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catastrophe can administer to complacency. Each incident prompted
a formal governmental inquiry, and similar contributory causes
were advanced , among them a cavalier attitude to safety and a
general feeling of invincibility. An excerpt from Senator William
Alden Smith's summary address to Congress on the Titanic commis–
sion findings can stand, with minor amendment, as a comment
upon the Challenger launch:
Science in shipbuilding was supposed to have attained perfection
and to have spoken her last word. Mastery of the ocean had at
last been achieved. And overconfidence seems to have dulled the
faculties usually so alert. With the atmosphere literally charged
with warning signals and wireless messages registering their last
appeal, the stokers in the engine room fed their fires with fresh
fuel , registering in that dangerous place her fastest speed .
Yet another parallel can be found in the sense of technological intox–
ication that seems to have lain at the very center of each endeavor.
The Titanic and the Challenger appear to have been built, fun–
damentally, because the technology was there , awaiting its realiza–
tion, independent of any particularly thoughtful or purposeful
application. Ironically, a trip on the Titanic was advertised at the
time as a latter-day counterpart to the Pilgrims' voyage; the ship
itself was held to be "redolent of the time when 'the Pilgrim Fathers
set forth from Plymouth on their rude bark to brave the perils of the
deep ." (Though it is true that the Titanic carried a number of
steerage passengers, it was intended to appeal to wealthy customers
such as the Astors.) What was then simply a presumptuous claim
must be seen today as something more; as a mordant allegory of
what ensues when huge resources are expended not in the service of
some larger end but simply for their own sake .
There is one further link between these two traumatic mo–
ments, and it is perhaps the most disturbing, for it seems to cast
technological prowess in a wholly-redemptive light. Both the Titanic
and the Challenger would have lain undisturbed for millennia on the
ocean floor but for the development of the state-of-the-art sonar
technology subsequently employed to locate the vessels . (The pri–
mary purpose of the Titanic expedition was , in fact , to test newly–
developed Navy submersibles.) It took seventy-four years to find the
Titanic twelve thousand five-hundred feet under the surface; it took
just seven weeks to locate and retrieve the Challenger. For that mat-
