Seven Astronauts, One Fate

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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. They swam through the Columbia's passageways like happy dolphins, thrilled with their good fortune, doing somersaults. This came naturally to David Brown, who in an earlier life was a tumbler and stilt walker in the circus and rode a 7-ft. unicycle before he settled down to be a flight surgeon and naval aviator. That turned out to be good training: "What I really learned from that," he said once, "is kind of the teamwork and the safety and the staying focused, even at the end of a long day when you're tired and you're doing some things that may have some risk to them." This was his first space flight, and when he talked about it with friends, he talked faster, and his eyes got brighter, and his hands started moving, because there was no other trip like this.