This is Kathleen chiming in for Peter and herself.
Peter is at the CreationCon this weekend in California and lent me his blog for a few days.
I read the news of the shuttle off of one of the professional lists I belong to. I couldn’t believe it. I turned on my radio to NPR and found out that it was true. My heart went out to the family and friends of those lost and all those who work at NASA.
Peter and I pass on our thoughts and prayers to all who are touched by this tragic event.
Kathleen
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A very sad day for the country.
It makes all the political bickering here the last few days seem way too trivial.
Best wishes to all.
sad day for the world in general, not just our country.
welcome kathleen, looking forward to hearing the thoughts of “wife of writer of stuff”
😛
We heard the big BOOM this morning in Arlington, Texas.
The Wife and I were lying in bed waking up, chatting, when we heard what I would describe as a very distant, muted explosion. It was a half hour later before we realized the significance of the sound.
Just like January 1986, it was surreal.
I didn’t believe it when my friend called to give me the news.
I didn’t believe it when I saw the video on TV.
It’s difficult to accept the hard brick of reality smashing hard against the stained glass window of dreams.
I value our space program on a very personal level as I suspect you do.
I made a Neil Armstrong hand puppet in Cub Scouts. I even won a ribbon for my original puppet show.
Sky Lab was one of the first things I learned to draw. I still doodle it from time-to-time. Just look in the margins of my meeting notes.
I used to send off letters to NASA requesting press kits… and they’d send me great, big envelopes full of pictures and diagrams. My bedroom wall was papered with images of Apollo-Soyuz.
What a wonderful gift it is that boyhood dreams of science fantasy have become science fact.
My grandfather’s generation never would have imagined that within their lifetime we would put a man in orbit, walk on the moon, and maintain an international space station.
On a daily basis, the Hubble Space Telescope peers back millions of years into the past.
We live in an age of miracles; we walk in a landscape of dreams.
Sometimes, dreams are troubled. We wake to find that a little bit of horror has entered our realm of wonder.
Like that January day in 1986, we grieve today. We grieve for seven people who were living our dreams. And we worry over the dream’s future.
No doubt, numerous factions will sieze the opportunity to question the wisdom of manned space flight. Others will recommend that NASA’s budget would be better spent on social programs. It’s what happened after the ’86 accident. I’m sure it will happen again.
We will overcome these obstacles as we did before.
We will improve.
We will fly again.
Our dreams are still becoming.
Truly a sad sad day. Everything was going so smoothly, it just came out of nowhere. We here in Israel share your grief.
It’s a tragic loss of human life, and also a serious setback to NASA. No more manned missions for at least two years, if only to retrieve the astronauts at the International Space Station. This is truly a sad event for all aspects of humanity…
I couldn’t believe it when I heard about it earlier. Like Aron, space has always been a fascination for me and still is to this day. This was a blow just as it had been when I witnessed the Challenger explosion many years ago.
My wife and I were talking over the cause and why it happened. My first thought was that it was an old spacecraft and maybe it had taken one flight too many. Then I read an article on CNN.com that Nasa thought about retiring Columbia in 2001.
I’m not going to speculate any more on it until NASA comes out and says what happened.
I do agree that this should not stop us. When we are faced with a tragedy, we mourn, we learn from it, and we advance. This is an uncertain science and there may be much we can gain from this to try and make sure that what happened to Columbia doesn’t happen to another shuttle just as we did after Challenger.
As for money, I doubt NASA will give up on shuttles. I’m sure someone will have a “Bakesale to buy NASA a shuttle” if it comes to money. I would.
What is it about late January, now early February and space disasters? First Apollo 1, then Challenger, now Columbia. This is just awful.
The major concern is that these crates are OLD. They needed to be replaced years ago, but short-sighted congress and bungles by NASA have put the next generation of single-state to orbit craft on the far back burner.
We need to urge out Congressional representatives to make sure that the US continues to send crewed missions to space. If we don’t do it, who will?
Beautifully stated, Aron. Well done.
I heard about it the other night on TV, and it was devastating. I was so impressed with the launch the other week, in which one of the pilots to go on this fantastic journey into space was an Israeli, and now, the joy’s been turned into sadness and misery. My condolences to the families of the astronauts who perished in the crash.
I hope the families of those lost know that a lot of people are thinking of them this weekend. Astronauts are heroes, real heroes and we’re poorer for their loss.
The Challenger was on the 28th flight of a projected 100 flight lifetime.
Perhaps NASA is expecting too much from these craft.
When I was a kid and living in So. Cal., my mom used to drag my brother and I to Edwards Air Force Base to watch the shuttle landings back when they used to land them there.
I witnessed three landings. Columbia twice, and Challenger once. Now they are both gone and it feels as if a part of my childhood has finally has died as well.
God be with the brave astronauts and the families of the Columbia diaster. God be with us all.
I was in Houston this weekend, for a comic/sci-fi show.
