COLUMBIA IS LOST

This morning I found myself in Michigan, having traveled there to help install an exhibit that included some Hubble images and a multimedia show that I'd helped author. For weeks prior, we'd been fighting with contractors over the lightboxes that were supposed to display the images, we'd been fighting the software that runs the multimedia programming, and we'd been fighting little skirmishes in the office with software upgrades and the usual things that clog our lives.

Having successfully gotten our part of the exhibit up and running Friday afternoon, I had attended its opening Friday night. The reception it received had been encouraging, even uplifting. So after a long day, I had gone back to the hotel under the impression that I would meet my boss, who was traveling with me, for breakfast at 9 am today.

Shortly before 9 I turned on the TV. It's my habit to watch the news as I get dressed, and today was no different. I'd settled in with a cup of hot tea, flipped on Fox News, and caught bits and pieces of the banter. They had up a shot of Mission Control in Houston, a place I visited during STS-109 last February and March. Mission Control was tracking the Space Shuttle Columbia, the very craft I'd seen launch on that mission nearly a year ago. Suddenly the flight techs lost communication with the shuttle. I'd only been dimly aware that the shuttle was even up, and had not been aware that today was to be its landing--that's how routine space flight has become since Columbia's first launch in 1981.

You know the rest as well as I do--NASA never did re-establish communications with the shuttle, which broke up over Texas and crashed there 16 minutes before its expected landing in Florida. Now seven families, and the entire NASA family, are mourning the loss of seven heroes, intrepid pilots and scientists and medical doctors who risked and gave their lives for the furtherance of human knowledge. Dark days lie ahead for the space program, but bright days lie ahead too. We will keep going. We will find out what caused today's tragedy, and see that it doesn't happen again. But space flight is, and will always be, a dangerous business, and it is impossible to eliminate its risks entirely.

Columbia was a special shuttle to me, personally. I saw it launch on a cold morning last year, the only shuttle I have personally watched launch, and spent a week at the Johnson Space Center in Houston after that launch while astronauts aboard her tended to Hubble. At night, as the astronauts spacewalked to repair and upgrade Hubble, my colleagues and I would time our activities so that we could go outside into the cold, dark night to see Columbia with the captured telescope pass directly over head. We talked about how, as we watched from the earth 350 miles below, up there astronauts were at that moment moving at 17,000 miles per hour, tethered to a robot arm outside the shuttle's protection, working on our telescope. We watched it all, passing serenly over us, like a bright star in the night.

And now Columbia, with the seven who were aboard her today, is gone. The first space shuttle, the world's first reusable spacecraft, has crashed. My prayers are with the families of those who are lost, and with those who will over the coming months and years unravel the causes of the crash. Godspeed, Columbia.