It's a paradox:
Shun risk, and yet passively persist in a state of risk--howsoever 'calculated'.
From the Seattle times . . .
While procrastination continues to dog necessary repairs for Hubble, even as essential weather satellites are on the verge of going out of commission with nothing on the agenda to replace them, somehow, somewhere in the administration of the Space Program, there is deemed (in a mentality the flavor of Fruit Loops) to be room on the Shuttle for another frivolous, trivial, patently asinine "School Teacher in Space" mission--but no room in the crew for a pair of crack space-ship mechanics, let alone an engineer or two, to be on board for every mission, thoroughly trained and equipped for just such an exigency as this, which occurred with the last Kaptain Kangaroo and Romper Room in Space mission which ended in catastrophe--as only such a mission is apparently destined to do.
There just seems to be a fateful kind of logic to it that is too mathematical, too concrete, too almost cosmically lawful (let alone 'awful') to be expressed in parabolas of words. It has nothing whatever to do with "justice" that 1 + 1 = 2; it just flatly makes sense, as likewise so does the observation that inanity tends toward tragedy.
When things get stupid, needless, wasteful, capricious, snotty and slothful--well, once again from the Seattle Times . . .
"Endeavour's bottom thermal shielding was pierced by a piece of debris that broke off the external fuel tank shortly after liftoff last week. The debris, either foam insulation, ice or a combination of both, weighed just one-third of an ounce but packed enough punch to carve out a 3 ½-inch-long,
2-inch-wide gouge and dig all the way through the thermal tiles. Left exposed was a narrow 1-inch strip of feltlike fabric, the last barrier before the shuttle's aluminum structure."And now get a load of this . . .
"The chairman of the mission management team, John Shannon, said Johnson Space Center's engineering group in Houston wanted to proceed with the repairs. But everyone else, including safety officials, voted to skip them."
How on earth (or in the heavens) can this be happening again, right before our eyes?
It's simple: one 'risk' is deemed superior to another--the easiest risk, the passive, the do-nothing one, not the active one, wins the day in the Romper Room realms of the inane at NASA.
So what *is* the "lesson" for the children to learn from this?