Good afternoon. The first item of business is time for reflection. Our time for reflection leader today is Rabbi Y Y Rubinstein, who is a Torah scholar, international speaker, author, broadcaster and former pupil of Govan high school.
The cold war between the United States of America and the USSR never escalated—thank God—into a hot war. However, there was one area where it got a wee bit warm: the battle for prestige over who was going to get a man on the moon first.
The Soviets were originally more successful, and they were the first to put a man, Yuri Gagarin, in space. That spurred the Americans on to greater heights, and they eventually succeeded on 20 July 1969, when Apollo 11 deposited Neil Armstrong, who was of Scottish descent, on the moon’s surface.
The run-up to that achievement presented NASA with an enormous problem. The astronauts were also scientists, and they had to record crucial data from their experiments. The problem was that pens do not write in weightless conditions. NASA spent a considerable amount of money and expertise on solving the problem. The solution came from a company called Fischer, which developed the space pen. I have one: it writes upside down, underwater and in weightless conditions.
The Russians took a pencil. That rather illustrates that the answer can be staring you in the face, and sometimes you just do not see it.
Staying in space for a wee while longer, it took 10 years and $7 billion for the European Space Agency to develop a successor to the Ariane 4 space rocket. The next generation was called Ariane 5, and its first flight was on Tuesday 4 June 1996, when four very expensive satellites blasted into space. The flight lasted 39 seconds and ended in a huge explosion that resulted in the loss of $370 million-worth of satellite, which in today’s terms might be best expressed as, “Ouch!”
A subsequent investigation discovered that the fault was a simple human error. The software that was designed for Ariane 4 was used in Ariane 5 without taking into account that Ariane 5 was a much bigger and faster machine. The data passing back to the software meant that it was overwhelmed, and the computer simply detonated and blew up the rocket because it could not handle it. It was a simple human mistake, and there was a lot of egg on somebody’s face.
A tiny human error, sometimes overlooked, can sometimes have huge consequences. When I was growing up in Glasgow, the idea that four decades later there would once more be a Scottish Parliament, with Scots making Scottish law for the Scottish people, would have been seen as a forlorn hope or as particularly fanciful. As a rabbi, I give you a blessing: that those who pass legislation for the Scottish people should have a canny eye that watches out for the big things and for the tiny details that can sometimes lead to an “Ouch!”
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