I was in bed Saturday morning, sleeping to the late hour of 9.30; drifting in and out of sleep I heard a conversation between Jared and his mom '... blah blah blah blah space shuttle blah blah ...'. What about the space shuttle? I wondered and tried to ask but drifted back under.
Jared told me later in the day. I don't know how I reacted, but something showed on my face; "that's just how mom reacted", he said. He's too rational sometimes; the fact that this was completely predictable and in some sense expected (re-entry is the most dangerous time of the flight, the risks involved in space flight are still high, etc, etc) kicks in and causes him not to be surprised. Or so he says. I think it's because he didn't spend his childhood wanting to be an astronaut.
I spent much of my childhood wanting to be an astronaut; wanting to go to the stars, to set foot on other planets. I know that I will never go ... and still, news like this comes at me from out of nowhere and I weep.
I spent much of the weekend ignoring it by thinking about policy implications. The shuttle is going to be grounded for months, of course, if not years; and I suspect that this will be the death knell of the ISS. (Yeah, the guys up there can get down --- but using Soyuz as the only means of getting things to and from the station is not sustainable in the medium-term). In a perfect world, NASA would use this tragedy as an occasion to step back and think about what it's trying to achieve, and figure out where it wants to go and what it wants to do, and how manned missions fit into that scheme; instead, getting the shuttle back into space will become an end in itself ... and the soul-searching NASA desperately needs will be pushed off for another decade or, perhaps, another generation.
I find the fact that the debris made a visible trail in satellite weather photos to be somehow viscerally disturbing; and i'm trying to shake off this morbid urge to call my uncles who live in dallas and ask them if they heard it.
I remember being twelve, in the bathroom before PE, when one of the other kids told me the space shuttle had blown up. The kids were always teasing me in one way or another; I didn't believe him. "You're lying, the space shuttle can't blow up."
I so want the newspapers to be lying to me.
I know what you mean. With Challenger, I remember going from mishap on the launch pad to utterly gone.