On the first day of February, in the clear blue sky over my home state of Texas, there was a fire in the sky. Playing outside on that cold, clear morning, my niece and nephew looked up to see a trail of flames, as the ground and air around them shook with thunder. Afraid, they ran inside to ask their mom what it was. At that moment, around the world, television programs were interrupted, radios shows stopped, and the people of Earth began to hear the terrible news: seven were dead. Seven of our best and brightest, on their way back home from the frontier, had met fate and not survived.
In the days that followed, the world wanted answers. How could this have happened? What went wrong? What can be done to fix it? Should we even send people into space? And the big question: Why did they die?
As this goes to print, there is a blue ribbon board at NASA looking into the technical and cultural reasons at NASA that allowed such a thing to happen. Unfortunately, it seems that the same sort of mentality that came into play in the Challenger incident are still there. The findings will show that the accident was a combination of technical and engineering failures, and a cultural failure as well. A culture based not on achievement, of vision and definable successes, but of protecting one?s job, not looking bad, not rocking the boat, and not allowing the facts to ruin the theories. A culture without direction, caught in a loop of self- serving survival without a goal that is bigger than parochial and personal agendas. Or, as former NASA administrator Thomas Paine said to me after Challenger, and before he passed away, "My worst fear is that we will not develop a goal, and just keep flying Shuttles in circles until another one falls out of the sky."
As to the big question "why," I wish I could put their loss into a larger context, citing like so many the grand vision of human exploration. I wish I could toss out the paeans of a grand future built on their shoulders and point to them as pioneers. But I can?t, and they weren?t, not really. I wish I could look at that particular mission and say it fit into an overall design that was taking us somewhere. But again, I can?t. It was redundant. Dozens of others had flown the same route over decades. Almost everything they did on that flight could have been done on the ISS. Columbia?s flight was not about taking vital supplies or crew to the Space Station. It was not about launching or lifting some important object into space that couldn?t be done with expendable rockets, far cheaper and without risk to humans. It was not part of a grand push to increase or improve our foothold in space, or to learn some major new thing that would help us as we pushed outward, because we aren?t. There was no justifying context for their sacrifice.
Forget the speeches and lamentations. I will not say they died for nothing, but they died for so little, given what is possible. And for that, the policy makers in Congress and the White House should be ashamed.
There is no Vision in our space program. There is no grand set of goals that lead us boldly into the future, no unachievable thing that we can rally around and accomplish. Our human space flight program as currently designed will not improve our future, will not open new possibilities, new lands or even create new options for the lives of our children. It is a disaster, a slow train wreck in the sky. It is a causeless set of activities with no central theme, led by no one and going nowhere ? a series of stunts and showcases and mega-projects that conceal a central core that is hollow, meaningless and in the end, self-destructive. We fly Shuttles just to fly them; we built a space station just to build it, and now talk of throwing it away. We spend billions on alleged new systems to open space year after year, with nothing to show for it but pockets lined with gold, politicians able to bring home some bacon, and job security for a few thousand government employees.
Now contrast the loss of those seven with the hundreds of people who have died in the past few months in Iraq. Soldiers and civilians, and each death is as tragic as those of the astronauts, but in the end they all died for something. A world safer from fear; a grand thing called freedom. For in the years to come, the people of Iraq will have a better future as a result of those deaths, and people in ours will sleep a little easier. In the end something new - a grand new experiment called democracy - will have a chance to be born and perhaps flourish, and the children who have watched the horrors of war outside their doors will have the context, the understanding of "why" to help it all make sense. But not so Columbia. Columbia was more like Mogadishu. The deaths of those incredible astronauts were more like those of the young and proud GIs on those dusty streets in Africa, caught out on a mission gone awry, part of a malfunctioning military with bad internal structure and no vision of itself and its goal. Without that goal and the parameters it would have created for them, the limits, boundaries and activities it would have made possible or not allowed, the trip wires and safety nets it would have insisted upon, they ended up as the casualties of a directionless political and government agenda gone terribly wrong.
So now it is up to those of us who live, to give meaning to their deaths. Is our Goal in space to simply pretend to be doing something great? Or will we step up and take on something big enough to justify their sacrifice ? the exploration of our universe, the survival of our species and the cause of human settlement and the expansion of life beyond Earth. A Goal so grand that it will show the silliness of quibbling about robots vs. people, government sector vs. private sector, this destination vs. that one or this technology or enabler vs. another? Or will we rise up and look to the universe that calls us outward, no longer afraid of our own ambitions and dreams and go boldly forward? Can we then sight our course on that goal and let it guide our decisions and course? And will we stick to it and make it happen, and not let it wither away, or be sliced and diced into nothing by the risk of political expediency, the need to look good, not to look too "out there," or the whining of those who say it can?t be done? Will we at last embrace a Goal that is worthy of these people who put it on the line each time they fly?
I know some will be offended by my words. But look deeper. I know some will feel I am callous or without feelings, but the opposite is true. I cried that day, and my tears were real. And I cry now, inside, for I desperately want their deaths to have meaning. I cry, but I also hope. I hope and swear to work until my end to give those brave and wonderful peoples? deaths a real meaning, one that is as glorious and powerful as the freedom and hope our soldiers have just given the people of Iraq.
In the big picture, in the span of time, I want the loss of the Columbia seven to be seen as part of our quest to achieve the most noble goal of all: the expansion of life and humanity and hope beyond the realm of Earth. I want their names celebrated as heroes by their children?s children on the plains of Mars, in the domes of the Moon and in the bubbles of life that will someday float between worlds. And I want to be able to tell my little nephews and niece the astronauts died for them.