Columbia Thoughts

I've just been reading Rand Simberg's blog Transterrestrial Musings, and I think he has a number of very intelligent things to say about the Columbia tragedy. In particular, I have to agree that, as unthinkably awful as Columbia's loss is, if (and sadly, it's a big if) it leads to a clear-headed rethinking of America's space policy, than at least some considerable good will have come from it. If we're to continue manned exploration of space, we need to develop the right hardware to do it. We need a system that is more reliable and more cost-effective than the shuttle, and we've needed it for a very long time. So far, the US space program has been coasting by on "good enough" when it should have been looking towards the future and developing the tools to do the job right. And as we've all just, to our horror, discovered, "good enough" really wasn't good enough, after all. (Note that I'm not actually blaming NASA on this. They've done what they could with the funding they've had to work with. It's at a higher, US-policy-making level that this issue needs to be addressed.)

There's been a lot of debate -- not new, but perhaps more urgent -- about whether manned space exploration is even a reasonable thing to be pursuing. Wouldn't it be better, some argue, to keep us fragile human beings safe on the ground and let the machines go out and do whatever we want to do in space for us? There's a great deal of practical merit in that suggestion, and, personally, I'm a big fan of robotic space probes. (I remember watching, enthralled, as live Voyager images rolled in from Neptune.) But it seems to me that the notion that space travel is too hazardous for humans profoundly misses the point. This satirical piece by blogger Scott Ott does a better job than I ever could of summarizing why.

Simberg also asks the question: "Why do people so uniquely mourn the loss of astronauts?" Why are we so deeply moved by the deaths of these seven people when "more died in traffic accidents in the past twenty-four hours than have died in space since we first started going there"? Put so baldly, that might seem like a callous or disrespectful question, but I don't believe that's the intent. I think it's a legitimate question, and I think the answer is more than simply "because they were dedicated and brave," even though they most certainly were. Simberg thinks it has to do with national prestige:

As Wolfe pointed out, [astronauts] became the gladiators of our age, in a (hopefully) bloodless competition on the high frontier against our enemy the Soviets. They became a symbol of our technological ability, and in order to win the propaganda battle, they had to leave the planet and return alive. The loss of the vehicles that delivered them to the heavens was insignificant, because they were designed to be thrown away after they served their purpose, once, but if we lost astronauts, it was a sign that we were losing the Cold War.

With the advent of the Shuttle, and even with the end of the Cold War, we retained the same sense that space symbolizes our nation's might and prowess, in a way that an aircraft taking off does not. So, though they've become so seemingly routine that we no longer televise them, our national pride continues to ride with each flight.

But most of us are brought up to believe that "people are more important than things." . . . .

So when we are shocked by the loss of something so vital to our national psyche, and so seemingly useful to our ambitions for spaceflight, it is natural to transfer the mourning from the vehicle to its inhabitants.

I think he's got a point here, that it's most certainly not (or not just) the loss of life that leaves us so sorrowful and shocked. I know that in my case, as much compassion as I feel for the families of those who were lost, I don't normaly sit in front of the TV set and shed tears for the deaths of people I have never met and do not know. I can't speak for anyone else, but, yes, there is something else, some other emotion, which has transferred over into feelings of grief for these seven people. But it isn't a loss of national prestige. It's something that's at once much more personal and much more universal than that.

Like many of my generation, I grew up on Star Wars and Star Trek, dreaming wild dreams about the adventure and excitement of exploring space. Yes, I know, the reality isn't -- and won't be -- anything like Star Trek. No Klingons, no warp drive (probably), no freaky space anomalies that catapult you into alternate universes or send you back in time. But the reality was and is even more exciting precisely because it is reality. When I was a kid, I used to lie on my back and look up at the stars and simply ache at the fact that I was never going to be be able to fly among them, never going to see the Earth from space, never going to walk on the surface of another world. But I cannot say how much it means to me to know that someone is out there doing it. It's not a matter of national prestige. Maybe it's a matter of human prestige. Astronuats are part of humanity, and I am part of humanity, and, in an abstract way, it's as if there was a little part of me, floating out there, looking down. I may never make it beyond Earth's atmosphere, but at lest my species has. From that perspective, is it any wonder that space disasters like Columbia and Challenger are such a blow, that the loss of these particular individuals feels, somehow, so much worse than the loss of so many others no less deserving? It's not "merely" the loss of human life, it's not simply a blow to the national ego. It's being kicked right in the dreams.

Wow. I seem to be getting much more serious and emotional in my blogging of late. I'm not sure whether I should apologize for that or not...