REVIEW & OUTLOOK
Space
The Wall Street Journal on the Challenger disaster.
Saturday, February 1, 2003 1:00 p.m. EST
URL:http://www.opinionjournal.com/editorial/feature.html?id=110003013
(Editor's note: This editorial originally appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Jan. 29, 1986.)
For most of us, space is still what is out there in the sky--stars, the sun, planets that we don't understand very well and beyond that, nothingness. But for a relatively small band of frontiersmen--astronomers, physicists, engineers and unusual people like Christa McAuliffe--space has always been jammed with wonder. An endlessly wondrous and huge palace of mysteries so varied that none of these extraordinary people alone could hope to possess all of them in a lifetime. And so they work together.
They are the people who together sent the little Voyager 2 and its cameras three billion incomprehensible miles to Uranus. And yesterday seven of them rose from the Earth in the space shuttle Challenger and minutes later fell back into the ocean.
This unexpected and shattering event was a particularly poignant reminder that--despite our success at making technology work as we bid it--the exploration of space ultimately rides on the physical courage of individuals. That was our thought as we watched the broadcast of Challenger exploding as it strained toward space, surely taking the lives of Commander Francis Scobee, Pilot Michael Smith, Mission Specialists Judith Resnick, Ellison Onizuka and Ron McNair, Payload Specialist Greg Jarvis, and New Hampshire schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe.
Each of us surely knew, in some basic sense, that what these people did entailed risk. But for them the danger was palpable. Yet haven't we all been struck in the past by what President Reagan said yesterday was that "special grace and spirit" of our space travelers? Somehow the men and women of these shuttle crews have always displayed it as they strove to get aboard with their fears in check. "Give me a challenge," the president said of them, "and I'll meet it with joy." Isn't that the way Christa McAuliffe will be remembered? A buoyant and brave young woman who never doubted for a moment that she wanted to go out there. And behind her and her six colleagues stood a long line of others, hoping for a chance as well. We suspect that line will be there today, and it will be there tomorrow.
The question will inevitably arise, because it has in the past, whether it is indeed necessary to put human beings at such risk to learn what we wish to know about space. Voyager 2, after all, is flying toward Neptune on a sea of computer-derived mathematical formulas. Is it necessary for any of us to risk conflagration or abandonment in space to gain useful knowledge? Well, the answer is yes, it is necessary.
Human beings are instinctively driven toward new knowledge. But few of us are content merely to be aware that something exists. As long as we continue to explore, we will be like small children staring for the first time at a statue in a museum. We want to touch it. Then it is ours. Probably if some of Challenger's crew had been given the chance to ride off toward Uranus in Voyager, they would have done that, too.
Others will follow these seven brave men and women. Mr. Reagan put it just right in his brief remarks yesterday afternoon: "Nothing ends here." |
