Leaving Orbit (23 page)

The commission’s report also revealed that the crew cabin had remained intact after the explosion, that the astronauts had been alive, though not necessarily awake, for the two minutes and forty-five seconds it took them to fall back to Earth. This revelation struck us children as horrifying, yet it somehow made sense. We’d already grown used to that portrait of the seven smiling astronauts standing for TRAGEDY rather than ADVENTURE. We’d seen updates about Christa McAuliffe’s family, her two small children readjusting to life without a mother. We had already come to realize that the adults in charge of making the world run smoothly actually had no idea what they were doing.

Challenger
changed Americans’ perceptions of spaceflight irrevocably. Shortly after the disaster, a poll found that 47 percent of Americans reported their confidence in NASA had been shaken. Two years later, only one-third of that group indicated that their faith had been restored. If the first disaster during a launch had taken place during the heroic era, people might have understood the astronauts’ deaths to be a sacrifice in the name of progress. This certainly seemed to be the case for the Apollo 1 fire. But the disaster-free launches NASA ran from 1961 to 1986 gave people the sense that astronauts’ safety should be guaranteed. Losing a crew during the shuttle’s operational period seemed a worse failure, a worse betrayal of trust, than losing a Mercury capsule might have. Though the investigation into
Challenger
didn’t end the space shuttle program, as some feared it would, American spaceflight would never entirely recover.

Discovery
was the return-to-flight orbiter in 1988, and though the shuttle was still associated with a new sense of danger, people soon got used to the idea that things had been fixed. Another successful period followed, from 1988 to 2003, during which fewer missions flew, many of them devoted to delivering components of the International Space Station. The overly ambitious pace of the early eighties had been found to be partly to blame for
Challenger
, so the idea of making the shuttle pay for itself was officially abandoned.

As the oldest of the orbiters,
Columbia
was a bit heavier than the others—it missed out on a technological breakthrough involving stronger and lighter alloys—and as a result
Columbia
somehow always seemed bumbly, a chunky older sister forever dropping crumpled tissues from her sleeves. The fact that in coming years
Columbia
had a disproportionate number of delays compared to the others did nothing to contradict that dundering image.

Because they were lighter,
Challenger
and
Discovery
were always the ones to fly high-profile missions taking heavy and important cargo to space.
Columbia
became, unofficially, the science-mission orbiter. Predictable, reliable, unadventurous. It doesn’t seem right, then, that
Columbia
was the one that gave way to structural weakness, the heat of reentry sneaking itself between the tiles and pulling the ship apart over Texas on February 1, 2003, killing all seven crew members aboard. Debris was strewn across three states.

Maybe losing
Challenger
taught us how to say good-bye to space shuttles and their crews. Or maybe it was because the terrorist attacks of 2001 fell in between, forever readjusting our scale of horror. Either way, there was much less fanfare, much less hand-wringing, when we lost
Columbia. Challenger
’s disaster had been so dramatic, breaking up visibly in the sky during launch, during those two minutes when everyone was watching, tracking the bird through the clear Florida sky. Far fewer people turn out to watch landings; far fewer people were there with their faces turned up expectantly for
Columbia.
Even for those who were there, the only sign of
Columbia
’s demise was its absence.
Columbia
was supposed to land that morning, and simply did not.

Norman Mailer says of the Apollo astronauts, operating with the risk of their own deaths, “Like all good professional athletes, they had the modesty of knowing you could be good and still lose.” He was fascinated with the possibility of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin dying on the moon. On the one hand, the loneliness of that final resting place was terrifying to contemplate; on the other, Mailer considered the prospect of the souls rising—as so many who have had near-death experiences describe—rising faster, more cleanly than those earthbound, into a “transpostmortal insertion to the stars.”

As with
Challenger
, an investigation followed. Sally Ride became the only person to serve on the investigation boards for both
Challenger
and
Columbia.
As was expected, the
Columbia
Accident Investigation Board (CAIB, pronounced “cabe” by insiders) found that the immediate cause of the disaster was a chunk of foam falling onto the tiles and that the organizational cause was a pattern of dismissing problems too easily, the “normalization of deviance” as Diane Vaughan put it so memorably in her study of
Challenger.
When a shuttle flew with a known issue and came back safely, the tendency among managers was to assume that the issue was not in fact a risk, using the previous success as “evidence.” “Try playing Russian roulette that way,” Richard Feynman remarked after
Challenger.
CAIB found that after a short period of vigilance, the same error of thinking had crept back into NASA decision making. The board stated in the report that “the causes of the institutional failure responsible for
Challenger
have not been fixed.”

