Causality is such a weird thing. I'm starting to think that the whole concept of causality serves to confuse predictions and understandings of events, whether they are physical, neurological, or social. I'm sure I'll write a long speil about it at some point, but one thing hit me again today...

With this whole blowup (pardon the term) about letting Dennis Tito visit the International Space Station as a tourist, a CNN article made a loose reference to the Challenger disaster and Christa McAuliffe, the last 'space tourist' to attempt a space mission (if you don't count Senator John Glenn). The article quotes NASA officials who think sending Tito up would be dangerous because he's not sufficiently trained and could endanger himself and others.

Well, obviously it wasn't Christa McAuliffe's lack of training that precipitated the Challenger disaster, but it's also fair to say that the disaster wouldn't have happened if she wasn't on the mission.

Back on that fateful day in January 1987, a shuttle was launched in far more adverse conditions than ever attempted before. Morton Thiokol, makers of the solid rocket booster that failed, spent the 12 hours before the launch trying to convince NASA officials that the launch in such cold weather wasn't a good idea. It was the first time the manufacturer had ever given a 'no-launch' recommendation in 12 years of rocket development for NASA.

So why did NASA launch anyway? Well, Edward Tufte would say that it was because Thiokol did an abyssmal job of data visualization and presentation, and true as that may be (this is what I mean about causality. A billion things need to align for something to happen, and you can point to any one and say 'that's why it happened. What a flawed concept), as bad as the data visualization may have been, NASA decided to override the recommendation because this was a media-driven mission.

Like the Moon shots, which NASA used to gain funding for planetary research (mainly the Pioneer and Voyager missions), the Challenger mission was supposed to renew waning excitement over the Shuttle and other initiatives NASA had planned including, ironically, a space station to compete with Mir.

Okay, back to the point, if Christa hadn't been on the Shuttle the nation wouldn't have been watching, and if the nation wasn't watching, NASA wouldn't have had so much pressure to launch on schedule, better conditions would have been waited for, and the launch would have gone off without a problem.

Sort of Murphey's Law and a Catch-22 rolled into one..