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It is difficult to write of a tragedy like the explosion
of the space shuttle Columbia. Aside from the shock and sorrow we
all feel, just about everything one can say seems inadequate to the
moment, even trite: they were courageous, the country weeps, it’s a
national calamity. This is all true, but ultimately unsatisfying.
Only a handful of Americans have broken gravity’s hold
since Alan Shepard’s 1961 up-and-down ride in Freedom 7, strapped to
a rocket that was not much more than a souped-up Roman candle.
Still, all these decades later, Shepard’s quaint little capsule
carried him closer to the final frontier than most of us will ever
go.
Space travel is far from common experience, yet it is as
much a part of popular culture as the American west once was.
Children of the 1950s played cowboy and watched “Gunsmoke;” today
it’s more likely to be Jedi Knights and “Star Wars.” I’d wager the
average person has a better chance of picking Captain Kirk or
Princess Leia out of a lineup than identifying their local
congressman.
The comparison of horse operas to space fantasies only
works so far because there really was an old west. There is no
Starship Enterprise. There are no bars where friendly aliens knock
back exotic brews, no warp drive, no one to beam you up, yet we are
so saturated with the images that they seem almost ordinary. They
mingle with our notions of reality, leaving few people with any idea
of what space actually is or the risks one takes in trying to find
out.
Exploration has always been dangerous. The nation kicks
off commemoration of the 200th anniversary of the Lewis
and Clark expedition this year, a journey of nearly three years that
cost several lives. Today their historic route can be driven in a
few days by anyone with a car, which is pretty much everyone. It
may someday be the same of space, many years and many lives from
now, but only because others went first.
Explorers do not view risk like other people. Most of
us would love to go to space but are content to wait until we can
book a cruise. That may well become possible, just as Lewis and
Clark could today adventure across the country hopping from Holiday
Inn to Hilton Hotel, enjoying a free continental breakfast with
every stay. The difference is that they wouldn’t. They’d be
applying to NASA.
Thomas Paine once
observed that “What
we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that
gives every thing its value.” A trans-continental journey doesn’t
make headlines because it has become pedestrian. The same
will be true of space flight one day, but the fact that it is our
nature to take the familiar for granted robs nothing from the
explorer.
True explorers are not
motivated by cheers, fortune, or fame. They go to space because it
is there. When the day comes that people can reserve an economy
room at an orbiting Motel 6, they will probably give no more thought
to the shuttle crew than today’s cross-country travelers pay
Meriwether Lewis and William Clark. This is no slight, only the
nature of trailblazing; if you are successful, others will follow in
your path planting drive-through restaurants and automated teller
machines along the way.
The relative ease and comfort
of the American way of life seems common and cheap only because
others bore most of the cost. Whether or not the Columbia
astronauts are remembered a century from now does not change the
fact that their sacrifice will have helped build that future.
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