The Day After....
Always, in momentous events, the day after brings more reality into the picture. The reality is that the Columbia is gone, the crew is gone, and we won't know for quite a while, if ever, what truly happened. Theories will abound, congressional hearings will point blame, perhaps even lawsuits will be filed. But the overidding reality for me is that space travel is, and always has been a mighty dangerous business.

I reminded myself of that by looking thru pictures I took of a shuttle launch I attended in 1996. Being on the VIP guestlist, we got to get a closeup view of the shuttle mere hours before it was to liftoff [above]. We rode in buses around the base of the launch platform, attended the prelaunch briefing four hours before blastoff and then viewed the launch from a very close three miles away. The magnitude, size and complexity of the launch platform with the shutte resting there is staggering. The whole affair is as big as some of the largest 20 story office buildings in our city, and with tubes, pipes, vents and electrical equipment twining throughout. The shuttle itself has millions of individual parts and holds within itself some of the most volatile chemical compounds known to man. And this whole array of parts, vents, wiring, electronics and explosives has to work perfectly, everytime.

I remember in 1996 while at the 10 second mark or so of the countdown, flashing back to 1986 and the Challenger disaster and thinking, "Please God, don't let it happen again, while I'm here". It was still very much on everyone's minds even ten years later. But the launch was flawless and the shuttle streamed away into the night sky while we listened to radio traffic from the ground controllers. "Columbia, you are 30 seconds into flight, 10 miles altitude, 18 miles downrange and you are doing 2800 m.p.h." Everything was working fine, and in 30 seconds they're doing 2800 m.p.h. I still get goosebumbs. Only eight minutes later we heard, "Columbia, you are cleared for orbital insertion, you are doing 17,500 m.p.h. and are over Africa". In eight minutes I'm still standing at the launch site, with the smoke not even cleared from the lauchpad, and they are doing 17,500 m.p.h. over Africa, we could still see the rocket motors dimmly twinkling in the eastern sky. They were around the world once already by the time I made it the 22 miles back to the hotel in Cocoa Beach.

One of the philosophies I have come to live by is one of Acceptance. Acceptance of the things we cannot change, the Courage to change the things we can, and the Wisdom to know the difference. We must accept that spaceflight is dangerous, we need to find, fix and change the things we can to make it less risky. But we must have the wisdom to know that many things in life that are worthwhile are not easy, are indeed risky and move ahead. The last thing that the seven newly departed astronauts would want if for there to be exessive blame, fault finding and delay. But somethings, even though dangerous, are worth doing. They would want us to get flying again, they gave their lives for that.