July 4th, 2006
We have liftoff
June 10, 1983. I was a precocious lad of 8 years, but I can remember the day as if it were yesterday.
For any 8 year old kid, space travel is big stuff. And on that particular June 8th, the Space Shuttle Enterprise made a flight over Toronto – piggyback on a 747. We stood out in the soccer field and watched as the gleaming craft cut an arc across the sky. We screamed and yelled and jumped up and down, and I’m sure I didn’t sleep for at least three days after that.
The amazing part was, the damn thing wasn’t even in space. I don’t recall why it flew over Toronto, but it sure made my day.
Ironically, the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster would be my first real “brush” with tragedy. I was 11, and walking home for lunch when one of my friends ran up and told me that the Challenger was getting ready to take off. I flew into the house, sailed onto the couch and watched 7 Americans ride to their firey death.
For months, I clipped every newspaper article I could find on the Challenger. I tried to imagine the force of the explosion ripping apart their bodies. I wondered if any of the astronauts could have had a beating heart when their remains hit the Earth. So I was a morbid kid – but it’s the way I tried to reconcile what had happened.
I was not ignorant of the other space disasters that had preceded the Challenger. One of my favorite books was a 2″ thick encyclopedia of spaceflight, and I poured over photos of the charred Apollo capsule. Even at that young age, I was fully aware of the risks involved, and I remember wondering whether it was worth it.
Zoom ahead a few years. The mechanic was finishing up the paperwork for the 2003 inspection on my wife’s GTI. The service counter guy and I both turned out heads when the radio station was interrupted to announce that the Columbia had gone missing. I remember walking out to the car, wondering if this would be another sad day. I was somewhere in the North Carolina countryside when they finally announced that the Columbia had indeed broken up upon re-entry.
Many years wiser than I was in 1986, I still couldn’t help but wonder what those poor people must have felt as the space shuttle disentigrated. I know it’s macabre, but I’m too much of an anthropologist to worry only about the mechanical details.
It’s with a restrained sense of doubt that I think about another batch of astronauts going up today. The symbolism of launching the space shuttle on Independence Day is good and all, but there are real people sitting inside of that 23 year old airframe. I certainly hope they make it home OK.