Blood on the Frontier

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Blood on the Frontier
by James Hall, Senior Associate Editor

February 4, 2003

"Leaning Left"

James Hall It was an eerily familiar sight, a streaking ball of flame that disintegrated into smaller pieces which burned and disappeared. Much the same thing had happened to the space station Mir when it was brought down over the Southern Pacific in a controlled re-entry almost two years ago. But there were human beings onboard this time, seven astronauts who had spent 16 days in space performing 80 experiments in microgravity, experiments that taught us more about the frontier of space.

For those of us who live and work in Central Florida, the four space shuttles are a fixture of life. We see them take off in a bright column of smoke and fire and we hear them return overhead, their characteristic twin sonic booms rattling our windows like nothing else in the sky. Some of us have even seen the bizarre appearance of a shuttle riding the back of a 747 on it way back to the Vehicle Assemby Building. Today there was no return, as pieces of Columbia fell instead in east Texas from Nacogdoches all the way to the Louisiana state line. Columbia will not be coming back.

The televised images over Texas reminded me of a cold day in January 17 years ago, when I stood in my front yard and watched the space shuttle Challenger explode into small pieces that arced gracefully over the Gulf Stream and disappeared into the Atlantic. This past week there have been disturbing reminders of that tragedy --- the 17th anniversary ceremony at the Astronaut Hall of Fame in Titusville and NASA's announcement that the Teacher in Space program was being restarted, a program that was canceled with the death of Challenger astronaut and teacher Christa McAullife.

On January 28th the Columbia crew itself remembered the Challenger disaster and offered a minute of silent meditation and prayer. Now the Columbia astronauts join the Challenger and Apollo 1 astronauts and Russian cosmonauts of Soyuz 1 and Soyuz 11 as those who have given their lives to make humanity's dream of space travel and life in space a reality.

In the wake of this disaster, some initial attention is being focused on Columbia's left wing, which was struck by debris when the shuttle took off 16 days earlier. Just before telemetry was lost from Columbia, temperatures were said to rise quickly in the left wheel well and then there was a loss of signal from the left wing sensors. This occurred during reentry manuevers, where heat from aerodynamic drag reaches its maximum.

Whether this turns out to have been the cause of the disaster or not, count on NASA to find and solve the problem. Count on the three remaining shuttles to fly again, and on NASA's efforts to build a new generation space shuttle, though that may take another decade and more to fly. Although the Columbia astronauts have given their lives, they have not flown in vain. We will keep their dream alive. ***

James Hall
Orlando, FL USA

Photo of the author courtesy of staff files