… the Shuttle Challenger, exploded shortly after launch over the Atlantic Ocean, killing all seven of its crew. Among them was the first (and so far only) Teacher in Space, a radiant, inspiring woman named Sharon Christa McAuliffe.
The accident, 73 seconds into the flight, remains fixed in my mind for many reasons. One, quite selfish, is that fateful day was also my 30th birthday. Another is the consideration I made to apply to the Teacher in Space myself (though I never did). Christa and I shared the same profession, and I understood the deep emotional connections that can exist between teachers and their students. And yet another was just the shock of it all. We had grown so accustomed to routine launches from Cape Canaveral that collectively we forgot how dangerous space flight really is.
In the months that followed, we learned, courtesy of an impatient demonstration by physicist Richard Feynmann, that O-ring seals in the external boosters had failed in the unusually cool weather of the launch date. Chilled below their design temperature, the rings lost their pliability and allowed jets of burning solid propellant to ignite the liquid hydrogen and oxygen in the external fuel tank. The crew had no chance to escape; it happened all too quickly.
In the four decades of human space flight, the U.S. and the other space faring nations have been overall very fortunate, given the risks. No one has died in space, although the crew of Apollo 13 came uncomfortably close. But we have lost astronauts and cosmonauts on the launch pad and on re-entry, which are arguably the riskiest times of spaceflight.
Is the potential loss of human life worth that risk? Some argue that human spaceflight is too expensive, too showy, too inefficient, and yes, too dangerous. The cost overruns of the Shuttle program and the International Space Station give these detractors some practical ammunition to deep-six human space exploration. Yet, the very heart of being human is to explore the unknown. We do it as babies as soon as we can crawl. We have done it as civilizations throughout milennia. Humans are curious, and the call of space is hard for many to ignore, just as the call of the sea and the New World beckoned to our ancestors.
Human space exploration is inherently dangerous, but we are not coercing anyone to be these explorers. They do it of their own free will and know the risks. Human missions are expensive, but they have to be. As Challenger and its sister ship, Columbia, demonstrated with their destruction, it is dangerous to cut corners, to rush launch windows, and to assume too much. If we want to keep our space explorers alive, we will have to spend a lot of money to keep them safe.
In these days of terrorist attacks, seemingly pointless wars, peak oil and threats of catastrophic global warming, I would suggest we as a species need some greater aspiration than just surviving our own folly. We need to honor those who died in the line of duty and those who continue to risk life and limb by continuing their work. To quote the Russian rocketry pioneer, Konstantin Eduardovitch Tsiolkovsky, “The Earth is the cradle of the mind, but we cannot live forever in a cradle.”
Recquisat in pace: Christa McAuliffe, Francis R. Scobee, Michael J. Smith, Ronald E. McNair, Ellison S. Onizuka, Judith A. Resnik and Gregory B. Jarvis.
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