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What Space Means To Me

Nine years ago today, the space shuttle Columbia (STS-107) broke apart on reentry, taking with her the seven astronauts aboard.

The catastrophic accident was later found to have been caused by debris striking the heat-resistant tiles, leaving the orbiter unable to handle the incredibly high temperatures the shuttle experiences as it enters the atmosphere.

I lived alone at the time. My first apartment, a tiny, one-bedroom setup. I was off work, half-watching TV while I killed time on-line. Something caught my eye. Some sort of problem with the shuttle. I flipped over to CNN, pulled up every news site I could think of.

Contact was lost.

Human remains were found.

I don’t mind telling you that I spent the rest of the weekend crying.

This was the second time an American spacecraft was lost in my lifetime. The Challenger, lost seconds into its flight, happened when I was too young to really understand what had occurred. But, I lived in Florida for several years when I was growing up. I went to the museum at Kennedy Space Center a few times. Sometimes, I’d get lucky and one of my teachers would turn on the shuttle launches. If I were really lucky and the sky was clear, I could actually see the contrail from my backyard.

[Photo: I had the mission codes of Apollo 1, Challenger and Columbia tattooed on my arm a few years ago.]

I went to Christa McAuliffe Middle School, named for the teacher lost on STS-51-L. On the floor of the gym was a painting of the Challenger lifting off.

I’ve crawled through the shuttle simulator at KSC. I’ve walked along the Saturn V rocket, the same kind used to launch the lucky, brave men of Apollo to the moon. I stood in awe at the Apollo exhibit at the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum on a school trip in fifth grade.

I grew up being told— promised— that we were going to continue exploring space. We were going back to the moon. We’d be on Mars by the end of the century.

In my life, no human being has gone past Earth orbit. A few hundred miles. Nothing to sneeze at, sure, but…

We’d gone to moon. People discovered how to fly in 1903. In 1969, we were standing on another world.

And we haven’t been back in forty years. For forty years, we’ve been content with orbiting our planet. Space stations. Unmanned probes.

That is not the way it should be.

Last July, Atlantis made the final shuttle launch. The last American spaceflight for the next five years, at least. I was fortunate enough to be invited to NASA’s tweetup for STS-135. For someone who grew up staring at the stars, being INSIDE KSC, nothing but a fence and some barbed wire separating me and the shuttle, standing next to the massive clock counting down the hours, minutes to launch, talking to scientists working on the Hubble, shuttle pilots and mission commanders… I can’t even begin to describe the feeling.

[Photo: Me with astronaut Doug Wheelock with Atlantis on the launchpad in the background.]

That is what spaceflight is. It is wonder and glory and bravery and incredibly daring. Exploration is in humanity’s blood. We are, as a species, curious. We push ourselves, go further, do things we’ve never done before. From our very birth, humans have wandered and moved and explored. We left Africa and spread across the entire globe. We sailed the seas, plunged their depths and then, finally, bravely left our world. Even after a tragic training accident claimed the lives of Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee, we pressed on. Apollo 13 was nearly lost and we pressed on. That is the nature of exploration. It is amazing and dangerous and worth every minute, every hardship, every glorious discovery.