February 02, 2003

TO THE SKIES

I was home sick from school twice during my junior-high years. By an astounding coincidence, one of the days was the day the stock market fell 508 points; the other was the day the Challenger exploded off the Florida coast. No one ever let me stay home sick again, for obvious reasons.

Today I was at work all day, watching news come in about the Columbia's horrible end. There aren't really any words to decribe your gut reaction to the explosion of the space shuttle and the instant deaths of seven -- I'll say it -- heroes. It's like a kick to the stomach; that's the closest I can get to it.

Now, in the days to come, we're going to hear all of the blame and the face-saving and the speculation (well, we already did...of course some people with no concept of physics immediately assumed that al-Qaeda figured out a way to shoot down something 200,000 feet above the ground traveling at 3x the speed of sound). And some will wonder why we're sending any money at all into the space program. It's a valid question to ask; there are enough problems on Earth that demand, or should demand, our attention.

But come on. We're human beings. The nature of our species is to dream, to question, to risk lives to find out why. The astronauts, even by doing something as prosaic as testing floral scents in space, were pushing the limits of human knowledge. It's as simple as that.

The seven astronauts who died today were following in the footsteps of the prehistoric Asians who set off over the Bering landbridge and the Indonesian seas to find more fertile land. And in the footsteps of the European explorers who sailed into "Terra Incognita" to see what was out there (yes, I know...gold, profits, slaves...but there was surely some noblemindedness). And in the footsteps of scientists today who work tirelessly to answer questions and cure ills that have haunted us all forever.

But some people will want to end the space program out of fear. Some people are content to look at the mysteries of life, shrug and say "[fill in deity]'s will." Some people don't want to risk the pain and the despair of loss, even when the potential rewards are limitless. Some people want to drag our collective feet on any subject with the slightest hint of controversy. It's always been that way; it probably always will.

But history remembers the name Galileo, not the cardinals who had him jailed for suggesting that the earth revolved around the sun. We remember Darwin (well, most of us) while we're constantly forgetting those who've tried to discredit him.

And we'll remember the names Anderson, Brown, Chawla, Clark, Husband, McCool and Ramon for a long time to come. One way or another, the human race is richer for their lives and their sacrifice.

Comments

I absolutely agree. We need to explore. We need to learn. We need to push the bonds of what we can do. It is sad that these 7 heroes (and that IS what they are, as you say) died in the effort, just as it was sad that the 7 died on Challenger, and 3 (Grissom, White, and Chaffee) died in a fire on the ground in Apollo 1, but all died doing what they wanted to do and trying to advance mankind. We should learn how to do things better so that future space adventurers do not have the same risks, but we shouldn't stop the space program.

Posted by: Vin at February 3, 2003 01:51 PM

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