....Broken up and vanished. In the sky over Nacogdoches County. And I�m sad all the way back to the little boy with his stiff black book and his Bonestell rockets.
But Willy was right, and nobody ever said it would be risk-free.
If it were, it wouldn�t be glorious.
And it�s only with these losses that we best know that it really is...
Gibson 02/01/03 (read the entire piece)
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Yet I fear this accident (as it almost surely was) will instead be a justification for paralysis -- a halt to U.S. space exploration when the proper response is to redouble humanity's push into the frontier. It has never been more critical, given the terrestrial threats, to get the species off the planet and to find new resources for those who remain.
The space station and shuttle program were under fire for other, good reasons. They do little for true exploration of space. A reexamination of the entire space program -- and maybe turning it into a truly global affair -- would be smart at this point.
But we would dishonor the memory of the astronauts, and take away from our own future, if we let this tragedy turn us away from the heavens.
Space is humanity's destiny, if it has one. We are an exploring, expansionist race. We must go on.
Dan Gillmor 02/01/03
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"The same creator who names the stars also knows the names of the seven souls we mourn today," he said. He told the nation that while the astronauts had not safely returned to earth, "we can pray they are safely home."
George W. Bush 02/01/03
{there was a TV show in 1957 called 'Have Gun Will Travel'. I liked it a lot. I was 8. my mom and I used to go to the library every week or so, I remember being frustrated at the Dr Dolittle books, and some pig named Freddy. somewhere in the stacks I ran across a book called 'Have Spacesuit Will Travel'. it had that little orange and yellow atomic rocket sticker on it, which meant little to me at the time. I checked it out. I remember going outside a few nights later, looking up at the relatively clear central California sky, and feeling the depth of space. the world after world, the membranes of complexity tearing open, the infinite reach not abstractly filled with numbers and theoretical spheres, but populated.as I remember the book it grew in orders of magnitude, from terrestrial to solar to galactic to some other 'place' that was still a 'here'. I don't want to go back and reread it for fear the stepping stones I found, that I remember finding, might not really be in the pages themselves. there began those dreams for me. worlds as real as this one. forever. we could go there. it was possible. later on there would be a vivid picture of a world of fresh water seas, a kind of Sierra Club planet, mammalian utopia, and of course the parallel dreamings of so many others. one of my deepest resentments is the theft of those dreams by men with no discernible imagination. by the time of the first moon landing I was myself an alien. it seemed as though the first of us through the great starry portal would be Spiro Agnew and Dick Nixon, or their chosen designates. the dream began to fragment. it's a bitter thing. maturity insists that many of the people on the ground and in the capsules, in the ships and at the station, were closer to Carl Sagan than Ronald Reagan when it came to dreams of spaceflight. and I've learned to honor that, I honor it now. I feel the grief, or recognize it behind the armor the shock throws up so quickly these days. it's there, so much sadness.}
