THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
An Online Journal of Political Commentary & Analysis
Volume XII, Issue # 93, June 2, 2010
Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
Government Committed to & Acting in Accord with Conservative Principles
Ensures a Nation's Strength, Progress, & Prosperity
THE CHASM BETWEEN APOLLO & THE GULF OIL SPILL:
NO VALID ANALOGY BETWEEN THE OIL SPILL & APOLLO 13
By Dr. Harrison H. Schmitt
WITH NO SINGLE, COMPETENT, COURAGEOUS, & KNOWLEDGEABLE LEADER IN CHARGE OF A COMPARABLY COMPETENT,
COURAGEOUS & KNOWLEDGEABLE TEAM, AS WE HAD WITH APOLLO 13, THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION HAS BEEN
DOOMED TO FAILURE FROM THE BEGINNING OF THE GULF OF MEXICO OIL SPILL. PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA,
WITHOUT ANY EXPERIENCE IN REAL-WORLD MANAGEMENT OF ANYTHING, MUCH LESS A CRISIS, HAS NO IDEA HOW TO
DEAL WITH A SITUATION AS TECHNICALLY COMPLEX AS THE GULF OIL SPILL. ABSOLUTELY NO REASON EXISTS TO
ASSUME THAT ANY PART OF THE U.S. GOVERNMENT HAS ENGINEERING EXPERIENCE COMPARABLE TO THE PETROLEUM
INDUSTRY THAT CAN BE APPLIED TO THE CURRENT OR ANY FUTURE ENERGY-RELATED CRISIS. FROM DAY ONE OF
THE GULF CRISIS, THE EXPERTISE OF THE ENTIRE U.S. & BRITISH OIL DRILLING & PRODUCTION INDUSTRY SHOULD HAVE
BEEN MOBILIZED TO COMBAT THE OIL SPILL, WITH A SINGLE EXPERIENCED ENGINEERING MANAGER IN CHARGE.
FULL STORY:
President Obama’s administration and its supportive media repeatedly say our 1970 Apollo 13 experience is analogous
to the effort to contain and cap the Deepwater Horizon oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Hardly!
The rescue of Astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert, after an oxygen tank explosion on their spacecraft,
illustrates how complex technical accidents should be handled -- in contrast to the Gulf fiasco. Nothing in the
government’s response to the blowout and explosion on the Deepwater Horizon and its aftermath bears any
resemblance to the response to the Apollo 13 situation by the National Aeronautic and Space Administration and its
Mission Control team at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, Texas.
“Failure was not an option” for Gene Kranz and his Apollo 13 flight controllers and engineers. In contrast, failure
clearly has been an option for President Obama and those claiming to have been on top of the Gulf situation “from day
one” in the White House and in the Departments of Interior, Energy, and Homeland Security. With no single,
competent, courageous, and knowledgeable leader in charge of a comparably competent, courageous, and
knowledgeable team as we had with Apollo 13, the Obama administration has been doomed to failure from the start.
The President, without any experience in real-world management of anything, much less a crisis, has no idea how to
deal with a situation as technically complex as the Gulf oil spill.
Whatever may be the culpability of British Petroleum and its federal regulators in causing and dealing with the
accident, it has been left to BP engineers and managers and to Gulf State officials to respond as best they can in a
regulatory environment that is politically charged, incompetent, fearful, and hesitant.
Absolutely no reason exists to assume that any part of the U.S. government has engineering expertise comparable to
the petroleum industry that can be applied to this or any future energy-related crisis. Certainly, White House Chief
of Staff Rahm Emanuel, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano, and Energy
Secretary Steven Chu have no more experience in these matters than does the President.
Salazar’s empty threat to “push BP out of the way” has no basis as a realistic option and best illustrates the
floundering of the Obama administration. Indeed, from “day one,” the expertise of the entire U.S. and British drilling
and production industry should have been mobilized to combat this spill, with a single experienced engineering
manager in charge. It still is not too late to start doing it right.
A more appropriate analogy from the Apollo era would be the recovery from the tragic fire during a pre-launch test
on January 27, 1967, that took the lives of astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. The Apollo 204 fire
occurred in the clearly recognized crisis atmosphere of the Cold War, in which America raced to demonstrate to the
world the superiority of freedom over the Communist oppression of the Soviet Union. The Deepwater Horizon
explosion took place in the equally apparent crisis of America’s dependence on sources of oil from foreign nations
governed or intimidated by our enemies or economic competitors. There, however, the validity of the 204 fire
analogy ceases.
