Shuttle disaster stirs emotion
The phone rang early Saturday morning at the Lind house in Smithfield.
Too early. It was 7 a.m., and the family was still in bed.
Don Lind stirred from his 40 winks and picked up the receiver.
“Columbia lost contact with NASA. Turn on the television,” the voice said.
It was relatives from Kaysville.
The former astronaut and Utah State University physics professor rushed to do as he was told.
“You know how when something has just happened, the anchors have nothing to say, so they play that 10-second footage over and over again,” Lind said.
He watched the same scene people in Texas had seen unfolding in the skies above them a few minutes before. First, a white line left by the shuttle streaks across the clear blue sky. Then pieces of the shuttle appear to come apart until there is nothing left.
“It was déjà vu in a very sickening way,” Lind said. “It was sort of like reliving the same experience with [the Space Shuttle] Challenger. When you can visualize what’s happening, it is very, very painful.”
Lind would know. He was a mission specialist on a 1985 Challenger mission nine months before the craft exploded. He lost close friends in that accident.
For John Taylor, a former NASA public affairs director and USU communications instructor, the initial reaction was one of shock.
“I thought, ‘Oh no. Not another one,'” he said. “Then I realized that it’s been 17 years.”
Seventeen years since that fateful day on Jan. 28, 1986, when the Challenger exploded 73 seconds after takeoff from the Kennedy Space Center, killing seven crew members, including a New Hampshire school teacher — along for the ride as part of NASA’s teacher-in-space program.
“This is still the safest space program [in the world],” Taylor pointed out. “Nevertheless, there is always shock. The best risk assessment we’ve been able to get is 99 percent. You know you’re going to lose one. These folks didn’t expect to die, but they knew they could.”
The Space Shuttle Columbia apparently disintegrated in flames over Texas 16 minutes before it was supposed to land, killing all seven crew members.
For many USU faculty and staff, the accident brought back memories, re-ignited old debates and motivated a groundswell of emotion about the space program and its future. But in general, the approach is pragmatic: Figure out what went wrong, and move on.
“Nobody in their right mind is for one single second going to cancel the space program,” Lind said. “You couldn’t. It is so integrated with our American way of life. When you turn on the TV to get the weather, you see the satellite picture. International business couldn’t function without satellites.”
Taylor agreed.
“We can’t afford to be down four years like the last time,” he said. “It hurts the economy.”
While the accident’s impact on future aerospace research is a matter of concern, officials at USU’s Space Dynamics Laboratory say they aren’t at risk, though delays are likely.
The university was set to launch a major experiment on the next space shuttle mission March 1. NASA awarded SDL a $1.9 million contract to build a Floating Potential Measurement Unit — a device with four sensors designed to measure and evaluate how the space station’s static electricity interacts with the surrounding atmosphere.
“That instrument launch will likely be delayed,” SDL Deputy Director Harry Ames said. “However, in financial terms, we’re unaffected.”
USU has designed between 50 and 100 experiments conducted on the space shuttles or flown to the MIR or the International Space Station — more than any other university in the world.
Ames expects that close relationship with NASA to continue. He dispelled fears expressed by SDL Director Allan Steed and others in the Deseret News that Columbia’s disintegration will result in NASA cutting back on scientific shuttle missions.
“Unless NASA takes a huge amount of money out of its budget to build another shuttle, we will not be affected. And with President Bush offering half a billion dollars in aid, it most likely will not affect us,” Ames said.
But there is always a chance that things might go the other way.
“We might be surprised,” Ames said.
The university and SDL aren’t the only Utah-Idaho entities affected by last week’s tragedy.
At the Fort Hall Indian Reservation in Idaho, 15 American Indian students from the Shoshone-Bannock tribe mourned the Columbia calamity.
The students were part of a talented group of young scientists from Sho-Ban High School teacher Ed Galindo’s science class. They had designed a sophisticated experiment, carried aboard the shuttle, to find ways to extract water from urine. The technology, they hoped, would provide extra water aboard spacecraft on trips to far-off destinations, like Mars.
“They were sad when they heard the news,” Galindo said. “We’ve had the staff at our school make themselves available to students if they want to talk about the accident.”
It isn’t just about science.
“There’s a real human side to this,” Galindo said.
These kids felt like they knew the crew of the ill-fated STS-107.
“Every mission that we’ve had experiments on [the school has flown three previous experiments aboard NASA shuttles] we have a flight patch that we send to the crew. This one had the STS-107, the school’s colors — red, black and yellow — and the experiment’s name, ‘Painting with urine.’
“The STS-107 crew wrote us and said they liked the design. They said it was really colorful and they loved the experiment’s name.”
It’s the human side to the tragedy that underscores the sacrifice of a few good men and women.
“All learning takes place at the edge of risk,” Ames said. “We’re grateful we live in a country where men and women are willing to take those risks.”
And they’re backed by families who, despite the gnawing dread of not seeing their loved ones again, have the courage to let them go.
Listen to Kathleen Lind.
“When my husband went, the Lord gave me this peaceful feeling that everything was going to be all right,” she said. “Then after the Challenger accident, the investigation revealed that they [Don and his crew] had come very close to having a similar accident.”
Still, the quest for space will go on.
“The space program is going to continue, science and exploration is going to continue, the manned program is going to continue, even though it may be down for a little while,” Lind said.
–leon@cc.usu.edu