The Aerie
I woke up this morning to a dread deja vu. I turned on my television
expecting to see vapid animation, and instead a man in a tie was
holding up model of the space shuttle. He gestured somberly at it with
a pen, pointing at one wing.
It's 1986, and I'm waiting on fourth avenue for my girlfriend at the
time to drop something off in a downtown building. I turn on the
radio.
The man on the TV says that the debris field could be quite extensive,
and that no one is to touch anything they find, since it might be
contaminated with toxic chemicals.
The first words out of the radio are "...pieces... settling slowly
into the water."
Oh no.
Oh no, not again.
I envied Christa McAuliffe so much my guts would clench up. Out of a
nation of teachers, she had won the grand prize, to be the first
teacher on the Space Shuttle. How I wished I was a teacher, that I
could have entered. Although riding the space shuttle is to my Star
Trek dreams of space travel as floating on a rubber raft is to an
ocean cruise, still I would have boarded that rubber raft eagerly.
The crew of the Columbia was unknown to me, except that the first
Israeli astronaut was on board. My guts clenched up at the pain that
the battered Israeli public would feel when they learned the news of
their national hero. The man in the tie mentioned that the Ilan Ramon
had been one of the pilots to bomb the Iraqi nuclear plant in 1981.
I am driving down University Avenue in a Ford Galaxy 500 with exhaust
fumes rolling back into the cabin. The Cold War is in full swing, and
I've lived my entire life expecting The Bomb to flash in my eyes and
end the World As We Know It. I turn on the radio, and the announcer
uses the words "nuclear" and "bombing" in the same sentence. It's like
ice is flowing through my veins, and my vision tunnels until I seem to
be driving the car while looking out through a long, dark tube. Then I
grasp that a nuclear POWER PLANT was struck with CONVENTIONAL bombs,
and life sputters, turns over, and resumes its normal course.
The video is astonishingly clear for something that a quick mental
calculation tells me is 40 miles or more from the camera. I see small
pieces splitting off to trail the larger star. Maybe there's hope? And
then a large piece spins off, and then a puff of an explosion and now
other large pieces break away, and the remaining main piece is
spinning in frame-by-frame slow motion. At Mach 8 or Mach 12 just
opening a cabin door would be impossible, and if accomplished would
shred the vehicle and its occupants.
The day is spent in my college apartment with close friends, watching
again and again as the smoke pillar bloats, splits, and the solid
booster rockets mindlessly arc in separate ways. Tiny pieces form
white parabolas as their linear path is bent relentlessly towards the
earth. Maybe someone could parachute?
I steel myself against hope. They are gone. I will not be lured into
the disappointment of seventeen years ago.
Whenever anyone talks about the possibility of the doomed Challenger
crew surviving the initial explosion, I turn away. I don't want to
know. There's nothing I can do. So I will pretend I know that in the
dire instant they were gone, snuffed out instantly in their triumphant
moment, unaware.
The telemetry makes it clear. The pilots knew. The pilots knew the
moment that they started losing left-side sensors. But I will pretend
that I know that they never said anything, never gave a sign. I will
pretend that with ice in their veins they silently and professionally
worked to salvage the situation. And when the dire instant came it
came fast, with a flash and a bang and no time for the triumphant crew
to realize.
There was no flash and bang of a nuclear bomb. Ilan Ramon flew back to
Israel and twenty two more years of life. I drove on to the U of M and
the world did not come to an end.
If my envy had been enough to put me in Christa McAuliffe's seat on
the Challenger, I'd be dead.
Tonight the families of the Columbia crew are grieving. I am helpless
to comfort them.
But if tomorrow a shuttle were ready for liftoff and I were offered
the opportunity to board it, I would do so without hesitation,
conscious of the risks. Not from courage or bravado, but because
that's where my dreams have always been pointed. A child of the
Sixties, Space has always been my legacy, up there waiting to be
seized. Life has never led that way, but if it did I would go there
willingly, because somehow I feel like that is where I'm supposed to
be.
If Christa McAuliffe felt that way, if Ilan Ramon did so, then I can
handle their deaths and those of their crewmates a little better.
Because it's out there. It's ours. We have to figure out a way to take
it, but it's right there: space, possibility, exploration, and
discovery. And it's going to kill some of us getting there. And you
just do it and hope you're not one of them. And if you are, you are,
but at least you were out there, at least you were on the edge. At
least you led the way.
I'd like to believe I'd still take that chance, even after what
happened today.
Because I saw the ones who led the way.
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Posted by Albatross at February 1, 2003 12:00 AM