Five years ago today ...

[unixronin]

"Buildings shook in Texas.  Columbia was coming home."

And no, sorry, no cut here.  Thanks to Master Sergeant wcg for the reminder and the Bill Whittle pointer.  Because we should never forget.

What Bill Whittle says is true:  Those astronauts knew the risks, and they flew anyway.

Also true is that NASA worked wonders making the Shuttle fly, somehow, on a budget not nearly enough to do it right.

But they shouldn't have had to.  We should have done it right.  We owed it to the men and women who were going to risk their lives riding it.

And now we're talking about going to Mars.  Will we do it right this time?

We owe that to the memory of the men and women who flew the Shuttle, in full knowledge of the risks, and didn't make it home.

Comments

[fair-witness.livejournal.com]

I'm married to a NASA brat. My father-in-law, among other things, had to help with the post-Challenger analysis. He doesn't talk about it.

When we called to mourn, as a family, about the loss of Columbia, my father-in-law was very terse. I can't imagine what he was going through to see that happening again, though I suspect he was relieved he'd retired from the agency so that he could simply react, rather than have to try and work on the question of what happened.

All of which, I suppose, is my long way of saying, "No. We shouldn't forget. And though we mourn, we should not falter."

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

And though we mourn, we should not falter.

I'll second that. Not only because if we falter, if we stop now, we may not go back; but because we owe it to Husband and Kalpana, to McAuliffe, Scobee, Smith and Onizuka, to Gus Grissom and Roger Chaffee, and all the others, to finish the job they started.

[cipherpunk.livejournal.com]

And here's to Willie McCool.

It's NASA's curse to have decent, skilled and courageous pilots with awesome names (Gus Grissom and Willie McCool being the two at the top, of course) who die in tragic flight failures.