Sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground
As I was walking to the Ashby BART station this morning, I saw through someone's ground-floor window a wide-screen TV, left on in an empty room and tuned to CNN. The picture was showing the Columbia re-entry over and over again. "Oh, I forgot to watch that," I thought. It was supposed to have been visible from California very early in the morning. But I wondered why CNN would keep showing the same re-entry image. A caption, which was very difficult to read, said that the space shuttle had broken up over Texas on re-entry.
I didn't understand. The loss of a space shuttle was something that happened in the 1980s. It was an iconic event of the 1980s; "the Space Shuttle disaster" happened right before my sister was born, right before the Chernobyl disaster. And then Richard Feynman investigated it.
Now "the Space Shuttle disaster" is something this decade has to share with the 1980s, as when World War II came along and people had to adjust to seeing "the Great War" in a different context. But I don't know how I can think of a Space Shuttle disaster apart from the Challenger.
When I walked on to BART I thought about what John F. Kennedy, one of the most eloquent of all U.S. presidents, famously said a long time before I was born:
We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
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