight [see "The Wizards of Ozone," April 6, 1992], many prudent scientists, including some who worked for NASA, dissented from the dire predictions. They noted that natural factors such as storms, winds and volcanoes affect ozone measurements. When chlorine monoxide went back to normal levels in a few weeks, NASA stood silently by without issuing so much as a press release to put the anomalous "crisis" in perspective. "We aren't going to put out [another] press release until we have a complete picture and a complete story to tell," NASA spokesman Brian Dunbar told Morrison.