But the space shuttle has since acquired a broader meaning. This piece is short enough to copy her in full, from Counterpunch:

February 1, 2003
Jung and the Space Shuttle
Symbol and Synchronicity with the Columbia Disaster

by JERRY KROTH

The loss of the Columbia space shuttle is suffused with symbols begging for attention. Columbia is named, in part, after Christopher Columbus and symbolically points to the very discovery of the American nation. Strangely, on the threshold of America’s preemptive invasion of Iraq to eliminate its weapons of mass destruction, the shuttle’s hold contained the first Israeli astronaut who in 1981 himself participated in a preemptive attack on an Iraqi nuclear reactor to eliminate its capacity for developing weapons of mass destruction. An uncanny echo, but certainly not the only one.

As we are on the precipice of a war with Iraq, the whole Arab world screams that it is not Iraq but America’s relationship with Israel and the Palestinian crisis that is the root cause of all Arab anti-American sentiment and certainly all terrorism. Suddenly the Columbia crashes with an Israeli astronaut over George Bush’s home state as debris rains down on “Palestine, Texas.” One cannot help but hear these mysterious reverberations.

Similarly, just as the very essence of Israel is intimately connected to the holocaust as a place of refuge against the worst evil ever perpetrated by man against man, so we cannot help but notice another coincidence: Israel’s astronaut was the son of a holocaust survivor.

These synchronicities drape themselves over the landscape of our sadness, almost overshadowing the advent of the America’s next major war. But perhaps the word is not overshadow but foreshadow, and the meaning of the Columbia disaster—if we are to hazard a guess about these coincidences—is that it is the American relationship with Israel that is leading toward disaster. Certainly many in the Islamic world will see this as a preternatural sign that America’s connection to Israel will result in its annihilation.

On the other hand, if our focus is on Israel, then the meaning might be that it is Israel’s relationship with America which is leading it toward disaster, not the other way round, and here we have a more immediate meaning since an invasion of Iraq will more likely result in retaliation upon Israel than upon the U.S. mainland.

Psychiatrist Carl Jung’s teachings about synchronicities-as-oracles might echo similar sentiments. The fact that all this happened on the first day of the Chinese New Year—a terrible omen in ancient China—adds another element of foreboding. Let us hope such things are egregious speculations and that there is no symbolic significance here, merely meaningless coincidences, a few loose tiles, a painful accident, and the loss of very dear people whose parent’s grief galvanizes a nation’s remorse.

Jerry Kroth, Ph.D. is an Associate Professor of Counseling Psychology at Santa Clara University. He can be reached at: anya@znet.com

One can actually generate a net amount of energy this way using the gravitatonal slingshot effect.

I’d qualify that to say that at some scale, with enough economies of scale, chemical-fueled rockets could be cost-effective — but that starting from where we are, it’s hard to see a cost-effective path to that scale of activity. The rocket equation, the earth’s gravity well, and the energetics of chemical propellants tell you that in the best possible case (zero structural weight) you need roughly 8x the payload mass in propellant to get to orbit; real rockets, of course, don’t do nearly that well.

Propellant is cheap, so that ugly ratio isn’t the killer in itself. But it does drive you into an economic corner in which you need lots and lots of payload to amortize the up-front costs: either (1) reusable launchers with a high flight rate, (2) huge numbers of cheap mass-produced expendables, or (3) lesser numbers of extremely large expendables — and even those would have to be manufactured more cheaply per kg than anything we’ve ever done in aerospace.

So you get a chicken-and-egg impasse: only very large payload volume is likely to drive down launch costs per kg dramatically, but nobody can afford that kind of volume starting from current cost levels. Which is why space fans have long yearned for the Big Project, something with extra-economic incentives like solar power satellites or space-based missile defense, to get “over the hump” from a few hundred tons of payload a year to tens or hundreds of thousands of tons.

You may well be right that some other technology will become feasible before chemical rocketry can bootstrap its way up that steep curve. All I meant to say in the Easterbrook context was that we’ve spent decades second-guessing the Shuttle as if it were a lemon, but [implicit premise] some other design for a version 1.0 reusable could have been the breakthrough to cheap and cheerful spaceflight. I think that premise is wrong: that the underlying engineering and economic constraints are so tough as to require a long road, with many successive versions needed, for any design approach.

