he world has been filled far too much of late with those haunting moments that crystallize traumatically in memory, moments about which, when we're asked in the future whether we remember where we were and what we were doing when we first heard the news—we will. I had hoped that there would be no more of such moments for a while, but Saturday morning brought another tragedy, one which has occupied most of the nation's thoughts for the past few days.
Many people felt shock and disbelief when they first heard news of the disaster that befell the space shuttle Columbia. My own emotions were more disorienting than that, because when I initially heard the reports, I thought that history was repeating itself, only in the most literal sense of the word.
I was out early that morning, and when I turned on my car radio and heard a commentator speaking about a space-shuttle accident, I assumed that I was not listening to a live broadcast, but rather to a program commemorating the Challenger accident which had occurred 17 years before on Jan. 28, 1986. What else could it be but that the local news station was merely airing a retrospective? Only when the announcer began to speak about the accident occuring during a landing, rather than during a liftoff as in the original incident, did the sad truth of the situation begin to seep in.
Brave astronauts Rick Husband, William McCool, Michael Anderson, Kalpana Chawla, David M. Brown, Laurel Blair Salton Clark and Ilan Ramon gave their lives to the pursuit of knowledge and the dream of space travel. These are goals toward which President Kennedy pointed our country when he spoke of the space program on Sept. 12, 1962, and said that "we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard."
Unfortunately, that which is hard is often, as in this instance, too much to bear.
Because space is there
I have always felt myself a part of the choice that Kennedy made to explore the cosmos, because I can't remember a time when I did not dream of the heavens. I fell in love with outer space and science fiction at about the same time, idolizing John Glenn and Robert A. Heinlein equally. Because of that timing, and because SF and the space race shared a dream of unlocking the mysteries of the universe, the two worlds
have always seemed intimately connected to me.
In the face of such a solemn event as this, I feel a little sheepish about acknowledging the relationship between the two, so it's comforting to see that I'm not the only one who feels this way. The Washington Post also made the connection. This sentence appeared on Sunday's front page: "Things once unimaginable, the stuff of science fiction, had become humdrum." And then, inside, the writer continued that "Star Trek helped persuade a whole generation of people that they would someday travel at Warp 8." Without science fiction's inspiration, we might never have made it to the moon. I hope that in the future, SF can inspire us to go even further.
Ever since the disaster, news analysts have been polling the public with such questions as "Should the space shuttle program continue?" I am pleased to see that the overwhelming majority of Americans believe that we should.
Over 40 years ago, President Kennedy ended his famous speech by urging us ever onward:
Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, "Because it is there."
Well, space is there, and we're going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God's blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.
Those words still ring true today, and we must continue to live up to them. Of course, we must pause to reflect and, yes, we must take our time to figure out what went so horribly wrong. But then, as humanity's dreams have urged us to so since the beginning of time, we must go on.
Scott Edelman started his trek to the editor-in-chief position at Science
Fiction Weekly back in 1974, when he began working as an assistant editor at
Marvel Comics. Between these two positions, this four-time Hugo Award nominee in
the category of Best Editor was the founding editor of the
award-winning magazine Science Fiction Age, in addition to editing
Sci-Fi Universe, Sci-Fi Flix and Satellite Orbit. Currently, he also edits SCI
FI, the official magazine of the SCI FI Channel. His short stories can be found in the recent anthologies Angel Body and other Magic for the Soul and The Book of More Flesh.
