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FUTURE FLIERS At MIT, students reassess the risks
By Douglas Belkin, Globe Staff, 2/4/2003
''The rest of the day was kind of blur,'' the sophomore said yesterday, sitting in the student union of the Daniel Guggenheim Aeronautical Laboratory at MIT, where Hoff is studying to be an astronaut. ''All those lives, all that work.'' Saturday's disaster hit few communities as hard as it did the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. The engineering school has sent 30 people into space -- more than any other institution with the exception of the US Naval Academy and US Air Force Academy. In this field of rocket scientists and nuclear engineers, hundreds of students from around the world come to leverage the pipeline between MIT and Cape Canaveral to pursue their dreams of one day launching into orbit. In a brief ceremony in the student union yesterday, as slides of Columbia's crew members were projected onto a screen next to him, Edward F. Crawley, the head of MIT's Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics, compared the astronauts to Polynesian explorers who set out from their islands in dug-out canoes. ''They would make it to the next island, or they wouldn't return,'' Crawley said. ''There is something in the human spirit that allows us to take these risks.''
About half the students majoring in aeronautics and astronautics enter MIT with the intention of becoming astronauts, said professor Ian Waitz. Yesterday, many spoke of a fascination with flight that started before they could remember. Dorm room walls at MIT are plastered with posters of Edwin E. ''Buzz'' Aldrin (an MIT alumnus) and space shuttle launches. Students tune in regularly to follow shuttle flights on the NASA television station. Amid a suspended space program and critical questions about NASA's mission, there is no wavering among students here about whether space flight should continue. They understand, they said, that hundreds of thousands of computations must be exact for a mission to succeed. Risk, several said, is a part of the calibrations that go into shooting tons of metal and ceramic into space. ''There is always a danger in pushing the boundaries of anything,'' said Waitz. ''But the students who come here are can-do people.'' After the Challenger exploded in 1986 (which most of the undergraduates are too young to remember) enrollment in the aeronautics and astronautics department increased, Waitz said. He expected the Columbia disaster to have a similar effect. MIT students say engineering is the science of risk-taking -- and allocating resources to hedge those risks. When Jordan McRae, a sophomore, came close to a correct answer in his physics class last semester, he told his professor he didn't think his error was a big deal because he understood the broader concept. The mistake, he contended, was simple arithmetic. The professor disagreed. ''He said, `Hey, if you were building a bridge, thousands of people might have just died because of that little mistake.' It really brought me up short,'' McRae said. Along with hundreds of theories that flooded MIT chat rooms after Saturday's Columbia disaster, students said they appreciated that the loss of those seven lives equals a significant blow to a community dedicated to pushing the limits of space flight. ''These people were the best in their field. The loss to the intellectual community is tremendous,'' said Erisa K. Hines, a 23-year-old master's student studying aeronautics and astronautics.
This story ran on page A12 of the Boston Globe on 2/4/2003.
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AMBRIDGE -- Nicholas Hoff was huddled over his desk working on an application for a summer internship at NASA when his mother called from New Hampshire to tell him that the Columbia shuttle had disintegrated in the earth's upper atmosphere.
