cellio | Baruch Dayan Emet. [1] Dammit.

Gegarin was the first, back in 1961
When like Icarus, undaunted, he climbed to reach the sun...

A few days ago, I was reflecting on Challenger and had started to compose an entry in my head. But this past week was a little hectic and I never got the words down in bits. Now, instead, I will write a slightly different entry.

I am old enough to remember the first landing on the moon, but I wasn't old enough at the time to understand what the big deal was. (I was 5 going on 6.) My formative years, educationally-speaking, fell during that decade or so when the space program was no longer "current events" but was not yet "history". Neither my parents nor my small circle of friends followed the space program, so I was pretty unaware until, probably, sometime in college. I heard a lot of space history for the first time from the filk tape "Minus Ten and Counting", which prompted me to go out and learn more. Now that I think about it, I have never properly thanked Julia Ecklar and Leslie Fish for that.

I remember the morning of Challenger quite clearly. I knew there was a launch coming up, but had lost track of the schedule. And I wasn't so hard-core that I watched (or listened to) launches live anyway. I caught them on the news when I could, or read about them in the paper. I was at work that morning, and I had a cubicle, not an office, so I wouldn't have had the radio on anyway.

Scott walked out of his office into my cubicle and said "It blew up". I thought he was talking about some code I had handed over to him. I said "on what? I ran the test suite". And he said no, not that, and I should come into his office and listen to the radio. And I did.

I didn't actually see the footage until later that night. They were playing it over and over, and I sat there stunned. And several of us said that this was probably the end of the manned space program, even though these had hardly been the first deaths. They were the first deaths that we had witnessed, as opposed to reading about, though, and it made an impact.

That was 17 years ago, and it didn't kill the space program, though clearly that program hasn't been a major priority. But it's been there, and that's important to me. I have hopes that some day people will actually leave this planet for more than a few days or weeks or months. I desperately hope that we do a better custodial job on the next planet we get our hands on, too.

Shuttle trips have become fairly routine. There have been enough that I guess I got complacent about it, the way I do about driving a car. I didn't even realize that today was the day they were coming back.

Today was Shabbat. I didn't hear the news. Tonight I read my email and saw a message from someone in the local SF club saying something like "shall we plan a memorial after this week's meeting?". Memorial? What the heck was he talking about. I figured maybe some SF author had died. I bopped over to CNN to see if I could tease it out.

Damn. How did that happen? My heart goes out to the victims. Seven, like before. A first, like before -- last time a teacher, this time an Israeli.

I feel mildly guilty that my heart aches a little bit more for those seven (and their families) than it does for many of the truly innocent, unexpected deaths that happen around the world every day -- earthquakes, famines, wars, disease. Astronauts, at least, know they're going into danger; they're taking a chance. The folks who die in brushfires or monsoons or tornados, or in skyscrapers in New York, weren't doing anything risky or out of the ordinary. I should have more sympathy for them than for astronauts. But I don't, somehow, though I am not uncaring. Call it a character flaw, I guess.

I suspect that this is a setback, not an end, to the space program. But I do wonder how many setbacks it can withstand before an impatient public calls to shut it down and spend the money elsewhere. I wonder if private enterprise will be positioned to take up the slack any time soon.

[1] Literally, "praised is the true judge" -- said upon hearing of someone's death. Meaning: God had His reasons, even if we can't comprehend them.

Baruch Dayan Emet. [1] Dammit.

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