COLUMBIA AND BEYOND

Suddenly, with one brilliant flash of light 40 miles above Central Texas, the complacency about manned space flight disintegrated Saturday. The long roll of sonic booms caused by debris re-entering the atmosphere at 18 times the speed of sound drowned out the carping about the shuttle program as little more than an expensive bus service, the belittling of scientific experiments taken out of context.

Suddenly, all that remains are reflections on the courage of those who engaged in perilous exploration and the innate and unique need of the human race to expand its horizons as an end unto itself. Suddenly, the science is not frivolous and arcane, but, in the case of this mission, important research that could lead to breakthroughs in the treatment of bone and prostate cancers. If the 40-year history of manned space flight is a meandering between awe and nonchalance, suddenly, we are back to awe.

The cause of the Columbia catastrophe will be found. The first and thus oldest shuttle, the ship that began a new era in space on April 12, 1981, had just come out of two-year total overhaul. From launch until just before landing, Columbia had performed flawlessly on this 16-day mission. Yet, there were long-standing concerns about the condition of the ceramic heat-shield tiles, worries that spot repairs and patches were no longer enough. Routine pre-landing checks of systems critical to safe re-entry showed no problems, yet a video of the launch showed a piece of insulating foam that broke away from the pad and might have damaged tiles on the left wing. In a vessel with some 1,500 critical systems, the immediate question for NASA is whether the problem was beyond the scope of the pre-landing checks or whether the checks missed something they should have caught.

The tragedy of Columbia was especially cruel. Last Tuesday, mid-way through what had been a perfect mission, the seven crew members paused

in their work to remember the day and moment, precisely 17 years earlier, that the seven crew members of the shuttle Challenger were lost upon launch, and the loss, 36 years and one day earlier, of the three crew members of Apollo 1 in a launch pad fire. The Challenger blew up before the eyes of the crew’s families gathered at Kennedy Space Center to watch the beginning of a glorious achievement; the Columbia blew apart as the crew’s families gathered there for a glorious homecoming. Rarely does joy turn to grief so abruptly, so completely and with such a high public profile.

As with Apollo 1 and Challenger, the biographies of those lost on Columbia – Rick Husband, William McCool, David Brown, Michael Anderson, Laurel Clark, Kalpana Chawla and Ilan Ramon – are stories of lives of uncommon determination and achievement. Their lives were special not only for their achievements but because they represented hope as an integral part of their mission. Their deaths will be remembered because of this.

Any doubts about whether they will have ships with which to explore were erased by the words of President Bush immediately after the disaster: “Mankind is led into the darkness beyond our world by the inspiration of discovery and the longing to understand. Our journey into space will go on.”