Firmly anchored into granite, perched far above sunlit treetops, I found myself staring fixedly into my climbing partner's face, offering words of encouragement in a low, calm voice, while she clawed her way up toward me, in agony and terror, over an inexcusably-tangled climbing rope that could no longer save her if she fell.

I held out a strand of webbing, one that she might not get a life-saving grip on, even if she did make the last few desperation moves that would bring it within reach.

The story ends happily enough. She reached me. I clipped her into the anchor, we got calm, rappelled off, called it a day.

A day to remember, perhaps. But still just a day, with same old 24 hours as any other, even if it held some few minutes that dragged on eternally at the time. I could have left it at that. For some reason, I didn't.

That night, I made a list of errors. There were at least twelve.

The discussion of them is moot, here, a technical recitation.

Suffice to say that it that almost all my errors had one root cause -- overconfidence.

I believed I'd trained myself well enough. I hadn't. I believed I'd trained her well enough. I hadn't. I thought the climb was very easy, well within my capabilities, and with help, within hers as well. I was wrong. On all counts.

Timidity played a role -- there were calculated risks I could have taken that would have reduced the risk to her. However, mainly the problem was what the Greeks called "hubris" -- overconfidence.

The story also has a happy epilogue, sort of. We went back another time, and we did that climb. Again error entered in, but mostly we erred on the side of caution. We went very slowly, topping out in twilight.

I couldn't clearly see a way down, so we spent the night on the peak, burning what fuel we could forage, huddling together shivering when that ran out, and finishing the last of our water and food.

In the morning, I opted for a series of rappels descending the same face we'd come up; it was territory we knew. At one point, halfway down, dazed from hunger, thirst, exaustion, lack of sleep, I almost tossed the rope down when it was anchored to nothing at my end.

We would have been stranded, though not without a chance of rescue, perhaps even of self-rescue. We would have had time.

Rock-climbing might be the ultimate DIY sport. Maybe it's also the ultimate Can Do sport. Most of its serious accidents stem from the same root: overconfidence. My hubris could have killed my partner. Most climbers who lose a partner never climb again. And most of those never quite get over it.

Permit me to draw a parallel here. There is more than a whiff of melodrama to my little climbing epic, but, try as NASA might, it probably won't escape some similar redolence as the Columbia inquiry unfolds.

David Barnhart ("Can Do vs. Do It Yourself", Feb 19), offers a brief for making on-orbit operations more self-sufficient. He cites the Grissom Case: astronauts are "close to the action," so we should use them for that vaunted human versatility.

In short, he calls for more DIY: Do It Yourself.

By way of illustration: the Apollo 1 disaster would, Barnhart claims, have been less of a tragedy had astronaut self-egress from the test capsule been considered. Having astronauts riding herd on robot attendants would, he argues, amplify the value of astronauts being close to the action.

He further argues that on-orbit repairs, particularly of Shuttle tiles, could, with the help of teleoperated attendants, be practical; and that with new adhesives technology, repair workers could exploit the harshness of the space environment as a help rather than the hindrance. This, he says, is a path not taken.

There is a lot to this line of thinking. It's the kind of thinking that has driven dramatic improvements in rock climbing equipment over the last four decades. Unfortunately, there's also a lot missing from it as well.

Barnhart delves back into the early years of the space program which saw huge influence from astronauts who wanted more of a hand in the missions, arguing chiefly from safety. However, the case against the "spam-in-a-can" approach in the early Mercury/Gemini years owed a great deal more to PR than to engineering.

Every additional complication to support any added degree of human autonomy in space adds up to more payload weight, leading to higher launch costs, and posing new risks even as it ameliorates others. Rock climbers make these trade-offs all the time. But it's their own lives they are putting in the balance when they weigh the advantages and disadvantages of taking a piece of equipment along.

Barnhart speaks of miraculous "saves" made possible, in part, by astronaut intervention. Certainly there have been a few, though better satellite networking might have helped prevent some of the incidents over the years. More to the point, he neglects the fact that a major reason a more hands-on approach was taken wasn't safety but image: windows, astronaut-operated controls -- all of these adornments supported the Buck Rogers image of astronautics. And as the saying goes, "no Buck Rogers, no bucks." We want to see our heroes not just take risks, but actively manage those risks.

Climbing wouldn't be a hero sport if it involved dragging people up cliffs with a winch, even if that were riskier than actual climbing. However, it wouldn't be a sport at all if the vast majority of climbers didn't survive long enough to quell the hero spirit as it springs eternal in the hearts of younger climbers.

The Apollo 1 tragedy showed that hubris, combined with a deathly fear of a less-than-heroic image (of a kind that led to both the Challenger and the Columbia disasters) is the main safety culprit. The Apollo 1 capsule atmosphere was pure oxygen, when, if anything, a space capsule should have less of an oxygen component than ordinary sea-level atmospheres.

Helium would've been a perfect filler, better than nitrogen.

Very light, equally inert. And well understood, from its uses in long-term bathyspheric habitation. But we can't have Buck Rogers sounding like Donald Duck -- it just wouldn't do.

Perhaps the Apollo 1 astronauts, getting a dose of pure oxygen in the otherwise mind-numbing drills, were a party to this hubris -- pure oxygen can be a high, but a dangerous one, just as oxygen deprivation can be in the high mountains. And the Apollo 1 capsule was overpressured by a few PSI.

Allowing for astronaut-operated egress of the Apollo 1 capsule? They were incinerated far too fast for that to have made a difference. There was no safety net for that climb, once the dangerous conditions were set.

