Saturday,
February 1, 2003
Oh, hell
Yes, I heard it. I'd just gone back to bed after the cats woke me up around 7:00 AM (I was hungry anyway, so I got up to eat some pita bread and hummus and play with the boys a bit). So I was dozing with Jordan on my feet when I heard a low rumbling noise outside. To be honest, I figured it was a truck -- we live close to a major road, there's a certain amount of construction going on in the area, and I didn't think anything of it.
Jordan did, however, because he went apeshit and sank his claws into my ankle. I yelled, "What the hell is wrong with you?" and flung him across the bed, where he promptly sought the protection of Lyndon's body as a shield between himself and the Suddenly Crazy House Ape. Muttering to myself about equally crazy cats, I started dozing again.
And then the phone rang. When I picked up, I heard my sister say, "Did anything drop on you?"
"Wha?" I managed.
"Didn't you hear? The space shuttle blew up over Texas."
"THE SPACE SHUTTLE BLEW UP?!?"
That little exclamation woke Lyndon up, and we stagger-dashed into the living room to turn on the local news. And by god, there it was -- the NBC affiliate had set up a camera on their roof to film the shuttle going overhead, since it was passing so close to DFW, and caught the bright spark of light as it blossomed into a glowing smear, then fragmented into shooting stars.
Oh, shit.
I've spent the day watching replays, news from Nacagdoches and other towns in the debris field (I'm astounded that they found human remains -- I would have thought those would have been the first to vaporize), and I've caught the head honchos on C-Span fending off the media during a bitch of a press conference. And while my heart goes out to the families of the seven astronauts and the NASA employees and managers who lost their friends and are going to go through yet another baptism of fire as a result, I still find time to be shocked and amazed by the congresspuppets who are whinging, "Oh, space exploration is too dangerous -- we should stop all manned space travel and use robotics instead."
*pinches bridge of nose and sighs* Do they even realize just how insulting that is? It's insulting to each astronaut who died over my head this morning. It's insulting to their families, to the people who have busted their ass to keep the space progam going, to every child who dreams of being an astronaut. It's insulting to the pioneers who risked danger to found this bloody country in the bloody first place.
I swear, some people never bother to crack a history book.
Yes, manned space exploration is dangerous. It's dangerous as hell. So was crossing the ocean without benefit of longitude. So was traveling to new lands and settling them. But if our ancestors didn't look at the horizon or the sea and wonder, "What's on the other side?" we'd still be sitting on a savannah picking lice off each other. The seven astronauts who died this morning were pioneers -- and pioneering has always been a dangerous job. They understood that, and they climbed into the Columbia anyway. This time, luck was against them and they didn't come home. We grieve for their loss, yes, but to use that as an excuse to shut down manned spaceflights is flat-out wrong.
Now, I could say that we need manned space exploration because of all the scientific, technological and medical benefits we draw from it. I could say that we need it in order to stay ahead of the Chinese, who are getting ready to launch a space mission at the end of this year. Hell, I could even say that we need to do it to honor those seven who lost their lives today.
But you know why we need manned space exploration? Because man is a thinking animal that looks at the sky and wonders, "What's out there?" Because we are a pioneering race -- we spread across continents, crossed oceans, managed to put down roots in places as diverse as the Fertile Crescent and the Australian Outback, and finally we've made the leap into space. To shut it down now because "it's too dangerous" or "it costs too much" -- well, hell, we might as well just go back and live in the trees, because we damn well won't deserve the honorific of "human being" anymore.
Seven human beings died today, and I honor them for the risks they took in pursuing their dream and helping us take another step off the planet. May all that's powerful bless them and keep them close, and may that same power help anyone who tries to shut down the space program.
And on that note, allow me to present two verses from a filk song, originally written after the Challenger disaster but just as appropriate today:
"We're minus
10 who sought the stars, but out across the land
You'll see a million volunteers are raising up their hands
And all of them are well prepared to pay that final cost
They know that space and all the stars are worth the lives we've lost.
"It's minus
10 and counting, and many more may die
For as careful as we ever are, it costs us lives to fly.
But all who take the risk of space say, 'If we die, then take our place.
'And please, when we are gone, carry on.'"