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A BOSTON GLOBE EDITORIAL Columbia's final flight
2/2/2003
NASA officials yesterday worked to preserve the data that would provide clues to that question, at the same time they and President Bush and others extended the nation's sympathy to the families of the seven. At a time when the nation had already stopped breathing easily because of events in two corners of Asia, the deaths over Texas tore at scars in America's spirit still only half-healed from September 11. The Columbia's loss wrenched the nation's attention to the perils of its decades-long effort to explore the weightless environment of space, which invites pioneering research in medicine and other fields. While the Challenger loss was a blow to the nation's confidence, the 87 successful flights since then had let the country believe that Challenger's cruel lessons had been learned and the US space program would fulfill its destiny as humankind's pathfinder into the heavens. The first reactions from NASA echoed those of 17 years ago: We will fix what went wrong and move on. Without that kind of optimism, neither this country nor the old Soviet Union would ever have propelled pilots and researchers into space. Clearly, though, the review of the shuttle program's problems done by a special commission after the Challenger disaster did not dig deeply enough into the inherent hazards of this 1970s-era technology. The orbiter that was destroyed yesterday was the same one that inaugurated shuttle flight 22 years ago. NASA officials of that launch crossed their fingers on that April day when ice chunks tossed off from super-cooled fuel tanks damaged the heat shield's ceramic tiles. There is no proof yet that it was a failure of the tiles that doomed Columbia, but from the beginning engineers have known that re-entry is a perilous part of any space flight. The Cassandra on the Challenger commission was the late Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman. Feynman called for a longer and deeper inquiry into shuttle problems. ''The management of NASA exaggerates the reliability of its product .... For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.'' After mourning, the country will move on. But it should do so with the cool judgment of Richard Feynman.
This story ran on page D10 of the Boston Globe on 2/2/2003.
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© Copyright 2003 New York Times Company |
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NCE again, America grieves. Seventeen years and four days after the Challenger burned up during launch, the shuttle Columbia disintegrated yesterday just minutes before its scheduled landing in Florida. After a mission hailed for its extraordinary achievements in advancing science in several areas, STS 107 ended with the loss of seven brave and skilled explorers, six from this country and one from Israel. Now it has left science with a new riddle: what unforgiving flaw killed these five men and two women?
