Seven Astronauts, One Fate

We name our shuttles for our aspirations–Atlantis, Challenger, Discovery, Endeavour–the risks built into the very idea. Columbia, the fleet's pioneer, was named after an old Boston sloop that was the first American ship to circumnavigate the globe, carrying a cargo of otter skins to China. Any risk much repeated can become routine, and so it was for shuttle flights, except when they become tragic. That's when we are reminded that knowledge doesn't come easy and that many consequences are unintended, especially when we set off on an adventure.

It's strange how we glimpse the impossible only when it fails. How can this spacecraft exist, one that leaves the earth like a ballistic missile, a fragile plane strapped to half a million gallons of explosive fuel, but two weeks later returns as a glider, swooping in wide S turns back to earth under nature's power alone? The engineers who build these things know that so much has to work so perfectly and with such precise timing that we should expect them to fail catastrophically every 100 missions or so. That's why NASA must be America's most optimistic government agency, that it can keep muscling forward in the face of such odds. Columbia was the 88th mission since the Challenger was lost in January 1986–one flight lost to the cold, one perhaps to the heat.

This crew flew into that anniversary and marked the moment on board. Mission chief Rick Husband called for a moment of silence. "They made the ultimate sacrifice, giving their lives to their country and mankind," he said of the astronauts of Challenger and Apollo 1, whose three astronauts died in a launch-pad fire in January 1967. "Their dedication was an inspiration to each of us." It would be cheaper and safer to explore space with cameras and computers rather than men and women. But something would be lost as well, something brave and passionate that was sent in the messages and shown in the lives of the Columbia crew, who knew better than most the risks they took.

More than half the crew were rookies, who seemed to delight in the surprises of space, highly disciplined engineers and doctors reveling in a place where rules are broken, where physics plays games–Look, my cup is floating. Whatever their specialties, all were teachers. They were growing bone cells and prostate-cancer cells and protein crystals, studying the effect of dust storms on the global climate and space flight on the cardiovascular system. Physicist Michael Anderson, who used to build moon houses for his sister's Barbies, once told a group of second-graders, "Whatever you want to do in life, you are training for it now." At his old grade school in Avondale, Ariz., where his sister teaches, there were shuttle-shaped posters saying you are my hero, michael anderson and the sky's the limit.

The astronauts' final day began with Scotland the Brave, piped over the radio. The song was for Laurel Clark, the doctor from Iowa who was coming to the end of her first space flight. Did she know the words? "Wild are the winds to meet you. Staunch are the friends that greet you, kind as the love that shines from fair maidens' eyes." Her friends and family had been waiting to greet her from the moment she left. After Columbia lifted off safely, Clark's brother Daniel Salton told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel that he realized he had been holding his breath for about 10 minutes. "Anyone who has watched [video of the] Challenger can't even hardly bear going through" the point where the Challenger exploded, her other brother Jon said. "After that point, you can relax." Clark's son Iain said he wished someone else could have gone instead of his mom because he was missing her. The fears that weighed on her family sat lightly on her. "To me, there's a lot of different things that we do during life that could potentially harm us, and I choose not to stop doing those things," she said. "They've all come to accept that it's what I want to do."

So the reunions were ready, the celebrations waiting at the Kennedy Space Center, where Columbia was due to land. The countdown clock in Florida had started counting back up, when the landing time had passed and the shuttle had not arrived. People watching in eastern Texas heard a crushing rumble outside, the dogs whined, and horses started, and a poisonous rain of broken shuttle pieces fell onto backyards and roadsides and parking lots, through the roof of a dentist's office, bits of machinery in Nacogdoches.

It tells you something about America's new reflexes that when Columbia vanished, NASA chief Sean O'Keefe called the White House and a Cabinet office that didn't even exist when the Challenger crashed: Homeland Security. "There are no survivors," the President said, but by then we had been watching the endless video of what looked like the shooting stars of August, knowing that those bright white puffs of star were made of metal and rubber and men and women. Like other fiery images, this one keeps replaying in the dark long after you turn it off, and while it felt like an attack on the calm of this watchful winter, in this case there was no apparent evil, no enemy other than the limits of man and machines and the tension between the goals we set and the risks we take.

—from TIME, February 10, 2003

Questions

1. What makes NASA the most "optimistic government agency"?

2. What anniversary was observed during Columbia's ill-fated last mission?