However, I’m not sure that we should be worried about that at the moment, as rockets are never going to be a cost-effective method for sending anything into space (let alone people). The only way we’re ever going to be capable of sending things into space cheaply will be if we manage to construct a ground-based launch platform, something to the tune of a space elevator. If we can build such a vehicle that will get us to the moon in one shot (with a relatively small amount of propellant to stop us when we get there), then it should be relatively inexpensive to build a much larger platform on the moon, due to the low gravity and lack of atmosphere, and use that platform to launch ourselves to wherever in the solar system we desire.

Maybe this was not obvious to the “man belongs in space” crowd who have spent rather too much time watching Star Trek, but it was obvious to those of us in the reality based community. And, you know what, it wasn’t a difficult. Heck, I’ll go even better. Allow me to predict that NASA’s next great human launch vehicle, whatever the heck it is, will also be a disappointment. Why? Because putting people in space is a stupid, pointless activity that will inevitably end in tears. It is too freaking expensive, and space is too freaking hostile for things to be any different. Best case scenario — Americans actually get to Mars sometime in the next twenty years without any deaths along the way. The end result will still be vastly less science than could have been done by robot for the same amount of money, will have buggerall useful spinoffs (honestly accounted), and will do precious little in terms of furthering any larger goal of getting humans off Earth.
The fact that the US is currently spending like a drunken sailor, that this is going to end soon, and that this ending is going to hurt everything the federal government does, including NASA, makes the way this will playout even sadder, but is not essential to the storyline. It will probably, however, mean some pretty damn angry grumbling on the part of a sizable number of US tax payers.

I am not saying it will always be this way. A thousand years from now, who knows what we’ll be doing in terms of materials, manipulation of the human body, and other rocketry-related sciences. What I am saying is that right now, it is just too hard a problem for current science.

However, bitching about Easterbrook’s astronomy inaccuracy is beside the point. (His ill founded environmental skepticism is probably worse.) At least he CARES. How many other popular columnists are repeatedly advertising for science?

The Shuttle’s problems were rooted in the hubris of thinking we could get from everything we’d done in space before — the performance-at-any-cost, one-time-use engineering (and economics) of expendable launch vehicles — to a routine, robust, reusable system within a decade, in a single step. We were exploring a whole new engineering and economic trade space — but Version 1.0 was going to be an operational, cost-effective system right out of the gate, replacing ELVs for all purposes.

Maybe that was inevitable in the afterglow of Apollo’s success. (’Hey, we got to the moon, how hard can it be to make getting just 200 miles up routine?’) But it was starkly impossible — as if the Wright brothers had determined to build a DC-3 by 1910. Cheap access to space was (and still is) a qualitatively different and much harder challenge than Apollo, demanding multiple non-operational “X” programs to tackle one problem at a time (e.g. sturdy, low-maintenance thermal protection, which still isn’t nearly solved)… and a lot of flight experience feeding back into new design iterations in small, incremental steps. That was true in 1972 and remains true today, despite the New Space hype about how private enterprise will do everything 10x faster and 10x cheaper.

Space is hard, people. Orbital rocketry pushes near the physical limits of chemical propellants and workable materials, with a very high cost of entry (two bicycle mechanics won’t cut it), serving a market that’s tiny — a few hundred tons a year to orbit worldwide — compared to any other form of transport. It’s going to take a long, slow, expensive bootstrapping process to get costs down and demand up enough to start a self-financing virtuous circle. Real progress will begin when we acknowledge that — and stop analyzing the Shuttle as if it were a lemon, trying to pin the blame on someone. In fact, the Shuttle wasn’t half bad for a v. 1.0. The problem was our unrealistic “breakthrough” expectations.

“A fellow grad student and I once considered the possibility that gamma-ray bursts were in fact caused by exploding Death Stars in galaxies far, far away. We realized in the end that an exploding Death Star would likely produce a lot of thermal emission of the sort that isn’t seen in typical GRBs. Another beautiful hypothesis meets its end at the hands of cold, cruel data.”

A few years ago, as a grad student, I discussed a solution of the cosmological constant problem with a friend (who was a post-doc at the time). My friend had suggested that actually the field theory estimate for Lambda is correct. However, an ancient alien civilization figured out how to drain the vacuum energy and use it to make weapons. Lambda is so small today because they drained so much of it. Fortunately, they killed themselves off before they drained it down to Lambda