For us, the spectacular loss of Columbia became the moment to mourn Kalpana Chawla and to celebrate her amazing journey from Karnal to the stars. In the US media, it resurrected the debate on America’s space programme. The sad thing, columnist Paul Krugman wrote in the NEW YORK TIMES, is that for years NASA has struggled to invent reasons to put people in space. He argued that almost all the payoff from space travel has come from unmanned vehicles and satellites. In space, he said, people are a nuisance — ‘‘They’re heavy; they need to breathe; trickiest of all, as we have so tragically learned, they need to get back to earth’’. In TIME, Gregg Easterbrook, senior editor of THE NEW REPUBLIC, argued that the American space programme is wedded to a space shuttle programme that is too expensive, too risky, too big. But tough questions go unasked, he said, because of vested interests. Switching to unmanned rockets for payload launching and a small space plane for those rare times humans are needed would cut costs, he said, which is why aerospace contractors have lobbied against such reform. But for WASHINGTON POST columnist Charles Krauthammer, the problem lay not with the enterprise’s overreach but in its lack of ambition. The fantastic risk can be justified, he wrote, but only for fantastic journeys. The aim of such shuttle flights mustn’t be to produce a laboratory for the biology of weightlessness, but to go beyond — to the moon, asteroids, Mars — ‘‘to set foot in new worlds, learn their mysteries, establish our presence’’. Icarus fell because he flew too close to the sun. Columbia and the whole American manned space programme fell, said Krauthammer, because it flies too close to the Earth. On Chawla, the GUARDIAN’s headline put it the best: ‘‘Indian engineer who died at the moment she had lived for’’. Powell conquers. They said Colin Powell’s performance at the Security Council didn’t bring the convincing ‘Adlai Stevenson moment’ the US media lay in wait for. That iconic moment in Cold war history, when the UN envoy displayed poster-sized aerial reconnaissance photographs putting the lie to Khrushchev’s claim that the Soviet Union had not deployed offensive weapons in Cuba. But the US media agreed to agree that Powell had made the most compelling case. In its editorial, even the so-far sceptical NEW YORK TIMES laid down arms: Powell’s presentation ‘‘may not have produced a ‘smoking gun’, but it left little question that Mr Hussein had tried hard to conceal one.’’ Most commentators wrote the same column. Yes, there wasn’t an airtight case that the Saddam regime is plotting with Al Qaeda or that US faces an imminent threat from Iraq. But, the evidence was ‘‘irrefutable’’ and Powell’s case ‘‘overwhelming’’. Many argued that the messenger was the message. What mattered was that the case for war was made by the administration’s leading dove. What counted was that Powell is the man 63 per cent Americans trust most with policy on Iraq. ..But Not the UK Powel couldn’t escape unscathed in the British media though. In the INDEPENDENT, Robert Fisk wrote that it was like something out of Beckett: ‘‘Sources, foreign intelligence sources, ‘‘our sources’’, defectors, sources, sources, sources. Colin Powell’s terror talk to the UN Security Council sounded like one of those government-inspired reports.’’ Also from Britain, reports of Downing Street being plunged into ‘‘acute international embarrassment’’ after it emerged that large parts of the British government’s latest dossier on Iraq — based on ‘‘intelligence material’’ and singled out in Powell’s speech — were taken from published academic articles, some of them several years old. Picture This Several papers in the Middle East carried Norman Soloman’s account of ‘Waiting for the missiles in Baghdad’. ‘‘Picture yourself as an American reporter here in the Iraqi capital. ‘minders’ accompany you. editors back home want you to be a bit ahead of the US media curve — but not too far out on a limb. Your stories are supposed to be ahead of the pack but not out of step. You might do a story about the escalating fears among Iraqi children. Many of them are now exhibiting signs of acute anxiety. But the routine baseline of journalism cannot be shirked. There are officials to quote, political statements to analyse, military scenarios to assess.’’ War and Verse Auden wrote that ‘‘poetry makes nothing happen’’. Except when violent events are upon us — the NEW YORK TIMES tagged on that qualification this week. The ‘‘slumbering legions’’ of American poets were set marching, it seems, when Laura Bush postponed a White House symposium after some poets invited to the event announced they would use it to protest war against Iraq. Poets the NYT spoke to expressed hope that the beauty and precision of their language will make a difference. They pledged to tell the truth, to rescue its ambiguity and paradox at a time when people want black and white answers. But, the NYT, wondered: would any of them have the ‘grand witty’ imagination of Greek playwright and poet Aristophanes? Who, in his play Lysistrata, came up with the thought that women should withhold sex until their men gave up their warring ways. ‘‘Women are so wonderful: they did it. And it worked.’’