The return-to-flight mission after
Columbia
was on
Discovery
, as the return-to-flight mission had been after
Challenger.
This one was commanded by Eileen Collins, the first woman to command a shuttle mission and one of only two women ever to do so. I remember seeing the front page of the newspaper the second day of that
Discovery
mission; a large color photograph showed the full black underside of
Discovery
pointed at a satellite to have its tiles examined, a new protocol demanded by CAIB. The tiles were found to be undamaged, and
Discovery
returned home safely, as has every shuttle to fly since then.

I keep thinking that
The Dream Is Alive
was a portrait of the space shuttle at its most hope-filled, and it is. But when I look up the date of the film’s release, I discover that the earliest I possibly could have seen it was June 1985. Six months after the film came out,
Challenger
exploded and one of the film’s stars, Judith Resnik, was dead. I’m not sure I ever got to enjoy this golden period of shuttle history that I’ve come to associate with my childhood. It may be that by the time I had any understanding of shuttle at all,
Challenger
was already lost, and that was the beginning of the end.

My students think spaceflight is cool. They are openly jealous that I got to see a launch. As we talk through the counterarguments to the hoax conspiracy theories, my students seem relieved to be able to believe in the triumphs of the heroic era; spaceflight is one of the few legends of the past they can feel an unambiguous pride in. They are saddened that shuttle is being shut down and would like to know whom to blame. Yet they misunderstand the vehicle’s capabilities and estimate insanely high numbers for its cost. Will they hang on to the new numbers I have given them and a new idea that a government agency has achieved a lot with a little?

We’re always being told unkind things about this generation of Millennials—that they are annoyingly attached to their devices and social networks, that their sense of entitlement leaves them without any work ethic, that their helicopter parents have made them helpless to care for themselves or others. This has not been my experience of them. Like young people of any generation, they think they are the first to experience everything. Like young people of any generation, they lack a sense of history. They are alarmingly vague about the events that seemed so earth-shattering to their elders, but so was my generation and so was my parents’. The ignorance is as unchanging as the outrage, as the belief that we were smarter when we were young. We were not. I had thought my students would have at least a sketchy idea of what their country has accomplished in space, and I had worried that they might be too cool to care about it. I was wrong on both counts. In other words, despite how much things have changed, not much has changed.

The space shuttle project never did get us any closer to Mars, but it deployed more than half the cargo ever carried to space and sent three hundred fifty-five people into orbit. Shuttle allowed repairs on satellites that could be fixed only by human hands, including repairs to the Hubble Space Telescope, an instrument that has changed our view of the universe. Shuttle pieced together the International Space Station bit by bit over twelve years and carried thousands of experiments small and large for investigators ranging from National Science Foundation–backed scientists to elementary school children. The ISS alone is cited by many space advocates as having made the whole shuttle project worthwhile. The orbiting laboratory has been occupied nonstop since November 2, 2000—in other words, November 2000 was the last time all human beings were on the surface of the earth at once.

Is $209 billion a lot of money for the entire space shuttle program, or too little? Is 0.4 percent of the national budget way too much for NASA, or way too little? In comparing the two eras of American spaceflight, I’ve heard it said that Apollo was a mission in search of a vehicle while the space shuttle was a vehicle in search of a mission. This comparison is generally meant to be at the expense of the space shuttle, though I have never understood why shuttle has to suffer from the observation. Or rather, assuming that the comparison is an insult to shuttle reveals the speaker to be a heroic-era space fan who values “firsts” over all else. My parents’ generation tends to take it as an article of faith that setting a goal (“let’s go to the moon”) and then slapping together an odd-looking agglomeration of incredibly expensive single-use components to reach that goal was inherently cooler than designing a reusable and upgradable space vehicle from the ground up. Fewer people grasp the achievement of shuttle, suitable for many possible uses, some of which had not yet been dreamed of when
Columbia
was first being assembled.