Log
The Surly Bonds
This whole space shuttle thing has kind of freaked me out, since I’ve been thinking about the one in 1986 recently. This morning, I was looking through “Our Universe,” a book from my childhood that I recently salvaged from my parents’ house, showing it to cmk, and flipped over to the section with the space shuttle. The book came out in the early eighties, right after the Columbia first flew and there was a sudden resurgence in space hype. Right after paging through, I came in to check email and the news on cnn.com, and saw what happened:
A Space Shuttle contingency was declared earlier this morning in Mission Control when communication was lost with the Space Shuttle Columbia during its return to Earth following a 16-day mission.
Communication and tracking of the shuttle was lost at 9 a.m. at an altitude of about 203,000 feet above north central Texas while traveling approximately 12,500 miles per hour (Mach 18). No communication and tracking information was received in Mission Control after that time.
Flight controllers in Mission Control immediately began the process of securing all information, notes and data pertinent to today’s reentry and landing.
- Official statement from nasa.gov
At the beginning of the morning, it seemed that there was incredible danger to people on the ground: NASA issued a warning not to go near debris, saying that there were toxic chemicals that could cause a suffocating membrane to form in the lungs, causing death within 48 hours. They were projecting a debris field of at least 700 square miles. Who knew how many people could be exposed, how many buildings were hit by flaming, toxic debris?
Of course, a lot of that is about the way the media works. There was no new information until the NASA press conference, so the news was full of speculation—experts discussing their theories about what happened, theories about terrorism while officially denying that it was possible, the assembly of military commands and high-level federal officials. It was so much like the coverage of September 11th on a smaller scale: the repetition of one or two video clips; the inane commentary and the jumping to conclusions by second-tier news anchors; the ever-evolving, highly branded graphics; the celebrity commentators who have no real insight, no specific knowledge of the event at hand, just attempts by the networks to one-up the others.
But for some reason, this tragedy doesn’t have the impact that others have. Maybe I’ve been numbed to a degree by the scale and horror of September 11th. Maybe the distant, abstracted image doesn’t have the immediacy and punch that the images of the Challenger did. Maybe I’m not so innocent as I was in 7th grade and it doesn’t seem so impossible, that I’m so cynical that I almost expect it to happen. Maybe the repetition of the image strips it of its power. More than likely, it’s a combination of all of these factors. But it doesn’t lessen the tragedy of the situation.
The NASA officials in the press conference were clearly shaken and deeply upset by the morning’s events. This was sharply contrasted by G-Dub’s comments shortly thereafter. His inept, forced sympathy made him look like a deer caught in the headlights, his dumb, expressionless eyes fixed straight ahead (reading his lines off the teleprompter written by his equally inept speechwriters). I hate to admit it, but when the Challenger exploded, Reagan’s speech (at least the part that’s been quoted most) was quite eloquent: We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them this morning as they prepared for their journey and waved goodbye and slipped the surly bonds of earth to touch the face of God.
02/01/03 03:53PM Movies, Music, Media Politics Science
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