1/28/86

Christa McAuliffe. Greg Jarvis. Judith Resnik. Dick Scobee. Ron McNair. Mike Smith. Ellison Onizuka.

Never forget.

Curiosity has landed!

Mission Control: Curiosity has landed!

Yes, I stayed up until roughly 1:30 a.m. (EDT) to see NASA's Mars Rover Curiosity land on the Red Planet.

Well, to tell you the truth, I almost missed it. I nodded off while reading Jeff Himmelman's engaging new memoir about the late and legendary Ben Bradlee, the former executive editor of the Washington Post. But, I awoke with a start about 1:15 and made it in front of the TV in plenty of time.

Down it came. Picture perfect. The folks at NASA (California) were jumping up and down, high-fiving, grinning from ear to ear. I did the latter, too, figuring this will most likely be my moon moment. I doubt I'll live long enough to see a human being make it to Mars.

As usual, the nattering nabobs of negativism were busy denouncing this mission as a waste of cash. One, on Facebook, actually said, "This is about the future!"

I thought to myself, "Yes. Exactly."

Space is the final frontier. It's in our very nature as human beings to explore it, for one thing to see what's out there, for another to reap the scientific knowledge.

The day the human race stops dreaming, stops exploring, stops searching for information, is the day it is finished. Had no one dared to explore the Earth itself, people might still think it was flat. People once thought, incorrectly until the solar system was studied, that the earth was the center of the universe.

NASA hasn't helped its cause over the years (see the Challenger and Columbia disasters). That didn't matter early this morning.

The United States has put a super scientific vehicle on Mars. On Mars! MARS!

Hey, Olympics: Take one of those gold medals and send it to NASA.

As Walter Cronkite might have said it, "Oh, boy!"

Manned mission to Mars?

A 2009 episode of the highly entertaining latest incarnation of "Dr. Who" that aired Monday on BBC America centered around the first humans to colonize Mars.

In the "Who" universe, anyway, this happened in the year 2059. According to a story here, NASA hopes to get astronauts to the Red Planet by 2030.

One catch, though. They won't be coming back.

As early as 2009, Lawrence Krauss, director of the Origins Initiative at Arizona State and author of "The Physics of 'Star Trek,'" was advocating for a one-way mission to Mars. In a New York Times op-ed piece, Krauss points to the Pilgrims as an example. They didn't count on coming home, either.

Krauss writes that the biggest impediment to sending humans to Mars involves shielding them from solar radiation, before one even bothers with funding and logistics. He argues convincingly that a one-way trip is not only feasible, it's preferable.

"To boldly go where no one has gone before does not require coming home again," he writes.

Common sense tells you we're years away from even entertaining the possibility. NASA doesn't even go to the moon anymore (President Obama canceled the George W. Bush-backed Constellation Project, which called for a moon landing by 2020). The space shuttle is being scrapped in favor of a new heavy load vehicle, which is scheduled to debut four years from now.

When Neil and Buzz landed on the moon in 1969, Vice President Spiro Agnew boldly predicted that manned missions to Mars were right around the corner, guaranteed to happen before the year 2000. We know now that didn't happen. Challenger, Columbia and budget cuts certainly didn't help.

If you'd wandered into my 2nd grade classroom a quarter-century ago, I'd have told you humans would haunt Mars before I turned 40. Call me cynical, but I'm starting to think that seeing it on "Dr. Who" will be as close as I'll ever get.

'Flying for me'

As one last salute to the Challenger 7, here is an Associated Press story highlighting NASA's 25th anniversary memorial to the fallen crew.

And here is a video recording of John Denver with the Boston Pops performing "Flying For Me," the song he wrote about the Challenger 7. Denver initially lobbied to be the citizen chosen to participate in the Challenger mission.

Remembering the Challenger 7, 25 years later

Michael J. Smith. Dick Scobee. Ronald McNair. Ellison Onizuka. Gregory Jarvis. Judith Resnik.

These six astronauts, and teacher Christa McAuliffe, were killed 25 years ago, Jan. 28, 1986, when NASA Mission STS-51-L went horribly wrong 73 seconds into its flight. The space shuttle Challenger broke apart. Its crew perished. A nation reeled in shock.

High school social studies teacher Dean Harned, 33, will never forget it. Knox County Schools were closed that day -- it had snowed -- and Harned was one of the relatively few people who actually saw the shuttle break up while watching the launch live on television. (CNN was the only network to carry it live. Many children around the country were able to watch the launch because NASA provided a broadcast feed on its TV network to schools because of McAuliffe's participation in the flight as part of the Teacher in Space program).

"I thought it was neat that a teacher was going up," Harned says. "My mom is a teacher and I thought it was really cool. I remember hearing that the shuttle had exploded and going out in the garage to tell my father. He had a look of disbelief on his face and said, 'No, no...'

"No doubt, it's our generation's Titanic moment."

The news spread quickly by 1986 standards. Within an hour, more than 86 percent of the country had heard about the accident, which occurred just after 11:39 a.m. (EST). CBS News was reporting the incident by 11:45.

An extensive investigation later determined that a faulty O-ring seal on the right solid rocket booster was responsible for the breakup of the space shuttle (it actually did not explode in the common usage of the term). An investigation by the Rogers Commission later determined that NASA had known about the potential problem with the O-rings since the late 1970s. Bitterly cold temperatures the morning of the flight also contributed to the disaster. Read about the entire incident here.

