All these years later, I still remember the shuttle Columbia as it stood ready for its inaugural launch from Kennedy Space Center.
T-minus several hours before that launch in 1981, Columbia’s backdrop was an inky night sky sprinkled with stars. Blazing lights emphasized the orbiter’s pristine whiteness, and the balmy ocean air was the ultimate benediction as the buzz built before liftoff.
I told a friend that Columbia looked like a dazzling religious icon on display.
Others weren’t quite so enrapt. Columbia wasn’t sleek like the disposable rockets that lofted earlier astronauts into space. Disparaged by some in those days as a supersonic dump truck, a bureaucratic compromise that thrilled no one, this squat, winged thing was nevertheless going to take America back into space in a big way. And people seemed to care about that then.
Like other reporters who covered the first space shuttle launch, I stayed up for a couple of days, writing all of it down: The Shuttle Shooter drinks. The pioneers coming home to roost for the next chapter of the right stuff. The celebrities and politicians who warmed bare bleachers. The ordinary Americans who flocked by the millions to the Space Coast and lighted bonfires in witness of the beauty of adventure and exploration realized.
Those fires paled next to the huge fire and the huge rumble of that first shuttle liftoff, the loveliest thing I’d ever seen.
Because I lived on the Space Coast and worked as a journalist, and because I loved the space program, I would witness most of the shuttle launches during the next 20 years. And I would interview astronauts and ”pad rats,” the worker bees who really made things work at the Space Center.
The risks and rewards of space were never abstractions to me, perhaps because I was so close to it for so long. If the rest of the nation went about its business, and shrugged off any interest in the miracles and wonder wrought by space exploration, I could not.
I had seen Columbia at the beginning.
One very cold day in January 1986, I was tempted to stay indoors and miss the launch of the Challenger mission that included the schoolteacher. It was so cold that I didn’t think there’d be a launch. But the countdown progressed and I threw on a coat and hustled to the banks of the Indian River because I wanted to see that swell teacher off into space.
I was nowhere near a radio or a television set, and was about 20 miles from the Space Center, but I knew something very bad had happened when that bright and obscene bloom appeared in the shuttle’s contrail.
I raced back to my newsroom, barely able to catch my breath from the shock of it. When I tried to phone a loved one, the instrument was useless. All the phones were dead. Everyone was trying to call everyone they knew.
I was first sent to the Coast Guard station that awful day, to try to catch a ride on a recovery vessel, or, failing that, to get as much information as I could about the search for Challenger and its crew. I didn’t stay long. No one was saying anything, and there was no way reporters were going anywhere near any wreckage that might be found.
My assignment was changed. Instead, I would cover a religious service that afternoon.
The priest in the little Episcopal church grieved with those who filled the pews. Some could not stifle their cries. I had trouble seeing my notebook through the tears that I finally shed in the comfort of the church.
None of us knew the astronauts, but that didn’t matter. What had happened was more than a major malfunction. It was death, and death again, in our family. It was, and is, personal.
So sad, then, that it seems like an old and not very interesting story to most of the people I meet and know.
Just a few weeks ago, I was talking to a coworker when I noticed on his TV that Columbia was about to be launched again.
”Gotta go,” I said.
”Are you still into this?” he asked.
”I never miss a launch,” I said, and went back to my office to watch what would be Columbia’s last hurrah.
For what it’s worth, space is about more than circling the Earth. It’s about life on Earth. Space exploration helped to develop the technology used in neonatal units, the very same equipment that keeps our tiniest people alive. More recently, some technology for the international space station was applied to robotics now being used in surgeries on adults.
That good news doesn’t resonate with many of us.
But the bad news has shaken us, as well it should.
It is death, and death again, in our family.
Yesterday morning I turned on my television set. I switched on the news. A caption at the bottom of the screen said there had been no contact with the shuttle crew for 15 minutes. I sat down and waited. Minutes later came the inevitable video.
Columbia appeared, and disappeared, as a falling star.
I knew then that I would have to change the prayer I say every year on one special morning in January.
The prayer was born in the little church I attended after Challenger exploded. I added onto it a few years later to mark the names of others who fell in the name of exploration. Now my prayer will go like this:
Grissom. White. Chaffee.
Scobee. Smith. Onizuka. McNair. Resnik. McAuliffe. Jarvis.
Husband. McCool. Brown. Clark. Chawla. Anderson. Ramon.
And beautiful Columbia, I will remember you as you stood ready to carry our hopes and dreams, bathed in the white light of promise.
Amen.
