Five Stages of Grief
by James on Feb.02, 2010, under Space
As you might expect, I have been spending a fair amount of time gauging the reactions to the end of the NASA Constellation program. As such, I thought it would be interesting to apply the Kubler-Ross psychological model for the five stages of grief to the categorical nature of the responses I’ve been hearing/seeing:
Denial
“How could the U.S. want to abandon thier pursuit of human spaceflight for the forseeable future?”
“It still hasn’t made it through Congress, there is going to be a big fight!”
“The representatives/NASA administrator/senators/contractors are going to lash out, defend Constellation and we will be right back on track again!”
“Don’t give up! Fight this! Write letters!”
Anger
“Another program cancelled!?”
“When is the last time we built anything?!”
“All you Ares haters out there, congratulations, you got the plug pulled on the entire works!”
Bargaining
“We may have lost the moon, but we’ve gained the solar system!”
“Well, Orion wasn’t going to be ready until 2017 anyway, the commercial sector is going to get us back into space faster!”
“This will be better in the long run, Constellation was unsustainable anyway.”
Depression
“How are we supposed to keep working, when we know it’s cancelled?”
“All that work… down the drain… I just… can’t concentrate on the task at hand now…”
“We were so tantalizing close to going back to the moon, and now what… circle the Earth over and over again… I’m just going to quit and go work in another industry.”
Acceptance
“Well, the powers that be have spoken, let’s go forward with this new direction.”
“We have what we learned, no one can take that away, let’s use that to our advantage in the future.”
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March 21st, 2010 on 3:19 AM
Why do they hate the Moon as a destination so much?!?! The opponents of Constellation—the Mars-or-anywhere-else-but-the-Moon crowd—have felt the constant need to put down the lunar sortie mission profile. But what were the Space Shuttle flights up until the time of the ISS and Mir dockings? They were mere LEO sortie missions lasting 10 days or two weeks! Why is it that we can do the boring & the mundane routinely—over & over again—no problem from anybody; but as soon as it comes to doing something extraordinary: like a journey-to-the-surface-of-another-world mission, we get nothing but cantankerous calls for us to not even start it?? The Mars fanatic crowd really sicken me—because they are the people who would destroy the extraordinary just to uphold the mundane!! Robbie Zubrin himself, urges NASA to do his Red Planet mission with the technology that is available today. (Not some “Battlestar Galactica” future technology.) Yet, at the same time, the Mars-centrics vociferously condemn Constellation for relying on an Apollo-like mission architecture. So which demand is it?! Do we now have to wait for some beyond-amazing, “Star Trek” kind of space technology, before we dare land on the Moon’s surface again?! Oh yeah, and while we’re all striving for Red Planet glory, let us go there with only current, here & now engineering! I see right through all these contradictions of what the Mars zealots say that we must do & must not do. They howl in outrage over a possible Apollo on steroids, but yet they seem to have no problem at all with the Space Shuttle on steroids! I mean…with all that new zero g research they so badly need done…maybe that’s just what they’d prefer: the ISS on steroids! More larger & gigantic aluminum castles in LEO. Plus a mini variant of the Space Shuttle orbiter to do the 200 mile up commute. Yes, folks, this is what whets their appetite when they think about future space exploration! Shuttling endlessly to & from LEO for decades to come! All the while being engaged in some cutting-edge, stupendous research & experiments!! Meanwhile, the Moon is to be declared a Forbidden Planet, where no one is ever to go to—ever again. Surely, I am not the only person on Earth who sees something very wrong with this picture?! We need to get out of LEO, therefore we need Constellation!! This is a to-be or not-to-be moment in spaceflight history.