Apollo 1, Challenger, Columbia
Three years ago today, Rick Husband, William McCool, Kalpana Chawla, Laurel Clark, David Brown, Michael Anderson and Ilan Ramon perished when the Space Shuttle Columbia broke up on reentry over Texas. Four days and twenty years ago Francis “Dick” Scobee, Michael Smith, Judith Resnik, Ellison Onizuka, Ronald McNair, Gregory Jarvis and Christa McAuliffe died a few minutes after the explosion that destroyed the Challenger. And five days and 39 years ago, Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee were consumed by the Apollo 1 fire on the pad at Cape Canaveral.
This is a bad time of year for NASA, and for anyone who thinks that the future of mankind lies with the stars. Space travel is more than merely dangerous, it is fatal. It is fatal not just because the environment of space is inherently lethal. It is fatal because launch operators who are tasked with assessing the relative risks of launches are human, and make tragic mistakes due to lack of knowledge, hubris, or political pressure. It is because the politicians and managers who fund space development are only human, and political compromise and venality leads to fatal constraints on design. It is because the people who design the vehicles are human, and design less than perfect vehicles for astronauts to fly.
The astronauts accept these risks, knowing that the vehicles they fly, and that the people who make the decisions that could cost them their lives are far from perfect. Seventeen people dead in forty years is a high price for going into space, perhaps. And even higher price would be not doing it at all.
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I've been rewatching the HBO
I've been rewatching the HBO series From the Earth to the Moon on DVD, and MAN does it make me yearn for that sense of adventure and excitement in space exploration again. Those men in the Apollo program were true heroes -- they were eager, no matter what the risk, to take those steps. I don't know how true to the transcript it is, but Frank Borman's testimony to Congress in the episode dealing with Apollo I . . . truly awe-inspiring.
The episode on Apollo 11, in which the dad from Malcolm in the Middle plays Buzz Aldrin grappling with the fact that he won't be the first out of the capsule, is a good one too.