Greetings, friends. (XXI)

Greetings, friends. Blessed Imbolc to those of you who celebrate, and happy Black History Month.

Yesterday was the 20th anniversary of the destruction of the Space Shuttle Columbia on re-entry from orbit after a 15 day mission of scientific research. All seven crew were lost in the disaster. Their names were David Brown, William McCool, Michael Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, Rick Husband, Laurel Clark, and Ilan Ramon.

Amazingly, this portrait of the crew was developed from film recovered after the crash.

The loss of Columbia was for me one of those remember-where-you-were-when moments. I was waiting in line at the coffee stand on the ground floor of the Westin Horton Plaza hotel in San Diego on the first day of set up for the second (and last) O’Reilly Bioinformatics Conference. The TV above the coffee stand showed the news footage, with its awful imagery of the orbiter breaking up in mid-air, its pieces descending as separate fireballs.

Those pieces of the orbiter basically fell on the stretch of the Sabine National Forest where my grandparents lived, right on Toledo Bend Lake, not far from the town of Hemphill, in what folks out there refer to in earnest as “Deep East Texas”.

I once asked my grandmother if they recalled hearing anything as the shuttle descended. She said no. Apparently the shuttle was already in a million pieces by the time it reached them.

They found out about it soon enough. Ultimately about 25,000 people descended on Hemphill, a metropolis of 1,000 people, for a span of several months. They recovered the remains of the crew and tens of thousands of bits and pieces of hardware that eventually let NASA reconstruct the cause of the orbiter’s demise.

There is a very sweet museum in Hemphill today, the Patricia Huffman Smith NASA Museum, housing a memorial to the crew, and a bunch of exhibits and artifacts related to the history of the Space Shuttle, and the tragic fate of the STS-107 mission. They offer screenings of a film about the recovery process, which lasted for months and itself took the lives of two volunteers in a helicopter accident.

For a sense of scale, the museum shares a building with town’s public library. It is absolutely worth visiting, assuming you find yourself in the rough vicinity of Hemphill, Texas… which is three hours’ drive from anywhere.

The Space Shuttle was a fantastically complex thing, and also the most hazardous vehicle humans have put into outer space. NASA leadership knew about the foam strikes on the left wing’s leading edge, but they deliberately declined to use the means available to inspect and assess the damage. Foam had fallen off the Shuttle’s fuel tank before, and nothing had come of it. Even if NASA had bothered to correctly determine that the damage posed a risk to the crew, there were few good options available for their rescue. The demise of Columbia and her crew is as much a testament to human hubris, as it is to human ambition.

The final crew of Columbia were an astonishingly accomplished group of people. They were pilots, engineers, scientists. Clark was a physician. All but Brown were married, and most of them were parents. Chawla was the first Indian woman in space; Ramon the first Israeli. Clark and Brown had been ham radio operators. Wikipedia says McCool’s favorite band was Radiohead.

The video that survives of the mission itself shows them having quite a lot of fun while working at hard at something they had prepared their whole lives to do. They were very fortunate and very unlucky. Ramon had brought along a Torah scroll that had survived Bergen-Belsen. It did not survive STS-107.

While on board Columbia, Willie McCool had written:

From our orbital vantage point, we observe an earth without borders, full of peace, beauty and magnificence, and we pray that humanity as a whole can imagine a borderless world as we see it and strive to live as one in peace.

Amen.

I think humanity’s quest for knowledge is one of our two most admirable traits. Husband, McCool, Brown, Chawla, Anderson, Clark, and Ramon perished while serving that quest. May their memories be a blessing.