Postphenomenology: A Critical Companion to Ihde

11. Breakdown

161 11 Breakdown Peter Galison Preface The themes traversed in this essay, particularly the matter of thematizing the existential relation between the formation of identity and the activity of instrumental praxis, overlap in interesting ways with Don Ihde’s philosophy of technology, including his interpretation of Martin Heidegger. Breakdowns: Reflections from Failure Just before 9 AM EST on 1 February 2003, the space Shuttle Columbia disintegrated fifty miles above Dallas, Texas. In a few seconds, the hundreds of engineers, managers, and technicians who were running the complex space mission faced their equipment—and themselves—very differently. No longer acting with the world-spanning array of machinery and technicians to track and land a spaceflight, they were now contemplating a catastrophe, a ship raining from the skies from New Mexico and Texas to Louisiana, a failure that had killed the astronauts and was evidently going to shake the space program to its core.1 In a sense, the inquiry into the Columbia disaster was an accident investigation of an accident investigation. Sixteen days before, or more precisely 81.7 seconds after the 16 January 2003 launch, a piece of insulating foam, much like store-bought spray-on insulation, detached from the rocket assembly where the orbiter attaches to the External Tank (the enormous cryogenic fuel carrier). Two-tenths of a second later, the insulation struck the Orbiter at 500 miles per hour. For the next two weeks, while the Orbiter ran science experiments and maneuvered in space, NASA engineers, contractors, and managers confronted that foam strike. Was it a routine event? An acceptable 162 Peter Galison Figure 11.1 Disintegration of Space Shuttle Columbia, over Fort Hood, Texas, 1 February 2003. Source: Columbia Accident Investigation Board Report, Vol. 1, p. 40. risk? A catastrophic accident? At stake in that evaluation was everything, across a nearly infinite scale of consequences. Would it require nothing more than tile replacement, rather like switching tires after touchdown? Or was it, at the other extreme, a crew—and ship—threatening puncture in the protective shields of the craft? Once Columbia disintegrated, this first inquiry was, tragically, over. The “second” investigation began, their task enormous, a different order of magnitude . On the narrow side the Accident Board had to determine the proximate Figure 11.2 Foam Strike. Foam debris from the impact of the strike on Columbia’s left wing. Source: Columbia Accident Investigation Board Report, Vol. 1, p. 34. Breakdown 163 physical cause—as every accident investigation must. What were the actions that actually broke up the Shuttle as it entered the atmosphere? But once the Board began its explorations, it brought into view far more than detached foam and reinforced carbon-carbon: NASA engineering, NASA “culture,” NASA management—even Congress and the International Space Station accords fell under the investigative spotlight. In the end, the Board came to address the very nature of handling dangerous technologies. How do we, how should we stand when we work with objects on the edge of destruction? Objects are mirrors, to be sure, but their optics are vastly more complex than the silver-backed glass we peer into every day. Objects can serve as lensed mirrors of architecture that refract back to us who we are or who we aim to be; Rorschach Plates show us our selves rearranged, recast in new shapes. But the kind of self-object relation that concerns me here is rather different from any of these: In our desperate search to normalize the manipulation of dangerous, failing objects, we face the world in a highly unstable stance. This more existential mirror flickers, sometimes frighteningly, between two pictures of the Self with objects. One image shows us in confident self-possessed control of the world. There we are, the very picture of Cartesian (or perhaps more precisely Kantian) subjects who reason about what we want and make it so using the world of objects as tools and resources. We can build jumbo jets, nuclear reactors, hydrogen bombs; we can construct city-sized submarines and Space Shuttles to launch on demand. We are actors moving without undo selfconsciousness , not just with the assurance of tapping with a hammer, but with the hubris of decapitating mountains or vaporizing cities. And yet from time to time, the most powerful arms of technology break down and that bright image, the one starring us at the commanding center, flickers out of view. Another, more anxious...