| February
4 , 2003
Waking
up on Saturday morning, I was greeted with the headline of the New
York Times' website. I had to rub my eyes and read again; was that
a snafu, or did I just read something about the Challenger explosion?
Once reality quickly set in, I had the sudden urge to check my watch
and make sure it wasn't 1986.
Sadly,
the realization of the here and now was staring me in the face.
Another shuttle, another seven astronauts taken away in a horrific
fireball. Even now, days later, it all seems so unreal. Inside,
I felt as though I had taken a hard punch to my gut. I cannot honestly
say what most Americans were feeling, and are feeling now; that's
just what it felt to me.
I
remember back when the Challenger was destroyed. I was in an eighth-grade
classroom - whatever subject I can't remember - when one of the
teachers burst into the room, exclaiming something of how the space
shuttle exploded after launch. Minutes later, the Principal relayed
the message to all the students in the prison. Err, school. Whatever.
The Challenger was gone, in any case, just like that.
This
was something that was very hard for young kids to process, especially
children who were born after the glory days of the Space Race: Sputnik,
John Glenn, the spacewalk, the Moon Landing, Skylab. We had read
about the risks of space travel, and were taught about the three
American astronauts who died atop a rocket. But this all seemed
so, well, possible. Maybe the Russians had failures, but not us.
We were the ones who conquered space. Watching those old "Star
Trek" reruns, it was no surprise that the Starship Enterprise
was essentially an American vessel. Such science-fiction seemed
almost inevitable; we would be playing chess with the HAL computer
in no time.
The
explosion of Challenger took all that away in an instant. In that
violent flash, we were shown how arrogant and confident and vulnerable
we were. On that day, and the months after, it almost seemed as
though the space dream was fading away. Maybe this was just something
we did back in the '60s, to show up the Communists.
But
we returned to space. When the first shuttle launch after the disaster
took place, it seemed the whole world was watching. It probably
was. When a new space shuttle was built, the whole world watched
again. After a time, though, we stopped watching. The whole routine
of flying into space was just that, a routine. Again.
Now,
we lost the Columbia, the original, and I'm feeling numb again.
I remember twenty years ago, when the Columbia first launched, when
it first orbited the Earth, when it first landed. It was amazing.
I was only eight years old, but I knew I was watching history; such
moments are rare.
But
what happened? What have we really done since that day? When reading
about the loss of Columbia, observers remark how casually the younger
generation seems to react. Sure, the young people are sad, in a
general way, but there's nothing approaching the feeling we felt
before. Why is that? Have we become desensitized to violence all
around us? Have we become so conditioned by the mass media, the
24-hour news channels that perpetually feed us fear and dread? Have
we simply become numb after the shock of 9/11? Must everything come
back to that?
The
harder part is still to come. We will, once again, I fear, learn
the details of the explosion, of why those foam tiles failed, of
why Columbia's left wing suffered a sharp rise in temperature, of
why nobody except everyone watching noticed the same left wing take
damage in takeoff. We will, just as with Challenger, learn of a
NASA increasingly willing to cut corners and ignore safety warnings;
increasingly pressured to function with less and less money; increasingly
desperate to grab the attention of an American public that has tuned
out, closing outer space, closing out the world, closing in on themselves.
Sure,
we have an International Space Station, but what else? What happened
to the Moon? What happened to Mars? What happened to the Solar System?
What happened to our national sense of purpose, of adventure? America
used to be more than SUVs and big-screen televisions. What happened
to us? |
