I don’t know that it makes us heroes. I don’t even know if the Columbia astronauts were heroes. They were doing something challenging, and they faced great danger. But it all happened so fast that they weren’t given the opportunity to respond. A hero is someone who is faced with a decision, and the decision that is made is ultimately what makes that person into a hero. But these men and women had no time to choose. They were just doing their duty. They weren’t offered a chance to respond. They died doing their duty.
The grown son of my mother’s best friend was a pilot in the Air Force. He came to visit us, in uniform, and I showed him my Willy Ley book and told him about rockets, missiles and space travel. He said it wasn’t possible. Would never happen. That Willy Ley was wrong. That you couldn’t do that with rockets. I argued with him. It was the first time in my life, probably, that I openly disagreed with an adult….
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.
NASA offers more information on the disaster and Columbia crew. A nation’s thoughts and prayers go out to the families of these seven astronauts. We tend to take it for granted, as space shuttle lift-offs and landings have become more commonplace, buried in the newspaper’s back pages, but it has always remained an exceptionally dangerous job. And Gibson is right: that’s at least part of what makes it worth doing. It’s also an exceptionally important job. If our future lies anywhere, it is among the stars.
“Now we have to look for the best alternatives going forward,” says Aldrin, “so that when we look back 10 or 15 years from now, we can say that in 2003, as a result of the Columbia tragedy, we examined our alternatives closely and made the right decisions.”