Science Wars
CONNECT THE DOTS: Let's recap what we know. Australian Golden Orb spiders were sent out into space aboard the Columbia. The alleged purpose of the experiment was to study webs in zero gravity but later reports hint that NASA was more interested in studying the ability of insects to colonize other planets.
Alarms from concerned citizens and journalists warned of the potentially dire consequences of exposing spiders to outer space. Accounts conflict about what happened next. The astronauts said that the Space Spiders were doing just fine but following the discovery of worms that had survived the crash, NASA began claiming that the Space Spiders had died during the mission. Later accounts admitted that no-one knows what happened.
The Columbia was destroyed as it attempted to land on earth. Months later, a Russian space craft also experienced extreme difficulties when returning to earth. Right now, due to the destruction of the Columbia and the damage done to the Russian space craft, there is no space craft on earth capable of docking with the International Space Station.
The NASA investigators are refusing to share their information with Congress, and the Russians are refusing to share information with NASA.
Congressional investigators currently get stiff-armed by the secretive NASA investigative board should start asking serious questions. Why were we developing insect planetary colonists? Has the US developed a defense system capable of preventing space crafts from landing on earth? What is being done to find out what happened to the Space Spiders?
SPACE SPIDERS, II IS PROCEEDING EXACTLY ACCORDING TO SCRIPT: One of the creepiest aspects of the space shuttle Columbia Space Spiders mission that came to a disaster earlier this year was how closely it followed the standard features of science fiction horror flicks. As Jim Knipfel has pointed out, someone actually made a movie called Spiders about what happens when eight-legged mutant menaces get loose aboard the shuttle.
If Episode I ended with the destruction of the Columbia and its crew, perhaps with a hint that some of the critters had somehow survived, Episode II is beginning with a struggle between earnest Congressmen and a shadowy
, secretive investigative board that is concealing information related to the disaster from the public and elected officials. It's almost impossible not to envision a smoky, well-appointed, oaken room populated with grey-haired gentlemen, and then quickly cut to a bewildered FBI agent answering his mobile phone: "Fox Mulder here."
"Although the board has conducted nine public hearings into the Feb. 1 accident that killed the seven crew members, the most sensitive testimony about NASA decision making and management practices has been taken behind closed doors, the Washington Post reports.
The justification for this secrecy, however, gives us a hint about what is really going on.
"The only thing I know is that this process of conducting these investigations in a manner that's similar to the Department of Defense accident investigation has been upheld many times by the courts, and that's our position on this," Board Chairman (and smoking-man stand in) Harold Gehman told a Washington Post reporter.
So this is a war investigation. Unless Al Quaeda or the Fedayeen are suspected, however, this isn't about the War on Terrorism. It's another kind of war. A war that even Congress will not be allowed to know about. What are they hiding?
In any case, welcome to Space Spiders, Episode II: The War Begins.
THAT WILL BE $1,715.50 PLEASE: A Connecticut woman has returned a book found in her attic to the local library from which it was borrowed. The catch is that the book is
94 years overdue. At five cents a day in late fees, that's more than seventeen hundred dollars.
Maybe she should hire
George Szamuely's lawyers.
MAGICAL CROC: Whoever is in charge of figuring out why
alligators have started showing up in New York City, might want to consider the possibility that they've
been sent by witches, as this story out of Mozambique states:
"The magical crocodiles are sent by witches to attack their victims," district administrator Damiao Trinta told the Maputo-based Zambeze newspaper.
Don't laugh. Sure the Mozzy district administrator might not have much evidence to back up his accusations against the witches. But his claim is no more speculative than
what New York City officials have been saying:
"City park officials said then that the Central Park reptile probably was a pet somebody dumped in the Harlem Meer after it got too big."
MOSCOW TO HOUSTON--BUG OFF: As we've been reporting, the cluster of troubled spacecraft landings this year is raising eyebrows around the globe. The trouble started with the space shuttle Columbia, which brought insects into space as part of a study of colonizing other planets with small, multicelled creatures. That may not have been a good idea.
