Saturday
The day started off like any other workday: The alarm went off and I didn’t want to get up. Nothing major there. I observed the appropriate hygiene rituals, dressed and got ready to leave. I decided to check the computer for any overnight email and a quick scan of IRC before heading out. That’s when I saw it…

[08:55] (hetsaq) holy shit
[08:55] (hetsaq) space shuttle columbia blew up 8iiiiiii

I felt somewhat numb. Shocked, definitely, but numb.

On the way to work, it occurred to me that I had come very close to using a few lines from Rush’s Countdown as the subject of last night’s post. That song was written after the band had been invited to watch a shuttle launch. There’s even some chatter between Mission Control and Columbia used in the song. I also thought about July of 1996 when I was on vacation in Florida. We (my siblings, girlfriend-at-the-time and I) were driving to get breakfast. We saw… something… greyish-white in the distance. A thin column. As we watched, it grew longer and seemed to dissipate somewhat. It dawned on us that we were seeing the smoke from the exhaust of a shuttle launch. We talked for a while about how cool that was to see… even from that distance.

At work, I turned on NPR and listened to the coverage of the event. I heard President Bush address the nation. I listened to Talk of the Nation hosts Neal Conan and Ira Flatow interview people. But no one knew the “what” or “why” or “how.” There was speculation. There was theory. There were many questions. But no one knew.

I thought about where I was when I heard that the Space Shuttle Challenger had exploded. I was a junior in high school. I was walking down the hall from the administration offices past the library. A television had been rolled from the library into the hallway and there were people huddled around it. Peter Jennings was announcing the sad news. (It was also during this coverage that he made a remark that I found memorable for some reason: “We want to show you the footage of what happened. Well, we don’t want to show you, but we’re going to show you anyway…”) It seemed so… surreal.

Today felt like that, in some ways. Something happened to the orbiter. Seven lives were lost. That, alone, is sad. A historic event for the nation of Israel – the first mission of the first Israeli astronaut – ended on a dark chapter.

I came home and decided to do some drawing. I got my copy of Time: The Century Collection – The Greatest Events. This book is a collection of images and excerpts from the last century. I had forgotten that there was a section on the 1986 Challenger explosion. A quote from that spread:

The loss of the shuttle inflicted upon Americans the purest pain that they have collectively felt in years. It was pain uncomplicated by the divisions — political, racial, moral — that usually beset American tragedies. The crew, spectacularly democratic, was the best of us. The mission seemed symbolically immaculate, the farthest reach of a perfectly American ambition to cross frontiers. And it simply vanished in the air.
-Time, February 10, 1986

I have also had the line from Prince’s Sign of the Times playing in my head:

It’s silly, no? When a rocket ship explodes and everybody still wants to fly…

Although, I don’t think that it’s necessarily “silly.” I would say that it’s more attributable to “human nature.” I have heard people say that maybe we should give up or greatly reduce our quest for spaceflight. I don’t agree with this point of view. Yes, there are dangers involved, but there have also been discoveries that would not have been possible without the “What if…?” On a more basic note, we are an inquisitive race. Our history is full of people who challenged the established norms to discover what else lies just over that hill. Or that river. Or that ocean. Or that part of the sky… We do it because we question. We desire. We seek.

And we shall continue to do so.


May the spirits of those who dared to seek find rest and may those whom they left behind find comfort.

Namaste.