The NASA response to the 204 fire was to rapidly implement its previously well-formulated, objective investigation
of its causes, both technical and managerial. Managerial responsibilities were identified, and George Low and his
engineering team made appropriate changes without a prolonged exercise in finger pointing or the delays of another
presidential, buck-passing “commission.” NASA of that day moved forward and even accelerated the Apollo effort
to its successful conclusion. Apollo 8’s Frank Borman, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders orbited the Moon less than two
years after the 204 fire. Seven months after that, on July 20, 1969, Apollo 11’s Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin,
with Mike Collins in orbit overhead, landed on the Moon.
The lessons from the 204 fire were applied and we moved on. In contrast, the Obama administration’s otherwise
rambling response to the Deepwater Horizon explosion has been to stop offshore oil exploration by the United
States. How misguided and, indeed, how either ignorant or devious can our President be!?
President Obama has shown repeatedly that the best interests of the American people are a lower priority than his
ideological goal of changing America from what it has been, to some mystical, socialist utopia with a
renewable-energy-based standard of living equivalent to that of the late 1800s. As if the administration could not
make its ineffective, disjointed response to the Deepwater Horizon accident any worse, it did not even use
previously established sea surface burn-off and dispersant procedures to minimize the effects of the spill.
In addition, it has inexcusably delayed approving and assisting in Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal’s request to
protect the state’s shores and wildlife habitats, by building offshore sand barriers – as unnecessary as having to
make that request should have been. And this is the government that Congress and the President want to run
healthcare, immigration, banking, carbon emissions, auto manufacturing, and everything else in American life?
The geologists, engineers, and on-site managers responsible for the Deepwater Horizon drilling effort understood
that drilling to an oil reservoir through 13,000 feet of rock in 5000 feet of seawater would be very difficult. They
knew that their geophysically defined target, typical of Gulf petroleum reservoirs, would be a complex mix of crude
oil, natural gas and brine, contained in porous and permeable rock. Because of the rock and water depth, the
reservoir also would be under very high pressure. In this situation, a reliable blowout preventer, a crimping device
installed on the pipe near the floor of the sea, would be essential to reduce the risk of both a spill and potential
explosion on the Deepwater Horizon.
Current information indicates that BP installed a defective blowout preventer and did not have a deep-water,
robotically emplaced crimping technique as a backup to the blowout preventer. Essential to the prevention of
future accidents will be an objective, complete technical and managerial investigation of why a geological and
engineering situation of known risks spun out of control. The primary question is, will such an investigation be
possible in the politically charged, adversarial “boot on the neck” atmosphere created by President Obama and his
team? Imagine if such an atmosphere had surrounded the 204 fire investigation and recovery.
Responsibility for the Deepwater Horizon accident ultimately lies with the chaotic regulatory environment for
petroleum exploration created over recent decades by the Congress, the Courts, the Department of the Interior,
and environmentalist pressure groups. Will we learn anything about regulatory overkill from this tragic loss of
eleven lives, extensive environmental damage, and disruption of business and employment in the Gulf?
Elimination of access to most on-shore and near-shore oil production prospects has driven American exploration
away from more easily discoverable and producible resources – and into the much more dangerous and technically
challenging deep waters of the seas and oceans. Even then, drilling and production accidents are exceedingly rare,
in spite of the geological, engineering, and weather-related difficulties that explorers and producers face as a
consequence of these misguided restrictions.
Longterm, history reminds us that naturally and accidentally released oil in the oceans disappears due to bacterial
action. Remember that the fuel oil which blackened the world’s beaches as a result of World War II ship
destruction disappeared after only a few years, and ocean life survived. The Gulf oil spill will not be this Nation's
most serious environmental crisis: World War II tops it by orders of magnitude in more than just this respect.
If America and freedom are to survive indefinitely, the next Congress must begin to restore sanity and intelligence
to national energy policy. Until economically competitive alternatives become fully feasible, fossil fuels will remain
the mainstay of our economy. Our dependence on unstable foreign sources of oil has become one of our greatest
national security vulnerabilities, and only domestic production can solve it in the next 50 years.
The 2010 elections thus become a critical starting point to bring rational, constitutional, America-first thinking back
into the U.S. national government.
LINKS TO RELATED TOPICS:
American Government & the U.S. Presidency:
Presidential Politics & National Leadership
Political Environmentalism Versus Human Progress & Prosperity:
Policy Issues Relating to Energy, Environment,
& Natural Resources
Political Economy -- Philosophies, Systems, & Public Policies:
Government, the Economy, & Economic Prosperity
Dr. Harrison H. Schmitt, Ph.D. in Geology (Harvard University, 1964), formerly a Republican member of the United
States Senate from New Mexico (1977-1983) and formerly a NASA astronaut (1965-1975), is currently an aerospace
and private enterprise consultant, Adjunct Professor of Engineering Physics at the University of Wisconsin--Madison,
and a member of the new Committee of Correspondence.
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THE PROGRESSIVE CONSERVATIVE, USA
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Dr. Almon Leroy Way, Jr., Editor
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