n Saturday, Feb. 1, 2003, my phone started ringing at 7:15 a.m. Pacific Standard Time. I heard it first from my office (which I ignored, figuring it was a wrong number).
But then the house phone rang and rang.
My son was traveling that day. I had to drag my butt out of bed to answer it.
The caller wasn't my son, but my brother-in-law from Phoenix. "Turn on your television," he said. "Columbia just burned up on re-entry."
"Oh, blank," I said, alarming my wife, who was coming down the hall (and, like me, thinking about our son, 3,000 miles away). I repeated her brother's message, saw her relief give way to a different kind of horror.
Columbia. I knew it was supposed to land this morning. Crew of seven on a 16-day long science mission. Burned up? How? Why?
Still numb, I ran to the television set and saw the first of at least a thousand replays of Columbia breaking into a cluster of fiery pieces.
Seven astronauts dead. An irreplaceable $2 billion orbiter—a quarter of the shuttle fleet—scattered into fragments over western Texas and eastern Louisiana.
As the James Taylor song "Fire and Rain" put it, "sweet dreams and flying machines in pieces on the ground."
Mourning a death in the sci-fi family
I've written a lot about space flight: three novels and three large biographical encyclopedias. I've also co-authored two astronaut autobiographies and published another handful of magazine and encyclopedia pieces. The Columbia tragedy, like the Challenger disaster, is not just a news story. It hit me personally.
(Certainly the rest of the world thinks so, to judge from the kind phone calls and e-mails, as well as the folks at NPR, who asked me talk about the crew that awful Saturday.)
The impact of the disaster isn't just due to the number of fine people lost. More people died in automobile crashes in California the same day. It isn't even that the crew members were heroes; a like number of American servicemen died on various fronts during the same week.
What makes the Columbia disaster especially painful is that it's a death in the sci-fi family.
I know that sci-fi deals with a potentially infinite number of subjects, from robotics to genetics to politics. But, let's face it, for most of the past 50 years, the dominant subject has been space flight. In prose, from realistic portrayals found in Robert A. Heinlein's juvenile novels (Red Planet, Starman Jones, etc.) and a majority of Arthur C. Clarke's work (Prelude to Space, A Fall of Moondust, 2001). Space flight is the metaphor at the heart of Ray Bradbury's Martian Chronicles.
In films, the path goes from Destination Moon to Forbidden Planet to 2001 to Star Wars to Alien.
On television, from Tom Corbett to Lost in Space to Star Treks (versions 1.0 to 5.0) to Andromeda and Farscape and Firefly.
Even stories that aren't directly about space flight, such as X-Files, assume that beings are traveling from one world to another.
Last week, Locus Online, the e-edition of the famed sci-fi news magazine, published an article by Gary Westfahl ("Columbia, and the Dreams of Science Fiction"), a noted critic within the SF community, blaming SF writers (starting with those named above, I guess) for inventing space flight and convincing the rest of the world to adopt it.
It follows, then, that sci-fi is partly responsible for the Columbia tragedy.
I don't propose to debate the validity of Westfahl's thesis—you can check it out yourself—except to note that the article unleashed a fair-sized firestorm of criticism so notable that it was reported on this Web site ("SF Authors Debate Columbia").
At the same time—perhaps in response to the Westfahl situation—the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America went so far as to publish a statement of support for the space program. It was signed by more than 330 members.
The only other subject that gets sci-fi writers sufficiently riled up is war. And neither Vietnam nor the looming conflict in Iraq engaged as many writers as quickly.
Oh, no. Say what you like about sci-fi, that it's escapist, that it's badly written, that it's not as popular as fantasy.
But don't be dissing space flight.
It's the third rail of the sci-fi world.
The final frontier should not be horror
Unfortunately, whether we like it or, we are going to have to start writing seriously about space flight. Gary Westfahl's basic point is correct: We did indeed invent space flight. We made flying to other planets and meeting alien beings look possible, exciting, sexy.
Maybe it's time to reinvent space flight.
The conventional thinking is that naturally we will pick up the pieces and go on. Shuttles will fly again. Operations on the international space station will continue. The names of Husband, McCool, Anderson, Brown, Chawla, Clark and Ramon will be added to those on the black slab of the astronaut memorial at the Cape.
In the short term, yes. But then what? The fleet of orbiters is never going to be more capable than it is now. Or cheaper to operate.
And will require replacement in a decade, if not earlier.
With what? A smaller space plane?
How do we go from a small space plane and an aging space station to a piloted flight to Mars—to the planets—to the stars?
I don't know the answers.
I don't know if there are answers.
Somebody out there must have the right mixture of imagination and skill to do the job.
Otherwise sci-fi writers, for prose or screen, might start creating futures without space flight. Goodbye otherworldly landscapes. So long new discoveries. Catch you later, alien life forms—or catch you never.
No, that's not sci-fi.
That's horror.
In addition to writing scripts for such sci-fi television series as Twilight Zone, Max Headroom and, most recently, Andromeda and Odyssey 5, Michael Cassutt has published several books on the space program, most recently We Have Capture, the autobiography of astronaut Tom Stafford (Smithsonian Institution Press, Oct. 2002).
