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Feb. 1st, 2003 02:42 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
moonwiseLike just about everyone else on my friends page, I've been watching the coverage of the space shuttle explosion since about 10 AM this morning. My dad called me up to tell me to turn on the news, and god it was just like being back in 6th grade and our teachers telling us that the Challenger had exploded. I remember that so vividly, especially since one of my teachers had applied to go.
And now it's happened again, only I'm 27 instead of 11, and it hurts terribly. I grieve for the loss of life and the loss of one of the United States' spaceships. But even more, I grieve for the death of science that will inevitably come as a result of all this. Do any of you honestly think that our government and our people will fund the construction of more shuttles? There's already been so much grumbling over the apparent uselessness of the space program and the costs associated with such endeavors as the International Space Station.
What hurts the most is that I see a trend in our thinking, of constantly looking inward and covering old ground again and again to refine it rather than looking outward to the new. The space program has been on shaky ground for many years - one might say since the Challenger tragedy - and it has become, in my husband's words, more of a charity organization and a source of entertainment rather than a serious scientific organization. It's underfunded and disregarded. There is a sense that shuttle flights are routine; you never see shuttle lauches and landings on TV any more, except perhaps as a sound bite on the 7 o'clock news. And as to what we bring up, well - it's all to drive this obsession with communication; satellites and more satellites for our beepers and cell phones and spy programs.
But still... for and all that, it was the best manifestation of looking outward towards new frontiers. Why do we climb mountains? To say that we can. Why did we go to the moon? Because we could. Until this morning, I had hopes that some day, we'd see a manned mission to Mars. Now, I fear that people will perceive the risk/benefit ratio as being too much to justify. We will look inwards at ourselves out of fear, and not remember that part of the risk of being an explorer is to die in the attempt.
The second fellow who spoke from NASA - I don't remember his name - summed that up so well. Nothing is routine when you go into space. We find such comfort in thinking "if it's gone right before, it will go right again," but that's a fallacy. You take your life in your hands every day whether you realize it or not, but what's the use in staying home to protect yourself? What will you ever see or do if you do not take the risk of venturing out into the unknown? Closed environment, closed mind, dead thinking.
I'm a scientist. Perhaps not a good one - my other crisis of the morning was to recognize that my work will have a hard time getting published without the elemental analyses I neglected to do - but the pursuit of knowledge drives everything I do. Show me, prove it to me; if you can't, does it exist? My heart is not only with the crew right now, but with the countless scientists and engineers who are watching their projects go down the drain, who are watching their possibilities of funding evaporate, who are watching dreams die because no one will be willing to take a risk. It kills me. People like to say "space age technology," but do they have any comprehension at all of where it came from? It came from graduate students and college professors; from the geeks and the nerds and the slide rules and computer simulations of countless years. It came from chemists given a challenge, from materials scientists who spent hours looking at phase transitions, from outward thinking and the lure of the unknown.
Nothing - nothing, nothing, nothing - is ever 100% perfect 100% of the time. But that should be no reason to stop trying.
And now it's happened again, only I'm 27 instead of 11, and it hurts terribly. I grieve for the loss of life and the loss of one of the United States' spaceships. But even more, I grieve for the death of science that will inevitably come as a result of all this. Do any of you honestly think that our government and our people will fund the construction of more shuttles? There's already been so much grumbling over the apparent uselessness of the space program and the costs associated with such endeavors as the International Space Station.
What hurts the most is that I see a trend in our thinking, of constantly looking inward and covering old ground again and again to refine it rather than looking outward to the new. The space program has been on shaky ground for many years - one might say since the Challenger tragedy - and it has become, in my husband's words, more of a charity organization and a source of entertainment rather than a serious scientific organization. It's underfunded and disregarded. There is a sense that shuttle flights are routine; you never see shuttle lauches and landings on TV any more, except perhaps as a sound bite on the 7 o'clock news. And as to what we bring up, well - it's all to drive this obsession with communication; satellites and more satellites for our beepers and cell phones and spy programs.
But still... for and all that, it was the best manifestation of looking outward towards new frontiers. Why do we climb mountains? To say that we can. Why did we go to the moon? Because we could. Until this morning, I had hopes that some day, we'd see a manned mission to Mars. Now, I fear that people will perceive the risk/benefit ratio as being too much to justify. We will look inwards at ourselves out of fear, and not remember that part of the risk of being an explorer is to die in the attempt.
The second fellow who spoke from NASA - I don't remember his name - summed that up so well. Nothing is routine when you go into space. We find such comfort in thinking "if it's gone right before, it will go right again," but that's a fallacy. You take your life in your hands every day whether you realize it or not, but what's the use in staying home to protect yourself? What will you ever see or do if you do not take the risk of venturing out into the unknown? Closed environment, closed mind, dead thinking.
I'm a scientist. Perhaps not a good one - my other crisis of the morning was to recognize that my work will have a hard time getting published without the elemental analyses I neglected to do - but the pursuit of knowledge drives everything I do. Show me, prove it to me; if you can't, does it exist? My heart is not only with the crew right now, but with the countless scientists and engineers who are watching their projects go down the drain, who are watching their possibilities of funding evaporate, who are watching dreams die because no one will be willing to take a risk. It kills me. People like to say "space age technology," but do they have any comprehension at all of where it came from? It came from graduate students and college professors; from the geeks and the nerds and the slide rules and computer simulations of countless years. It came from chemists given a challenge, from materials scientists who spent hours looking at phase transitions, from outward thinking and the lure of the unknown.
Nothing - nothing, nothing, nothing - is ever 100% perfect 100% of the time. But that should be no reason to stop trying.
