Last week a friend of ours called and asked to borrow one of our vehicles. She had an emergency trip to make. She didn't know if her old car could make it.
That old car was fifteen years younger than the space shuttle Columbia which broke up as it re-entered the atmosphere. Seven fine people died just sixteen minutes from the end of what was a great adventure for them but which, for most Americans seemed as routine and lacking in romance as a delivery truck dropping off tomatoes at the supermarket.
Would you trust your twenty year old car for a long and dangerous trip? How about a twenty year old space shuttle?
Barbara Morgan must be thinking about that right now. On Saturday morning she was in the chase plane that should have met the shuttle as it approached Cape Canaveral and guided it to a safe landing. Morgan was scheduled to be aboard Columbia next November.
She was Barbara Radding when she graduated from Hoover High School in Fresno in 1969. She was a swimmer, a cheerleader, and a prom queen. From Fresno she went to Stanford University and then on to Idaho where she was a teacher.
She applied to the Teacher in Space program and got selected. On January 28, 1986 she was the backup to Christa McAuliffe, watching from the ground as Challenger exploded 73 seconds into its flight. She spent a lot of time that day comforting the families of those aboard. Saturday was the same.
First she called her husband to tell him that she was OK and very busy. Later she called from the crew headquarters where she was helping the families. This time she was the link between the families of the 1986 crew and the families of the Columbia crew. Beyond that many things were the same.
They seemed the same for many of us, too. This Columbia tragedy was sudden, falling out of a clear sky, just like Challenger. There were the somber faces, the technical jargon to mask the horror, the flags at half staff, the Presidential speech and the promise of a thorough investigation. There is even the "independent investigator" appointed by and accountable to NASA. The debate is already beginning about whether the shuttle program should be scrapped.
But a lot was different this time. This time there was almost instant communication and news. People connected to each other by cell phone to tell them about the tragedy. Cable news networks reached out for their experts and came up with slick slogans. There was a compelling need to state that this did not look like a terrorist act.
It seemed like we'd seen this so many times. Tragedy itself has almost become routine for us. Our televisions bring us the horrid streets of Israel after yet another suicide bombing, the images of the collapsing World Trade Center towers, the wreckage of the Muir office building and scores of plane crashes. We do not see these once, but over and over again, first as news and then as documentaries.
We've gotten used to the events and the terms. No one bothers to define "debris field" any more.
There is a routine feel about our reactions to this tragedy that matches the way many of us thought of the space shuttle missions. Most of us didn't know that the shuttle was up and due to return. Many newspapers had pre-written their stories of the landing. Fifteen years of successful shuttle flights have dulled our perceptions of the danger and robbed us of the romance.
It seemed like there were no more heroes either. The first seven astronauts were more than just heroes. They were almost like superheroes. Think about John Glenn. He was a test pilot and a war hero and the holder of aviation speed records. When he went into space the first time he was the oldest person ever to do so. Thirty-six years later he was the oldest a second time, at 77. We started to see today's astronauts as different, more like airline pilots than test pilots when they were pilots at all.
This routine and regular success lulled us into believing that there were no risks. Routine and regular reporting of tragedies of all kinds lulls us into believing that tragedy is common and that one is pretty much like an other. We've lost our sense of wonder and so we lose our sense of horror, too. If we don't feel great pleasure and joy our pain begins to seem routine as well.
But wonder and horror and pleasure and pain are inextricably twined in the human psyche. We need them all to be human. Our species needs heroes. We need people to go where we will not or cannot go.
For explorers in all times the risk and reward are part of the act of exploration. It is the challenge and the romance that pull them forward. They share some of that romance with us. It is the humanity of exploration and its risks that give us the romance.
There will be the usual debates about whether the shuttle program, indeed the space program, should be abandoned. There will be suggestions that a program using robots instead of human beings would be more efficient. Then, we are told, there will be no more loss of life.
Those commentaries miss the point. It is the human beings and the risk that give us the romance and build interest. This is about budgets and cost-effectiveness, to be sure, but it is also about Buck Rogers and Tom Corbett and science fiction stories that fed the dreams of generations of young people.
In January an Ariane rocket exploded on lift-off. That event only made the back pages of the largest and most international of US papers. Only the insurance company cared very much. Only payload was lost. It was like the loss of a delivery truck. There was no heroism so there was little interest.
For there to be heroes there must be risk willingly accepted. And we need heroes because they draw us on to become better versions of ourselves, they give us a vision of what human beings can do and can be.
Delivery trucks and delivery truck drivers don't do that. You don't pin your dreams or your nation's dreams on a delivery truck. Instead you pin your dreams on people like Barbara Morgan.
She's been waiting 17 years for the opportunity to be a Teacher in Space. She's excited about it even while she understands the risks. Grace Corrigan, Christa McAuliffe's mother and a friend of Morgan thinks it's a bad idea. Ms Corrigan thinks only space professionals, people "in the field" as she puts it, should go into space
But Barbara Morgan isn't the only teacher who wants to go into space. Other teachers are excited, too. Since January 21 when the Teacher in Space program was officially re-opened, more than 1500 teachers have applied. In the hours after the Columbia disaster one hundred more sent in applications.
These teachers, like Barbara Morgan, want to be part of something important, to share in the adventure and the romance of the exploration of space. It will not be without risk. It will not be without loss. But it will not be without wonder and horror and pleasure and pain either and it will give us more examples of just how good we all can be.