Climbing accidents on the ground -- yes, unbelievably, they happen. From overconfidence. We're safe, you see -- we're on the ground!

Being "close to the action" doesn't matter if you can't

* see* the action -- and a lot of what goes wrong on a spacecraft is invisible. Science, by and large, works outside the visible spectrum, or at scales or speeds that render phenomena virtually invisible. So, too, for high technology.

A tiny spark torched the interior of the Apollo 1 capsule; the fire went out of control instantly, and it was all over in a minute -- much as when, on a climb, a seemingly-firm hold with invisible flaws snaps off in your hand, while you reach with your other hand for the next.

What could the Apollo astronaut have done except crawl out and die on the floor, rather than in the test capsule? Overconfidence in equipment, not a dearth of equipment, was the root cause. It kills climbers all the time.

Telerobotics may help, but Buck Rogers will continue to die, as long as there is the threat that R2D2 could become too much a source of comedy. Barnhart's descriptions of the XSS-10 and AerCam Sprint telerobots are interesting, but it's quite a signal that the latter program was cancelled. And that teleoperations research was significantly dismantled by NASA in the late 90s.

Why?

It endangered Buck -- it could've turned him into a ground control monkey, that "spam-in-a-can" image issue again. After all, devices like these can be operated much more economically from the ground. A astronaut saved by a robot operated from the ground isn't Buck Rogers anymore; the drama would play out out more like that perennial child-who-climbed-too-high- above-the-picnic rescue story.

Then Barnhart speaks of the lost opportunities for Shuttle tile repair. Coming from a self-described aerospace engineering executive, his argument is shockingly naive:

"In the case of a tile, there are many polymer, ceramic, mechanical and structural technologies available that could be brought to bear to bond surfaces to each other in the hard vacuum of space."

True enough, perhaps, but he forgets about the very component of the system that he's promoting: human repair workers in space.

Do the math. The shuttle tiles require some 30,000 man-hours per flight. On the ground. Let's say that repair time is distributed over an average of 100 tiles requiring attention after every flight. That's 300 hours per tile; again, on the ground. Or 12 days, working shifts to give a tile round-the-clock attention.

Now factor in that it might take four times longer in a space suit. The Columbia didn't have six weeks -- supplies would've run out long before. Then figure in that far more than a single tile was damaged on the Columbia. Multiply by the number of tiles, and they don't finish until mid-summer, long after their climbers' knapsacks are empty.

Finally, Shuttle-style tile repair may really be impossible in a space suit -- it is, after all, just barely possible to repair these tiles even in ground facilities.

There are any number of high-mountain rescue scenarios that become more thinkable under the assumption that the disabled, stranded climbing team can hold out indefinitely. That's just not the nature of mountains.

Or of mountain climbing. It's certainly not the nature of space, at this point in development.

There is simply no comparison to Apollo 13, which retained some general spaceworthiness after the crippling incident, and whose equipment could be repaired in certain ways en route using relatively crude technology.

Apollo 13 had enough fuel on board to get back -- it was only a minor (admittedly human-steered) trajectory adjustment to steer it into the atmosphere at a decent angle. They couldn't rappell directly to safety; they had to swing to the ledge -- a move for which they had latitude.

The Columbia didn't have enough fuel to make it to the ISS, because that intraorbital move was beyond its designed capabilities. It blows essentially all of its fuel reaching orbit it requires only a gentle shove to push it back for re-entry.

In climbing, this what we call "a committing move." Climbers who make such moves lightly end up with a very hard climb indeed: from their hospital beds. If they're lucky.

What was really going on was hubris, and that deathly fear of damage to public image. Was there some reason that the Columbia went to an orbit from which it couldn't reach the ISS as easily as it could de-orbit, its only real hope (and still not a good one) of a rescue? Would an ISS rendezvous orbit have been ... cowardly? Underconfident?

Was that Israeli atmospheric dust experiment really so important? If so, did it really have to be done on the aging Columbia?

Barnhart says, somewhere near his conclusion: " .... the assertion by anyone in the space community today that nothing could have been done had the true status of Columbia been known, is more tragic and disheartening for the future of space exploration and today's and tomorrows generation of human space pioneers."

Perhaps so, but then where does the responsibility lie?

Similar eulogies have been written for Himalayan climbing teams under intense pressure by their corporate sponsors for bagging a peak. Anything to keep those vodka/parka hero endorsements coming.

The responsibility doesn't lie with the "space community" except to the extent that the space community (whoever that is) is to blame for being NASA's doormat, and for being NASA's political shock-troops, whenever pork-barrel space-heroics programs are in danger. The problem was not lack of support.

In a way, the problem was too much support, given with so little questioning, and so much confidence. As well as timidity, where timidity is a weakness, rather than mere prudence.

The overconfidence (and the timidity) that this support engendered in NASA and its contractors is what ultimately killed the crew of the Columbia. It's the same psychology that kills so many people on major mountaineering expeditions.

DIY isn't necessarily the solution, though having a little more in the right places might help in some instances.

The real problem is overconfidence, complacency. DIY overconfidence could kill as many astronauts as Can-Do overconfidence. It happens in climbing all the time.

The loss of these brave, intelligent, talented astronauts is indeed tragic. May they rest in peace.

And may the sleep of the culpable be troubled and fitful to the end of their lives. Just as my sleep could have been, had I not gotten lucky one fine summer day, cavorting without a care in the world, when everything suddenly turned grim out on that very beautiful, but very hard, very unforgiving, Southern California granite.

Michael Turner is a technical writer based in Tokyo.

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