We heard about the disaster by the mother of one of the show volunteers calling down to us and saying that she was out driving and heard a loud explosion. She continued home and turned on the TV, that is when she found out what the sound was. That is when she called us, and we started to worry while watching TV.
You see, my home is the Lufkin, Nacogdoches area of Texas. We were over two hours away and horrible news was coming in about our homes. I’m home now (Sunday night), can’t see much, it’s dark. Everything seems to be okay. Tomorrow, I have to travel to Nacogdoches (where I work), I hope that everything is okay there also.
The shuttle will rise again, there should not be some “2 years” of no flights, and from what the President said on Saturday I’m sure that will not be allowed to happen.
jeff
People couldn’t believe it?
One of the most complex devices ever designed by Man, built using material technologies 25 years out of date, assembled by the lowest bidder, and maintained by an organization which has seen its funding slashed time and again. Subject this over and over to some of the worst stress imaginable. And we’re surprised when some go ka-boom?
Though I doubt it’ll happen any time soon, it would be nice if this finally got the administration to working on designing a new generation of craft with real range (how about geo-synch and back?) and reasonably safety features. For example, why were there no EVA-capable suits on board? I was stunned to discover they didn’t have any. How else can they evaluate possible micro-meteorite or other damage? This is always a potential concern. Yet they had no way to deal with it? Or investigate it?
And even if they can’t repair the damage, if the craft is at all maneuverable, use some of the extra fuel to get them to the International Space Station to use as a safe port until they can get another craft up either with replacement tiles and repair kit, or at least pick up the stranded astronauts and experiment results.
Expensive? Sure. So is the time and money invested in training the lost crew. So were the lost experiments. So was the craft itself.
The Challenger and Columbia tragedies are what happen when you cut too many corners. Maybe, someday, the beancounters will realize this.
The StarWolf writes:
For example, why were there no EVA-capable suits on board? I was stunned to discover they didn’t have any. How else can they evaluate possible micro-meteorite or other damage? This is always a potential concern. Yet they had no way to deal with it? Or investigate it?
Isn’t it sometimes the case that the space shuttle can be positioned in such a way so that it can be viewed and examined by various orbital satellites? That may have not been done in this case, but it certainly seems that you should be able to at least make a cursory survey of vehicle exterior without having to make someone leave the craft.
That doesn’t help if you can’t repair the damage, of course…
Anyway, this disaster will certainly cause some real scrutiny to space shuttle practices and processes, which we can hope lead to better, safter, and smarter methods for future space travel. (Then again, the post-Challenger Rogers Commission made several recommendations, of which, I think, not all have been fully implemented…)
It turns out that — unless a Shuttle mission has been specifically launched for an ISS rendezvous — it doesn’t have the delta-V to make it there. The big problem is that the ISS is in a highly inclined orbit; the Shuttle usually less so. (The high inclination makes it easier to launch from Russia to the ISS.)
Don’t feel bad about not knowing that — I didn’t either until I asked.
Also, to add to Bill’s post, the Columbia was the only shuttle that coulnd NOT dock with the ISS. It did not have the right type of ports for that.
jeff
All of which again ties in with my assertions of cost-cutting. The shuttles should be retrofitted with extra fuel bays to allow for ISS rendez-vous in an emergency. This would leave less space for experiments and suchlike? That’s OK. Consider it more incentive to get that second generation of craft onto then off the drawing boards a.s.a.p.
No docking port? That’s what you’ve got the EVA-capable suits aboard for. Doing it right costs money, yes. Not doing it right eventually costs a lot more.
Greg Easterbrook (who warned about the shuttle before Challenger) has an article about why it should be dumped: http://www.time.com/time/covers/1101030210/sceasterbrook.html
“Greg Easterbrook (who warned about the shuttle before Challenger) has an article about why it should be dumped”
I agree with him about dumping the existing shuttle, but disagree on the replacement.
1 – Humans are simply more adaptable in an emergency than a robot. More than one mission has gone awry or been lost entirely because the computer couldn’t fix a fairly simple problem a human could have dealt with.
2 – Some of the things sent up in the shuttle (Hubble, for example) would be hard pressed to fit on many of the existing launch vehicles.
3 – His cheap space plane proposal probably couldn’t rescue damaged or inoperative satellites ($500M each?) to repair or salvage them.
4 – We’ll have to leave this planet behind some day. The space plane he advocates won’t be much use for that. A reliable, longer-ranged spacecraft (say able to get to geosynch and back) would be a good step towards this, however.
One thing I note, no one seems to be considering some of the more previously far-fetched alternatives.
Arthur C Clarke’s THE FOUNTAINS OF PARADISE is one of the best known novels talking about a ‘space elevator’. But it suggests such a thing won’t be for a long time to come.
Remarkable advances in materials sciences succgest it could well come within decades.
Of course, one isn’t about to se a tower stretching thousands of kilometers straight up being build anywhere near major occupied land masses.
But it’s an idea …