The Russians are apparently skeptical enough about NASA to have
refused the US space agency access to the investigation into the uncontrolled landing last weekend of a Russian Soyuz craft carrying two US astronauts and a Russian cosmonaut. If the troubled landings are connected with NASA's colonizing program, the Russians may be trying to keep NASA from gathering more data about, well,
the defensive measures being undertaken by the inhabitants of the prospective colonies.
Don't say we didn't warn you.
ANOTHER SPACE LANDING GOES WRONG: Scientists are scrambling to explain why yet
another earthbound spacecraft has run into landing trouble after the crew of a Russian spacecraft returning from the International Space Station landed 480 kilometers off-course on Sunday. Early speculation is that the problems were caused by a computer bug.
Oh, it was a bug alright. But we wouldn't be so fast to assume it was a
computer bug when there are so many of the flesh and blood kind were recently been brought into orbit aboard the Space Shuttle.
JIM KNIPFEL AND NEW YORK PRESS READERS:
Welcome.
RUMORS OF DEATH HIGHLY EXAGGERATED: This
story seems to contradict the
NASA's not-so effective reassurances about the fate of the Space Spiders:
The worms, C. elegans, were in containers found in debris in Texas several weeks ago. But the fate of eight Garden Orbweaver spiders - the culmination of a three-year experiment by students at Glen Waverley Secondary College - is unknown.
Don't say we didn't warn you.
TURKEY COUNTER-STRIKE: No, not the ongoing struggle over the destiny of northern Iraq. We're referring to the assault on an Iowa school by
a crazed wild turkey. The feathered, taloned kind, not the kind you drink with Pabst Blue Ribbon in
Doc Holidays.
Every year, usually around Thanksgiving, reports arise of turkey attacks, usually centered in the midwest. We're not sure why the midwest is a hotbed of turkish radicalism. But it's troubling if the attacks are beginning early this year. Maybe the President should send a message by refusing to spare the White House turkey this year. Let them know we mean business.
BY THE WAY, if you want to know what is really driving the struggle for control of the Turkish mountains (yes, this time we mean the country), you should start by reading the later books of Genesis. Or you could click here.
AUSTRALIAN SPIDER WATCH: Before they were eight-legged, living-experiments in planetary colonization, the Space Spiders were supposedly harmless, tiny and certainly not poisonous Golden Orb spiders from Australia. The NASA-fed newswires constantly repeated the mantra that the little critters were selected for the voyage aboard the space shuttle Columbia by adorable Australian school-children.
Not everyone, however, is so relaxed about Australian spiders. It seems that container ship discovered transporting Australian spiders has been ordered to undergo fumigation by New Zealand "biosecurity" authorities, according to the New Zealand Herald.
While the spiders in question are deadly Australian Redbacks rather than Golden Orbs, the incident should be raising alarms. If New Zealand is this worried about naturally occuring, earth-bound Australian spiders, shouldn't we be doing something more to investigate what happened to the Space Spiders? All we know now is that something went wrong during a "power-down" aboard the Columbia -- something the spiders "didn't like" -- and after that they started acting strangely.
OKAY, YOU CAN START WORRYING AGAIN: Why have we placed so much emphasis on the Space Worms that slithered out of the Big Thicket last week? As Catherine Conley, who runs NASA's Space Creatures program,
told the Washington Post:
"This is of major importance in astrobiology, because it shows that small multicelled animals can travel from outside the atmosphere to the ground in relatively unprotected containers and survive. This lends weight to the hypothesis . . . that species from one planet can be transferred to another."
Finally we learn why the folks at NASA keep sending bugs into space. It isn't, as some claimed, simply to study web-patterns in zero gravity. It's to prepare for the colonization of other planets.
[Ed.--Why not to defend against the colonization of our planet? If it's about defense, then it didn't work out so well. The Columbia crew died, and the worms survived. Ed--Maybe it's a new, Bush administration kind of defense. Defense through pre-emptive colonization.]