And here are a few horrifying facts you may not know. After an extensive recovery operation, NASA later learned that Challenger's flight cabin survived the initial breakup. At least two -- and likely all -- of the crew members were still alive and could have survived until the flight cabin crashed into the ocean at 204 mph about three minutes after the breakup. Three of the four Personal Egress Air Packs on the flight deck had been activated. A History Channel video provides further details.

NASA was heavily criticized for both its initial response to the disaster (officials all but avoided the press the day of the accident) and for its fatal decision to launch the shuttle under less than desirable conditions, despite warnings about the O-ring problem and other issues from engineers and others at both NASA and contractor Morton Thiokol.

The U.S. space program grounded to a halt for almost three years until Discovery launched on Sept. 29, 1988. Barbara Morgan, McAuliffe's backup who trained with her for the Challenger flight and watched the launch from Kennedy Space Center, flew on the Space Shuttle Endeavor as a mission specialist in August 2007.

Harned says the Challenger disaster was a game changer.

"That episode put to rest for generations the possibility that we would see a manned mission to Mars. After Challenger, NASA's timidity, the way it addressed the situation, they decided those dreams needed to be put on hold for awhile."

And, for a young boy, the Challenger disaster was Harned's initial brush with mortality.

"It was my first realization that we are fallible. There was something special about the first teacher in space. Christa McAuliffe represented the link to the future -- that ordinary Americans would one day go to space.

"Watching the reactions of her parents and her students, it was horrifying. Those mental images are burned in my head. It was very traumatizing."

The unedited CNN broadcast of the Challenger disaster can be seen here.

President Ronald Reagan's address to the nation on the disaster can be seen here.

CBS News's coverage following the disaster can be viewed in several parts beginning here.

An in-depth report on the disaster by NBC reporter Jay Barbree can be found here.

As President Reagan said in his memorable address, we will never forget the Challenger 7, nor the last time we saw them, moments before they "slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God."

Please feel free to leave your memories of that awful Tuesday by clicking on the comment link below.

It must have been moonglow...

I've always been fascinated with outer space.

Guess it's that little boy sliver of childhood -- I have that to thank for my love of baseball too -- that never quite goes away. What American child born after 1960 hasn't at one time or another put a big bowl on your head and pretended to be an astronaut, the last American cowboy, touching down in the Sea of Tranquility?

Saw an absolutely fantastic documentary tonight about the biggest of all the NASA heroes --- the Apollo astronauts. "In the Shadow of the Moon" is the story of that special space mission, told in the words of the surviving astronauts themselves.

Well, all except in the words of the guy, the one we all want to hear from, that ever-reclusive Neil Armstrong. It's OK, though, because the other guys -- Buzz Aldrin and Mike Collins among them -- all talk about him. And he's here, sort of, in archival NASA footage. (And, frankly, it adds to Armstrong's mystique that he wouldn't participate. Legends don't do such things.)

It's that archival footage, though, that makes this documentary quite special. You see a shot of Armstrong's famous one small step from an angle you've never seen before. And there are no CGI enhancements, no computer-generated images here. This is the real thing, baby, warts and all.

The film does a nice job of placing the Apollo program -- and its famous July 1969 Apollo 11 landing -- into historical perspective. We see a fresh-faced John F. Kennedy, promising the nation we'd land an astronaut on the moon by the end of the decade. Vietnam, protests, unrest -- all of that is here -- peppered around the big mission.

And, yes, it still captures the imagination. Maybe it's because we've not been back to the moon since '72. Maybe it's because space really is the final frontier, the one last place we've never been. Probably it's because this mission, now nearly 40 years old, is still better than anything George Lucas or Gene Roddenberry ever dreamed up.

The darn thing even turns out to be quite moving, when the various Apollo crew members talk of how insignificant the earth seems way out there in the blue -- and how precious it is to come home to.

You learn, one of them says, that we're wasting our most precious resource. "We should be concerned about (conserving the earth) for our kids and grandkids," one of them says. "And instead what are we worried about? The price of a gallon of gas."

If there's anything to criticize in this fine film, it's that you are left wanting more. Apollo 11 dominates the narrative (complete with CBS News footage of a spellbound Walter Cronkite calling the action that July 20). The movie hurries over the troubled Apollo 13 mission and doesn't really tell us what happened on the rest of the moon trips.

The striking thing about this movie is seeing how wowed the rest of the world was at America's little moon landing. Mike Collins says the most used word he heard on the around-the-world trip that he, Aldrin and Armstrong made after returning home, was "we."

We did that. All of us. Neil, Buzz and Mike took our hopes and dreams and fears up there with them.

"I always trusted the Americans," a French woman said after the landing. "I knew they'd get it right."

When on earth would you hear that today?

"In the Shadow of the Moon" is an important slice of history. It stirs up the star spangled optimism that this country used to be known for, and could be again. It makes me want to take a weekend off and finally read "First Man," James R. Hansen's 2005 authorized biography of Armstrong.

But mostly it reminds me of the wonderful unknown that lies way out yonder somewhere, and leads me to feel certain that someday, somehow, another generation's Neil, Buzz and Mike will fly out there and touch that undiscovered country.

Because that's simply what Americans do.

"In the Shadow of the Moon" is now playing at Regal CinemaArt Downtown West 8. It is rated PG.