Frontline warriors lost in space but journey must go on

It was a cold day in Washington, DC. I had woken up and switched on my television set to watch the landing of Columbia. At 9:20 am, there was a message stating that NASA Mission Operations had lost contact with the shuttle. As I heard the news, I hoped that this was a communications glitch but my heart sank as I realised this was probably not the case.

I knew that this was bad news, very bad news. Within moments, NASA declared a state of emergency. I called a few of my friends at NASA to alert them. Within minutes, debris was sighted over Texas, and all hope was lost.

President Bush cut short his retreat at Camp David with British Prime Minister Tony Blair and rushed back to Washington DC. He announced, what we in the Space Program were so painfully aware of, that there were no survivors. The Columbia Space Shuttle, flying at 200,000 ft at a speed of 12000 miles/hr, had met with an accident. At such an altitude and at such speeds, survival of the crew was virtually impossible.

It all happened so quickly. What in another 15 minutes would have been a successful landing on a routine mission turned into a gruesome tragedy. Re-entry into the atmosphere is one of the most complex manoeuvres for the Space

Shuttle. However, never before in the history of the Shuttle Program has the re-entry sequence been a problem. Among my colleagues at NASA, the mood was of sheer disbelief. It felt like a bad dream. For the astronauts, who were not on the shuttle and for the NASA officials who work with them, the crisis could not have hit home any closer.

We are a space-faring generation. Space is inherent in our consciousness, culture and philosophy. Space Shuttle landings and take-offs are treated like regular events and sometime do not even make the national news. Space tourism has arrived: if you have $20 million, you could hitch a ride to outer space like Dennis Tito and Mark Shuttleworth. Companies are trying to develop technology to lower the price to $10,000-$100,000 so that space tourism can translate into a mainstream industry. During his term, President Clinton had announced plans for a manned mission to Mars by 2020. The Columbia disaster comes as a great loss to NASA’s Shuttle Program. It is a grim reminder of the dangers of space exploration and has forced NASA to freeze all shuttle flights until the root cause of this catastrophe is determined.

Yet most of the work that we do at NASA does not directly generate profit or address any physical human need. It is an effort to satisfy the undying human urge to reach out into the unknown, to explore frontiers that lie virgin and to define our place in the universe. The astronauts are frontline warriors in this quest. Unlike space scientists like me who work from the safety of earth, astronauts take the huge risk of exposing themselves to the dangers of the unknown frontier.

This is not just a story about a Space Shuttle, this is a story of seven human beings who valiantly undertook the mission to carry human imagination forward, who made the ultimate sacrifice. This is a story of seven human beings who are never going to walk under the blue sky or hold their children in their arms again.

The Columbia astronauts were martyrs in a cause to further the frontiers of human knowledge.

Personally, I did not know Kalpana. But as a scientist, I have visited the astronaut training facility at the Gilruth Center, in Johnson Space Center, and watched other astronaut friends of mine undergo training. I have listened in awe to Harrison Schmidt, the last man to walk on the moon, describe the breathtaking views of earth from space and the moon. Suddenly, there emerges a new human dimension when you realise that the astronauts we lost yesterday are not just names.

Painful though it might be, NASA will reorganise and get back to the business of space exploration. In the words of President Bush: ‘‘The cause in which they died will continue. Mankind is led into the darkness beyond our world by the inspiration of discovery and the longing to understand. Our journey into space will go on.’’ The dust will settle, life will go on, but the finality of death is brutal, and Kalpana, the young girl who travelled from Punjab to the final frontier in the quest for knowledge, will never come home again.