THE PATCH

On a shelf in my office at work, I have a little blue cardboard rectangle, roughly 11” by 17” or so. On it are a photo collage, and a triangular patch. The rectangle with photos and the patch are an award, of the type large organizations often hand out after the completion of a major project. You know the kind of award I’m referring to—it doesn’t so much recognize any individual achievement as it signifies that some grand project has ended successfully, and that the organization wants to pause for a moment to thank its workers in a small way before assigning roles in the next grand project. The patch says “STS-109” and lists the names of a group of astronauts who helped add capability to the Hubble Space Telescope in March 2002. Having ridden aboard Columbia during that mission, that patch is one of two objects I own that have been to space and back. The other is a little 2-inch square of insulation that once protected Hubble from the harsh effects of outer space. I’d never gotten around to framing the rectangle with its attached flight patch, but I think I will now. This past weekend it took on new weight, in the worst possible way. STS-109 was Columbia’s last complete mission.

As the investigation into what caused Columbia and her crew’s untimely demise over Texas continues, I won’t be commenting on it. I’m not part of NASA’s manned spaceflight program in any direct way, but the project I work for does depend on that part of NASA for its launch and continued success. Succinctly put, without space shuttles Hubble would have probably never have been launched, would certainly have never had its eyes fixed, and would never have been able to keep up with the latest technology the way it has during more than a decade in space. So I have a vested interest in seeing that manned space flight continue at least until November 2004, when Hubble is set for its final servicing mission. Further, NASA will have enough trouble with gaggles of reporters lurking around Johnson and Kennedy Space Centers, and HQ in Washington—no one needs my half-informed commentary on the investigation.

Since the crash on Saturday, many have begun to question again why we go to space, or why we stay so close to earth once we’re in space. To the first doubt, I say that we go to space because it’s there. We’re explorers and discoverers, hard wired to find out what’s over the next hill, what’s behind the next click on the web, and what’s beyond the distant shore. The solar system is the next area of human exploration, and merely sending robotic probes won’t suffice in the long term. Pathfinder gave us a wonderful glimpse of the Martian surface, and Hubble shows us the deep universe we’ll never likely reach, but neither project puts us out there. We have to go there ourselves, to feel what it’s like to kick up dust on Mars, to feel what it’s like to break ice on Europa, to see what it’s like to look back at a little yellow dot once we’ve slung past Pluto and out into the Kuiper Belt. We have to do these things ourselves, because that’s the way we’re made.

To the second doubt, why do we stay so close to home once we’re in space, answers are harder to come by. First, I think we stunted our quest for space when Apollo ended. That project, it seems clear now, should only have ended with a semi-permanent human presence on the moon. But Apollo’s political message had been sent—America stood where no civilization had, and had beaten her ruthless competition to the moon. When Neil Armstrong stepped on the moon, he won the first round of the war that Ronald Reagan would win outright a couple of decades later. The space shuttle has been a great interim step in our drive to step out into space on a routine basis, to find out what we’re capable of once we’re there, and to test our bodies and minds to prolonged exposure to space. We know now, thanks to Apollo-Soyuz, Skylab, Mir, the ISS and Hubble, that in spite of the bulky suits and the thick gloves we have to wear that we can work in space. We can perform incredibly delicate maneuvers, we can manipulate precision tools, and we can do it while one foot is bolted to an arm extending us 360 miles up over the surface of the earth, which we pass beneath us at 17,500 miles per hour. That’s nothing to take for granted—it could have turned out that vertigo or some other physical phenomenon prevented us from being able to do these things. As we look further out, the hazards to humans and our space craft multiply. The radiation of deep space kills after lengthy exposure, and to date we have no way to minimize its effects without building space craft so large that we can’t launch them. Conversely, the engines necessary to get us out beyond the moon to Mars quickly enough to minimize the length of the trip, and therefore radiation exposure, haven’t been built yet. Traveling at the speeds necessary to get us to Mars and back without devoting decades of the crew’s lives increases the possibility that even a micrometeorite could wipe out our space craft, and that the slightest spacecraft hiccup could kill the crew inside. Our present propulsion technology simply isn’t up to the job. NASA has for years had several possible designs on the board, but hasn’t had the funding to make them a reality. We are currently exploring space with the equivalent of the horse-drawn buggies that moved our ancestors across the Oregon Trail. We need to invent the space version of the transcontinental railroad to get us further out, where we need to be.

Columbia’s loss should in no way turn us away from exploring space. Though their deaths are tragic, the astronauts knew the risks they took when they volunteered for the job. If they had it to do again, they would likely get right back on that rocket and head to space again. Given the chance, I would go on the next shuttle up. For NASA, the reality is that from the Apollo disaster to Challenger roughly 17 years passed, and from Challenger to Columbia we’ve seen another 17 years pass. That’s hardly a terrible record given the inherent risks of achieving escape velocity while sitting atop a giant bomb. To say that the fact that two shuttles have crashed means the craft is inherently unsafe is a bit like saying that they crashed because both their names started with the letter ‘c.’ It’s a non sequitur—the shuttle program is the second longest running space flight program in history, behind only Soyuz, the Russian launch system that hasn’t changed since the 1960’s. Yet NASA’s critics insist that it’s the agency that’s stuck with outdated technology.

Exploring new territory is risky, whether that new territory involves testing a new cancer drug, crossing the untamed oceans or plunging ourselves out into the cosmos. But the exploration is worth the risk. Columbia’s namesake risked all, knowing less of his destination than we know of ours. We owe it to the fallen astronauts, to ourselves and our children to follow his example, and keep reaching for the stars.