Remembering Columbia

[caramida]

On the morning of the 1st, shortly after the beginning of Groundhog day IV, Shuttle Columbia broke up over East Texas during re-entry.

I woke early that morning, to attend the groundhog party, and heard the news as I was driving to lurkingowl's house in the early morning. I hadn't quite made it up in time to attend the beginning of the party, but was planning to be there as close as possible. The news said that early reports were that Columbia was lost, and I made my way to the gathering, knowing that nobody there would be monitoring the news. As I walked in, I encountered angrybuffalo, and told him, “Columbia’s breaking apart."

“What?”

”Columbia is breaking up,” I replied.

He looked at me incredulously, “The country?”

Immediately I realized that I was too worked-up over the news to be clear.

“No, the Space Shuttle.”

I stuck around for the party, but I also kept an eye on the news. Columbia brought up many memories and feelings I hadn’t felt since Challenger some seventeen years before.

I’ve been a fan of the Shuttle Program since I was a kid. I watched with rapt attention as Enterprise flew her first test missions from the back of a modified 747. I sat transfixed in front of the tv when Columbia made her first journey into orbit in 1981. As a nine-year-old, the dream of finally achieving quick, cheap and easy transport into space was a idea that would start then, and never die. For years, I imagined myself as a possible participant in space exploration. Those first feelings of giddy anticipation never left me, and eventually led to my fascination with science fiction, especially the hard-science near-future realism of Allen Steele’s early books. Even as I now despair of our species’ seeming inability (or unwillingness?) to slip the surly bonds of earth, those early memories still bring me faint hope. Despite the cancellation of the Shuttle program, there are still occasional flickers of hopeful research into spaceflight, and possibly eventual colonization of orbit and even beyond.

Some will say that we are never leaving this rock, that we should work on fixing our problems here rather than spilling our human waste across the solar system and elsewhere. While I recognize that humanity is terribly flawed, I also note those things that show how much we can attain. To paraphrase J. Michael Strazynski, scientists agree, whether it happens a million years from now, or one-hundred million, or a billion years off, eventually, assuredly our sun will dim and go cold. When it goes, it won’t just take us. I will take Mozart, van Gogh, and Leonardo da Vinci. It will take Ghandi, Martin Luther King Jr. and Morihei Ueshiba. It will take William Holden Caulfield, Daffy Duck and Charles Foster Kane. We owe it not only to our children, but to our ancestors to attempt to continue this legacy.

Please do not let experiences Challenger or Columbia deter us from our goals. We must continue to be worthy of their example and their heritage.

Comments

I remember...

[jenderqueer.livejournal.com]

...watching Enterprize go up from my grandmother's front porch. It was right after my grandfather died, and it reminded me so much of him that I cried while I watched. My grandpa worked for NASA through the late sixties and early seventies before he retired. I've loved NASA since I was a kid as a nostalgic extension of my favorite man ever. Whenever something exciting or sad happens, it gets me thinking of him, and of how much he loved to teach me about all things mechanical, and never treated me like a "girl". I think he just loved having the company while he invented better underwater lights for his shrimping kit, or while he boosted the signal on his radio. I think his might be the sadest loss in my life. I feel for the families who have lost people to another space tragedy...