EDITORIAL
Columbia tragedy tests a nation's resolve
A 17-year-old wound that had begun to heal re-opened yesterday, when Hawai'i heard that the shuttle Columbia had perished on its return from a triumphant scientific mission in space.
We watched the spacecraft disintegrate, 40 miles above Texas at 12,500 miles per hour, in an appalling arc across a clear, blue morning sky. With our nation already under tremendous pressure on several fronts both foreign and domestic, we momentarily fought the temptation to let this new setback rattle our sense of national purpose and pre-eminence.
Our hearts broke for the seven crew members — Rick Husband, the mission commander, William McCool, the shuttle pilot, David Brown, Michael Anderson, Laurel Clark, Kalpana Chawla and Ilan Ramon — as well as their families, friends and colleagues.
And perhaps our hearts broke again for ourselves, as we remembered a similar January morning in 1986, when news came of the loss of the space shuttle Challenger and our own Ellison Onizuka.
We have become far too accustomed to this dangerous business of space exploration. It is routine to hear of another mission, another triumph, another probe into the vast reach of space.
The courage and cheer of the astronauts have given us the idea, obviously mistaken, that this is routine.
We knew, and we know now again, that it is not.
Space travel is dangerous, risky business. Only the best among us, like Onizuka and the seven who perished yesterday, are up to the task.
And inevitably, some will ask why we should risk these best, these brightest, these most courageous on such an endeavor. It's a legitimate question. If we must go to the stars, can't we use robots and machine-driven craft to do the work, keeping these promising lives to stay and work among us here on Earth?
There are technical answers to these questions, of course. Only the human brain, the human imagination, can totally comprehend what it means to experience space and what it can teach us. It is useful to know that Columbia's mission was, somewhat unusually, purely scientific. The task was to push back the frontiers of knowledge. The hope was that what would be learned, there, would benefit us, here.
And it will.
Throughout history, exploration has always brought with it the promise of exhilarating discovery and the prospect of intimidating danger. Yesterday's events brought that reality back to us in sobering fashion, and we must, as we did after the Challenger disaster, unfailingly learn the cause of this tragedy and prevent its recurrence.
But we know we will not stop. It is part of human nature to move to the next place, to learn the next thing. Those seven astronauts represented the best of our nature, and the only way to honor them is to press on.
We will fly again.
