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This isn’t just some remote corner of an intellectual ghetto on the Internet-the book came within one tick mark of making it onto the New York Times bestsellers list for paperback non-fiction (it reached #21 nationwide).

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That’s never amusing, and often can be expensive.Īs an egregious “bad example” of wrong causes, a recent book ( Dark Mission, by Richard Hoagland and Michael Bara) spent a lot of time muddying the waters over a series of NASA Mars mission failures in the 1990s. For spaceflight, being distracted by the wrong cause means being tempted by the wrong fix. That’s never amusing, and often can be expensive. A famous photograph supposedly shows that bolt, even though space experts have long been satisfied that the bizarre image was merely the result of camera jiggle during a time-lapse exposure.Īpart from the comic relief value of such crackpot ideas, there’s a darker aspect of this kind of cultural pathology, just as there are serious analyses pointing to the socially toxic effects of the JFK assassination “alternate theories”.

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But not to everyone’s satisfaction, apparently, as a search of still-thriving non-traditional explanations of the Apollo 1 fire, the Apollo 13 breakdown, the Challenger disintegration, and the Columbia catastrophe, whose fifth anniversary now approaches.įor example, in the case of Columbia, YouTube is full of videos from self-styled experts still convinced a freak bolt of ionospheric lightning crippled the spaceship. However, once a logical reconstruction gels, is tested, and then is ultimately verified by being implemented and hence reducing future flight hazards, that official explanation achieves a substantial level of authenticity. To the degree that innovative analysis is often critical to reconstructing-from partial and often garbled evidence-a shocking causal sequence leading from goodness to disaster, the initial investigation period demands that critical judgment be held somewhat in check so as not to discourage imagination.

Space disasters attract so much public attention and often involve such complex and subtle sequences of events that there’s an entire Internet literature of “crackpot causes” on par with JFK assassination myths. The dark side of space disaster theories by James Oberg Mars Observer was one of three NASA Mars missions lost in the 1990s because of technical errors, and not as part of a broader conspiracy.