OF COURSE the US shuttle disaster is a great human tragedy.

The heartstopping circumstances - bodies flung into the air miles up at the very edge of the Earth's atmosphere - compel more than even the usual feelings of sadness for those lost and sympathy for their loved ones.

But though I happened to be reading Capt Cook's Journals when I heard the dramatic news, I find it hard to accept the presentation of these space journeys as missions for mankind, to win knowledge almost for its own sake.

The driving force behind space exploration has always been a desire to militarise it. And if that's not so, we've failed miserably, because space is now militarised, to the extent that the US is preparing for Star Wars. As the shattered shuttle has demonstrated, we won't need terrorists with dirty bombs to scatter toxins far and wide.

A fact to emerge from coverage of the disaster is that Nasa has a special 'debris' team, which scans the shuttle's path for space junk and monitors the damage that the orbiting litter sometimes inflicts. We have not only militarised space but dangerously filled it with our rubbish.

Though Capt Cook was an astronaut of his day, I would have preferred space to be left as a place serene, silent, empty, and above all pure. Lacking the maturity to resolve at the outset not to mess up space or extend our destructive ways there, we will end up warring more horrifically than ever, and polluting any habitable planet we find.

ROY Hattersley, former deputy Labour leader, has come up with a striking analogy for New Labour. "It's like having a football team that one day takes the field and plays hockey instead. To protests from its fans, who say they expect football, it replies: 'Too bad, we're playing hockey now.'"

And what else but hockey could it have been when the Government killed off a private member's Bill to curb fat cat payouts - an abuse from which Labour made much political capital in opposition? The Bill was introduced by Tory MP Archie Norman, former boss of Asda - a hockey star now apparently playing football. And who said sport and politics don't mix?

JUDGES usually get a bad press. So let's sing the praise of Judge David Hodson. Not only did he send the appalling multiple motoring offender Ian Carr to prison for just six months short of the maximum (a virtually necessary reduction for Carr's guilty plea) but he said all the right things about the dangerous driving that ended with Carr killing six-year-old Rebecca Sawyer and seriously injuring her younger sister Kirsty.

The circumstances, said Judge Hodson, "tore at the hearts'' of all who heard about them. Words couldn't adequately describe the "community's revulsion''. But there was the "brave and dignified reponse of the parents''. Well done, your honour. Spoken like a man as well as a judge.

The tragedy might produce a general benefit. Coinciding with Government plans to raise the maximum imprisonment for causing death by dangerous driving from ten years to 14, it might well persuade Parliament that a life sentence must be available. Well it ought to, whether the Government is playing hockey or football.